This is a great essay on the problem of abuse and lack of control on social media. Its absolutely a problem. But I completely disagree that this has much to do with the decline of Twitter. I worked at Twitter, but even if I hadn’t, publicly posted stats show that the vast majority of Twitter users don’t tweet. So there is no chance of them facing abuse at all. It is absolutely important to address abuse, but it simply is not a significant factor in Twitter’s growth issues. In fact, the very fact that you think abuse is the issue actually illustrates the problem with Twitter’s growth. You are one of the “ists” as you call people like yourself, you have a LOT of followers, you tweet a LOT and get hit by abusive replies. Your experience on Twitter is so far from the normal user’s that you don’t realize that despite the lack of control over abuse Twitter is actually hugely useful for you. Most people have <50 followers and have never tweeted.

The reason is that it takes way too long for the average user to get any kind of value from Twitter. Or even to understand what it is for. You need something like 10 mutual follows and many weeks to even get to experience some kind of “aha moment” on the platform. And no one is going to use something for weeks to wait for this, unless they are an “ist.” That is and has been Twitter’s core problem.

I just signed up 2 new accounts on Twitter — one for my startup and one for a side project (a line of handbags I am making.) Twitter never asked me if this account is for a person or a business, suggested me the same dumb Top 40 accounts to follow and basically I ended up with a crap timeline I will never go back to and nothing useful on my profile. I can’t believe that all these years later this basic onboarding is still so broken. Meanwhile I created 2 Facebook pages for the same 2 projects. Facebook figured out that one was an iphone app and let me link directly to the app store from my page, the other was an ecommerce business and offered to integrate with Shopify and link a “Buy” button to my website. So which am I going to use? That’s an app and a small business example. I could rinse and repeat for all shapes and sizes of users and end with the same problem… Twitter needs to convey its utility to new users instantly or it has no chance of survival.