Twitter has seen a heck of development in the past couple of years. From Twitter acquiring companies like Revue and Beaker to they themselves getting acquired by Doge Father Elon.
Apart from organizational ups and downs, Twitter has experienced a lot of changes in its platform too, we’ve seen many features come and go in the past few years. They have been acting like a real startup by constant iteration.
Now that they have been acquired by Elon and have only ~30% of the workforce left, it would be interesting to see the fate of Twitter.
This will also boil down to see if Elon can repeat the magic which he has done with his companies like PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX.
👶🏻 History of Twitter
The idea of Twitter was born in 2006 when Jack Dorsey (@Jack), Noah Glass (@Noah), and Evan Williams (@Ev) used to work in an organization called Odeo which was on the verge of shutting down as Apple had launched the exact thing called “Apple Podcast”.
Odeo was not doing well and lay-offs were happening.
Jack, Noah, and Evan got together and came up with the idea of a status updater. They called it Twttr as they thought that they would give it a go. They also got help from (another ex-Odeo employee) Biz Stone (@Biz).
This was the beginning of Twitter. They raised money from Evan's cousin, a venture capitalist firm, and angel investors. In 2007, Biz Stone joined full-time. The first tweet was “just setting up my Twitter” and the first user was co-founder Noah Glass. However, Noah Glass was forced out of the company in 2008.
Dorsey worked on the initial versions of Twitter, which went live in 2006.
The current Twitter which we see is a much-refined version of their complete revamp which started in 2014 and went until 2020. The current algorithm was apparently made during this same time and went live in 2018.
Source for this section:
https://techcrunch.com/2006/10/25/odeo-bought-back-from-investors/
🔥 The Big Moments for Twitter
Twitter has seen multiple big events during its existence, and most of them have affected its growth positively.
Social Events: Events like 2007’s SXSWi conference, Covid 19, and BLM brought a flood of Twitter users and many stayed, which kept increasing Twitter’s audience exponentially over time.
Acquisition: Twitter’s Acquisition by Elon is probably one of the biggest events Twitter has witnessed as an organization. Though we have already seen many outcomes of this there’s much more to see.
Unban: Elon recently removed the ban on accounts like D. Trump, Andrew Tate, and Kanye West which may bring their audience back to Twitter who were there just for these accounts.
🔍 What Does Olvy’s Analysis Say?
Let’s start and check the Olvy magic 🪄
#1 User Input: Poor writing experience
Twitter is a content-based social platform which makes it vital for them to have a good writing experience.
In the initial days, Twitter used to have one of the best writing experiences among all social platforms, but that started changing after 2014.
People slowly started complaining about the poor writing experience and mostly malfunctioned inbuilt scheduling. It became so big of an issue by 2020 that people started looking out for 3rd party solutions that gave birth to scheduling tools like Hypefury and Typefully.
#2 User Input: Too much noise
Just like the above issue, during the 2014 update, Twitter also added too much noise to its design and UI. This was something most of the avid Twitter users hated.
People reported that sometimes they missed tweets from some particular accounts and see random posts in which they had no interest.
In addition to this, the sidebar which they added was another source of noise and just cluttered the UI, people started using the chrome plugin to block the sidebar.
#3 User Input: Subpar and broken tweet scheduling
Twitter’s scheduling feature is also broken and has bugs for many users. Twitter users have reported disappearing scheduled tweets or not being posted on time.
This frustration again made many users switch to 3rd party platforms in search of a solution but they still long for a native solution as other platforms like Facebook have it.
#4 User Input: Bots are a big pain
Twitter apparently has a lot of bot issues – try tweeting something about crypto, and you’ll be flooded with bot messages. A big issue and also decreases the trust people have in Twitter’s moderation.
#5 User Input: Advertisers hating recent events
We have always known Elon as the “Meme Lord” and “Doge Father” which is good and nothing bad but his recent tweets have started to agitate advertisers. Now that he’s a top-level Twitter employee, advertisers expect a bit from him.
For reference, here’s one such tweet that advertisers hate seeing from Elon:
Also, Twitter Ad’s RoI has significantly gone down which means that advertisers have to pay way more than they did to get the same results.
Here’s one advertiser explaining why he stopped all his campaigns.
#6 User Input: People still love the community
Though the UI of Twitter has many issues, what’s holding people from switching is the existing users of Twitter.
Most Twitter users have reported that the community on Twitter is significantly better than that of platforms like LinkedIn.
🤯 What can Twitter do?
Well, in Twitter’s case, it’s rather easy!
The good part is that Twitter’s users still feel value on Twitter so the retention part is sorted to some extent.
Apart from that, Twitter should start focusing on its platform and start incrementally improving things one at a time! The fact that Elon is so open — he can actually start sharing what they are working on so people can start having trust back in the platform knowing that these issues are being worked on.