I've often wondered why Twitter seems to do this again and again in spite of what appears to be common sense and good stewardship of its platform and ecosystem.

I think it's because Twitter is actually a successful, fairly open ecosystem that attracts all kinds of use.

What seems like ham-handed or draconian decision making is just Twitter misunderstanding its role as infrastructure provider.

What we all implicitly want from Twitter is for it to embody the values of net neutrality. If someone can build something cool on top of Twitter, why not let it happen?

Twitter's investors have pressured the company to monetize, and most of the bad platform decisions seem to be tied to those efforts.

Twitter's folly is assuming that usage patterns are "bad". It should view all usage in a content-neutral manner and provide and support APIs to let the ecosystem grow.

It is the hubris of caring too much about content and content engagement metrics that is driving this folly.

Twitter is a very simple broadcast graph. This is incredibly powerful, and while it's not quite as lucrative to own as Facebook (with users habituated to seeing the same boring stuff from the same boring people every day and clicking on sponsored content), it's far more powerful and is likely to change society more than other social media platforms.

All this is why Twitter should pivot and become a decentralized infrastructure... of course this will never happen. I'm predicting that Twitter will die a slow death as it tries to copy Facebook's revenue generation approach. It is also copying Facebook's real name initiative by caring too much about content attribution and verified accounts (which users don't care about).

Eventually we may see a decentralized broadcast graph, but until then it makes sense to expect Twitter to behave like a cognitively impaired dictator with respect to its ecosystem.

I think most of this is driven by intense cost-cutting measures and intensely misguided focus on revenue metrics in terms of content and engagement. Twitter is not a product, it's an infrastructure.

That's a really good analysis of what I was hoping Twitter could have been, and what it has actually became.

I am quite curious to poke your brain a little on this. I agree that the concept of Twitter-as-an-infrastructure could be amazing. I also agree that what they're doing is definitely taking massive steps away from that ideal (Whatever Twitter's initial lofty goals were, I would classify its current niche to be some sort of celebrity-gossip/outrage machine).

I'm having trouble articulating exactly what the correct thing for them to do would be, though? What sort of API access would you envision that they can provide in order to help developers grow the infrastructure in the best way possible?

You mention that Twitter could become a decentralized infrastructure. What exactly do you mean by that, and how would it work?