Let Twitter Be Twitter

In praise of the uproarious confusion the company is now trying to tame.

- James Gleick

Twitter is a mess—everybody says so. Twitter is mostly nonsense. You can’t find what you need on Twitter. Twitter is all haystack and no needles, all static and no signal.

By the lights of many investors, Twitter is floundering. Its longtime CEO (five years is long in internet time), Dick Costolo, jumped or was pushed in June; the board is scrambling to find a replacement; and Wall Street is sounding the alarm. The company’s revenue barely doubled last year, rising to $1.4 billion. Only 300 million people use Twitter every month. Its stock has hit an all-time low.

Advice is flowing in torrents: “How Twitter Can Be Fixed”; “Reimagining Twitter.” A Washington Post column explains “How to Fix Twitter, As Told via Tweets.” Twitter must pivot, must be transformed, must “reinvent itself.”

“I yearn to know where this company is headed,” writes one of Twitter’s earliest and largest investors, the billionaire Chris Sacca. His 8,500-word screed, “What Twitter Can Be,” has been making the rounds for weeks. His motivation is simple: “I want this stock to be worth more. I own more of it than virtually anyone working at the company.”

What’s the problem? Twitter isn’t growing fast enough. Maybe it is reaching a plateau. Five times as many people use Facebook—something like a billion and a half active users per month, which, if you believe it, is more than a fifth the Earth’s population. Twitter makes most of its money from its modest amount of advertising, but it could make so much more.