Twitter reported its Q4 numbers on Thursday and the stock got hammered in after-hours trading, down something like 12 percent at one point. Revenue actually beat what Wall Street wanted, nearly $479 million for the quarter, which isnt nothing. But the number everyone latched onto was monthly active users, which crawled up to around 288 million. Crawled. Thats the word. A company that used to brag about hockey-stick growth is now growing at a rate that looks more like a savings account.
I dont really care about Twitters stock price, Im not an investor, but I do care about the product, and Ive been feeling this slowdown in my own bones for months now. My timeline doesnt feel like it used to. It used to be this weird, fast, slightly chaotic river of stuff, people you followed, in order, no algorithm messing with it. Now theres the "While you were away" module shoved at the top every time I open the app, showing me tweets from six hours ago that it thinks I missed. I didnt miss them. I was asleep. Let me scroll.
Its funny because the same week Twitter is admitting it cant grow its user base, the platform is also the reason half my feed spent four straight days talking about a dancing shark. Left Shark, if you somehow missed it, was the backup dancer at Katy Perrys Super Bowl halftime show a week ago Sunday who just... didnt know the choreography. Flailed around doing his own thing next to Right Shark, who had it down cold. By Monday morning it was GIFs everywhere, by Tuesday it had its own fan art, and I saw a coworker with a Left Shark drawing taped above his monitor by Wednesday. That is Twitter working exactly the way its supposed to work: something small and dumb and human catching fire and spreading in hours. Nobody needed an algorithm to surface that for them. It just happened because people were watching the same thing at the same time and typing into the same box.
So I dont buy the story that Twitter has some fundamental appeal problem. The appeal is obviously still there — ask anyone who spent Sunday night refreshing their feed for shark jokes. The problem, if there is one, is that signing up and getting to the fun part is still genuinely confusing for a new user. You make an account, youre staring at an empty timeline, you dont know who to follow, the onboarding is bare bones, and meanwhile Facebook just hands you your cousins wedding photos on day one with zero effort. Ive tried getting my sister onto Twitter three separate times over the past two years and she bails within a week every time, not because she doesnt like it once shes in, but because getting in is a chore. Thats a design problem, not a "people are bored of Twitter" problem, and Im not sure the company is fixing the right thing when it keeps adding features like the away module instead.
I'll admit, I've drifted off the official Twitter app myself. Ive been using Tweetbot on my phone for probably eight months now, five bucks well spent, and it just shows me tweets, chronological, no injected nonsense, no "in case you missed it." I know Im not the customer Twitter is optimizing for anymore. Power users like me who want the plain unadorned firehose are apparently a rounding error compared to whatever growth the ad business needs to keep the earnings calls from looking like this one.
Anyway. The stock will probably recover, or it wont, I genuinely have no read on that and dont pretend to. What I do know is that at 11pm last Sunday my timeline was more fun than television has been in months, and that a platform capable of producing that is not a platform in real trouble, no matter what the user growth chart says. It just might be a platform whose own app is getting in its own way a little.