I thought I was sharing my perspective on it, I didn't think enough that it would hurt OP's feelings. I made the comment lightheartedly even added an ;-) but it didn't work obviously. Let me explain better then:
What I was trying to say is that I in large agree with how the market reacted to it. It is hard for Twitter to make money. There is a lot of HN armchair analyst advice around (which I engage in as well) such as "why doesn't Twitter just ... to make money". But presumably there are smart people working there and they probably thought of all those things. It has been compared to Google or compared or Facebook. But those offer a richer more comprehensive experience. I give Google access to my life and it helps me drive places, keeps my email, and calender and other things. I don't use Facebook but my relatives do and they like. Twitter is too narrow in that respect. So objectively looking at it, I think it is struggling and it makes sense to me why.
And I pointed out that Twitter for me in the past has been associated more with negativity -- spats, mis-understandings stemming from reading short 140 character replies as being curt and rude, which then snowball and turn into fights.
Now what sounded most mean was saying some services would die. Sometimes, it is better to just have a service / product that is going down to just go down faster, to maybe something better take its place. There were languages, products, platforms, I enjoyed and liked but they just didn't become popular. Hoping they would have an upswing sometimes is unrealistic. I wished and hope Thinkpads wouldn't suck and IBM would come back and start making them and install Ubuntu on them, but it just won't happen. It is better to just find something else. Anyway that is the sentiment where that comment came from.
There is always another social network: Reddit, Usenet, Forums, IRC. Twitter is a place where we have conversations for now, but the "innovation" of fast-paced conversations can exist anywhere... and already exists anywhere.
But that's not really constructive because you could say the same about 99% of social-network businesses, no?
You could also say: "It's not always the physical structure of a country that makes it great but its people (culture, history, how it started, so on) " and that would be true too. The fact that different websites have different 'cultures' make all the difference, right?
I like the artificial 140-char limitation though, but it would be comically easy to enforce it anywhere else.
The only reason for twitter instead of something else seems to be network effect. In a couple of paticular niches I use google+ and it is, believe me, a whole lot better as long as there are people there. (Of course I am annoyed by the fact that it doesn't have a working API etc etc but then again twitter has made that point mostly irrelevant.)
(OK, a few improvements have surfaced in twitter lately and I am once again interested.)
Never really saw the benefit or value in Twitter. People I care about are not on Twitter most of the time, or if they post, they don't post stuff I care about.
In general I found 140 character sentences are not just good enough to have a discussion (it ends up sounding curt and snippy). For links and all I just follow communities on forums (reddit, hn, github, their own sites, mailing lists etc).
> I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain
Well, given that I don't see a value in it, I hope they start that too, because I think it will accelerate its downward trend and it will just be over sooner ;-)