Since then, I've followed the rise & fall of dozens of social media sites & sources, watching each follow the same pattern: within about 7 years, each site started, caught on, became the place to be, sagged under the weight & dreck of everyone wanting to be at the place to be, the signal-to-noise ratio collapsed as meaningful content found a slimmer medium, the self-important/trolls/spam/etc piled on, and the site (still existing) vanished from the public awareness. Oh, sure, Usenet continues, AOL continues, MySpace continues, ... but seem flotsam of the past. I've no doubt Twitter, Facebook, etc - whatever the current cultural imperatives are - will carry on for some time, but will likewise fade into oblivion as interesting content finds fresher ground and the S/N ratio collapses.

I suppose a part of me wonders if the answers to these questions could lead to a more stable platform. Yet that seems unlikely, since platforms don't seem to be holding traction longer than their predecessors.

It seems like Reddit might be at least one possible evolution that could lead to increased longevity. Their trick is to have user moderated sub-communities as a first class feature, and keep the churn high on those communities (subreddits). That seems to be a way to allow the cyclic birth and death of platforms/communities to occur, but still keep people within the overarching Reddit umbrella. Though I think ultimately Reddit will suffer the same fate as Digg; it's only a matter of time before management makes enough mistakes or corruption reaches critical mass.

"Freshness" is also a factor. After a while, each forum just starts showing its age, not keeping up with spiffy new forms & forums. People get bored and move on.

"Us vs them" is also a factor. A growing subgroup may decide they just don't want to be around the base. Prime example: Facebook and the alleged "kids don't use it because their parents are there".

Embrace the lifecycle. It's real; instead of fighting it, manage it with the understanding that it will eventually fade and users head to newer quieter forums.

In contrast, the humble email, which was to have died a brutal death in 1999, 2005, 2010 and now 2015 at the hands of various Goliaths, merrily continues to fill the days of our lives.

Nobody posts on Twitter any more, there are too many Tweets.

http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/09/18/we-are-far-from-sol...

Maybe the problem is trying to follow the entire Internet and lacking the self-control to pick and choose.

Twitter can't afford to loose these people because they are the ones who create all the tweets most people come to twitter to consume.

Granted they would still use it to promote their stuff. But they wouldn't have to check their feed which is the cause of stress and info overload

Other than that, I pop in for a couple minutes a day, scroll through the most recent few hundred posts, and let it go.

Twitter's problem is that they invented a great communication channel with no clear way of monetizing it.

Like inventing email.

They're now trying to build walls around their protocol, shutting down APIs, etc. Imagine if the people behind email would have done it.

For me, Twitter is a great news reader. And Google shutting down their Reader product should explain the problem with this kind of products.

It's littered with sponsored tweets and advertisements EVERYWHERE.

Twitter analyzes your words and interests, your network, your locations, and sells you as a demographic to various businesses for targeted advertising.

They're pretty much an ads platform like Google Search or Facebook.

Email itself is not monetized. RFC 5321 charges no license fees. Platforms built on top of email are monetized.

I use Twitter daily, and would hate to see it disappear. But how much of current revenues are a product of companies still "experimenting" with the Twitter ad ecosystem? What happens if those channels provide less ROI than everyone expects? That's the way the trends appear to be heading.

  Twitter's 'cost per impression' is much higher than Facebook's...might not make it as attractive to advertisers.

If Twitters CPM is much higher than Facebook's it's because it is attractive to advertisers. Otherwise they wouldn't charge as much as they do. (unless there's something else going on, which seems doubtful in this case)

Not necessarily. It may simply be overpriced but not yet at the point where the market has enough information to force a correction.

Email (which I assume is a reductionist placeholder for the sum of its protocols and implementations), to the best of my knowledge, was never built with "monetization" in mind, not more than any open standard or protocol is.

(I guess this same thing could be made about Zero-Inboxers)

But I will say this: without judicious policing, the channel does gets noisy, and fast.

The people I most often see talking about how amazing Twitter is are those that get to reap the benefits of having a large following -- sure, if you have 10,000 followers and you can just pop on and write "Hey Twitter - any suggestions on a new ...?" and you get flooded with responses, of course you're going to think the community is amazing.

Now, as a _consumer_, Twitter can also be amazing -- if you curate who you follow, and understand that you're basically there to read and consume.

But then these folks see that "tweet" button, and they dip in to being a producer, and they're effectively screaming into a crowded room. "Hey, nobody's paying attention to me - this Twitter thing sucks" and then they shrug and walk away.

So Twitter's biggest problem, it seems, is that Twitter is actually different things to different people, and it needs to better differentiate what its purpose is so expectations are set properly.

Eventually I picked it back up, once there were more accounts I found useful/interesting.

Today they have the opposite problem: too much disconnected content: my feed is filled with 100s of random, disconnected headlines, links to top 10 lists, random comments from fiends, etc.

I don't feel overwhelmed, but it's hard to _casually_ engage twitter and feel edified by the experience.

I think to win the long run, Twitter has to be more valuable than just a seemly chaotic feed of information rushing by. They have never solved this problem well. At least, not for the casual user.

If they did, I think they would see their user adoption rate increase. That doesn't solve the monetization problem alone, but it would sure would help.

Update: fixed some spelling.

http://blog.codinghorror.com/performance-is-a-feature/

Knowing no one else who used Twitter, I had no other use for the service and promptly logged off permanently.

Maybe you could easily have engaged conversation with other people on twitter?

On this point, twitter is not designed to facilitate conversations. Twitter is a wall of announcement megaphones sort of thing it seems.

The result is cryptic gibberish.

I think @addresses and #hashtags should be moved out of the 180 char limit.

Also, web links should have their own field so you can say 180 characters of something interesting about the link.

How do new users know that until they use it? The problem this article discusses would seem to have nothing to do with getting new users (the problem discussed here) and everything about people stopping use of the service (churn) once they hit a tipping point of following too many people and getting tweet overload.

My most common reasons for dropping feeds are fleeting interest passing, people's interests getting boring, and deeper interests diverging. But changing personalities? No. Personalities are remarkably stable things.

If you're an awful person on Twitter (a) you've probably been that way from the day you started and (b) it probably isn't limited to your online life.

For example, urban dictionary has entries from four years ago with the very definition described. You may disagree with the usage of the term but don't change its history.

It was not popularized by GamerGate and many would say it was adopted by the hashtag because it describes many people within that debate.

Not that I disagree with you really, it's just I don't like to see people getting really close to using the tactics they seem to be speaking out against.

I did point out that using pejoratives along with terms like "vile" and "hate-filled" is hypocritical.

There is certainly a problem with harassment with many of the more prominent users, but if you don't latch on to an incredibly volatile hashtag you're not likely to draw any of that to you.

Possibly the best mixed metaphor (I know it's not a metaphor, I don't know a better phrase) I've ever read in my life.

"A metaphor is a figure of speech that identifies something as being the same as some unrelated thing for rhetorical effect, thus highlighting the similarities[...]"

Thats not very helpful. Can anyone tell me, if you were to print that out on paper on an inkjet, how much the ink would cost?

*Although I'm pleased with Twitter's self-awareness here, and I'm not saying there's anything intrinsically wrong with services like these. You just aren't going to see many successful entrepreneurs wasting their time on these services (unless they're directly responsible for engaging users through it).

Threads revolve around chronological events created/added/managed by the user - think running race, wedding, conference, concert, etc.