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Twitter is in trouble. As of November 2015, it had 316 million active users per month. This is worrying for Twitter because Facebook, as per the same database, clocked 1.5 billion active users per month. And it is not just Facebook; even Instagram now has more users than Twitter.
If you lay this point in front of an ardent Twitter user, she will trivialise your argument and say that Twitter is nothing like Facebook. Unlike Facebook, Twitter is a micro-blogging social media website where ideas and opinions are exchanged in real-time, in 140 characters. Brevity is key, and the platform not only enables effective transmission and receipt of crisp information, but also that the vast pool of tweets presents an ocean of data on opinion, perception and other such human behaviour variables. Through various studies, sentiment on Twitter has been shown to have forecasted political victories and stock market crashes.
Nonetheless, this grand, altruistic world-view of Twitter aside, its co-founder and newly appointed CEO, Jack Dorsey, is certainly more interested in maximising shareholder wealth. (Twitter, after all, exists to make profits for the people who have invested in it.) Under his leadership, the social media platform has shed its reluctance to change and is adopting novel ways to make itself more attractive to users. Most recently, Dorsey announced that 140 characters aren’t enough. He wants to increase the limit to 10,000 characters, which is roughly twice the length of this article. Sadly, people think that it might not work: there was a furore over this idea on Twitter, and the company's stock prices fell by 2% on the day of the announcement.
So, what might work, if one wanted to bring more users to Twitter as well as not change the essence of its existence?
Looking at its usage provides some insights. Twitter’s problem lies in skewness; the distribution of the power - the capacity of reaching out to many people - each user has is highly tilted towards a select few. Some metrics, although a little dated, will help here. 94% of users on Twitter have less than 100 followers; only 0.7% have more than 1,000. Thus, most people’s tweets are only being read by a maximum of 100 people at any given point in time. Similarly, 94% of users follow less than 400 people, and barely 1% of them follow more than 1,000 people. These 400 people that most users follow constitute of various politicians, celebrities, news agencies, and those who have consistently managed to be active on Twitter since it started and now have a sufficient amount of followers for their handles to appear in recommendations to new users. It is easy to see then, that Twitter reduces to being an echo chamber of tweets and opinions of a select few. To state it factually, 5% of users make up for 75% of the total activity.
Let’s draw an analogy here to the idea of markets in economic theory. A market is said to be perfect when it has, among other features, a large number of buyers and sellers. This would ensure that the quantity bought or sold by each person is insignificant in comparison to the total sales in the market. As a result, nobody has an extraordinary power to control the prices, and everybody is a price-taker.
Surely, Twitter has a large number of buyers and sellers: its 300 million users who exchange opinion. But does the other condition hold? Given that only a few people control most of the volume of opinion exchange, the market power gets disproportionately distributed among users. In other words, Twitter is not perfect; it is an oligopoly market.
This oligopoly on Twitter increases the barriers to entry for new users. Now, the motivation for interaction on social media is driven by the idea of instant gratification: you post an update on Facebook, and it makes you happy if other users like it or comment on it. Similarly, if you tweet something, you expect someone to retweet it, or like it, or it to begin a conversation. Twitter, unlike Facebook, does not tinker with what you see on your timeline. If you happen to be on the platform when one of the people you follow tweets, you’d see it on your timeline. (This is the essence of real-time Twitter.) However, for a new user with a measly number of followers, this tremendously reduces the probability of interactions and therefore the incentive to be on the platform. It requires a lot of will and persistence, and more importantly, chance, to gain followers. And not many people are interested in using Twitter as a one-way communication channel where there is no interaction. Thus, the problem is the lack of enough instant gratification incentives for new users.
A possible solution: devolve the oligopoly.
When Twitter was launched, its creators aimed to create an ambient awareness in the world through short messages providing a strangely satisfying glimpse of daily routines. The world could talk about a phenomenon in unison through the use of hashtags. It was oddly befitting that Twitter, with its 140-character tweets, made the world a smaller place. Unlike Facebook, it gave people a platform to exchange information and opinion on anything happening anywhere in the world with anyone.
However, over the last few years, groupism has evolved in the interaction on Twitter. It is now largely restricted among a small coterie of people that have become ‘Twitter friends’. The original idea of Twitter - an infinite open conversation in both time and space - seems to have disappeared. A part of this was also due to the lack of an efficient policy against abuse on the platform as online violence and threats acted as deterrents. However, Twitter has come down strongly on abuse cases and perhaps, the time to re-explore Twitter’s original idea is back.
The most likely scenario, in the absence of user led initiatives, holds the possibility of changing the essence of Twitter altogether. 10,000 character limit is just a minor tweak in Twitter’s architecture. We stand to lose much more than that, because Twitter has been toying with the idea of removing its reverse-chronological, and thus real-time, timeline and shifting to an algorithm-based timeline which will show the most relevant tweets to a user. This will make Twitter just another Facebook, and lay waste an idea that is perhaps the simplest yet most profound personification of the Internet itself.
Saahil Parekh writes about all things economics on his blog, Arthashastra, a part of Business Standard’s platform Punditry. Otherwise, he can be found doing research on climate change and sustainability at The Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi.
He tweets as @saahilparekh and can be reached at saahil.parekh@gmail.com.
