Thread by @PulpLibrarian

Time for my occasional series "Why is Twitter so awful and what are we going to do about it?"

And today I'm trying to find out what Twitter is actually good for. Let's take a look... #fridaythoughts

Twitter started as a microblogging site, and as blogs are familiar things we can hopefully work out how good Twitter is at this.

So what is a blog and what does it do? Well there are many flavours of blog out there...

First there are the expert blogs: subject matter specialists sharing their insights about stuff they really know about. These blogs sea a kind of free punditry: people acting as if they had a newspaper column.

But there are also curious amateur experts, people who are fans of TV shows, books, graphic novels etc who want to share their passions and meet like minded people. These blogs are about building communities of interest.

Some blogs are very personal. People use them to think out loud about their lives and make sense of them. These are like online diaries and often read like a stream of consciousness - which can be both fun and fascinating.

Finally there are discussion groups where each thread acts like a blog. Here the arguments and witticisms of participants are as important (and addictive) as the actual subject they discuss.

So which type of blog is Twitter good at?

Well Twitter's strapline is "It's What's Happening!" It puts a premium on immediacy.

"X is happening; what do other people think about X?; let's fire up Twitter and see!"

This can cause problems...

The pundit bloggers try to give their expert opinion on X. The curious amateurs critique the pundits. The diarists say how it makes them feel. The discussion group junkies tag everyone and bait or amplify them.

Then the circus rolls on...

There is little wisdom in the crowd because the crowds have different reasons for being on Twitter. And because Twitter is an open platform - no walled-off areas outside of private accounts - everyone bumps into each other.

Basically Twitter is very good at clusterfucks; lots of voices with no emerging order. Twitter Trends direct us to each car crash of a discussion topic and we survey the wreckage with a mix of anger and amusement.

Now is this inevitable, and if so is it sustainable? Many people avoid Twitter Trends. They carefully prune who they follow and they think before they post.

But that's no good for platform growth, and in social media terms your platform is either growing or dying...

Twitter needs growth to persuade investors to keep investing. It needs regular clusterfucks that are picked up by traditional media. It needs to seem permanently relevant and topical to keep growing.

Enter Donald Trump...

Trump is the best thing to happen to Twitter, from the platform's selfish point of view, because he treats it as a diary-like personal stream of consciousness, rather than a carefully managed expert domain blog. That guarantees regular clusterfucks of opinion.

Many other celebrities have followed suit: they drop clusterfuck bombs every day to generate debate and reaction. It's seen as the key to influence, provided you conflate influence with topicality.

Is this inevitable? Probably, unless Twitter can discover some new growth hack.

Is it sustainable? Possibly. Bad content drives away good people - folks who want to listen, share and think without stepping on a clusterfuck. The more they leave the slower the platform growth.

But are they leaving?

Here the stats are opaque. Twitter's raw active user figures have recently hit a plateau, but it's also changed what it counts: now it reports on 'monetizable daily active users' - folks who can be served with promoted content. It's also tweaked its mission...

Twitter is pivoting from 'onboarding new users' towards user retention. It sees itself not as a social network but as a topic platform: a place that people go to discover news, information and entertainment. It's introducing features to promote topics rather than hashtags.

But that still depends on users - you and me - generating that content. Twitter isn't BuzzFeed and doesn't seed these topics with its own content. And as long as clusterfucks gain interest we'll continue to see them dominant - though now they'll be nicely themed.

Is there another growth hack that could persuade Twitter to deprioritise clusterfuckery? Well let's go back to their key metric: 'monetizable daily active users'. What else would make people use Twitter daily that didn't involve outrage and argument?

Here's a thought: themed days. We already have #FolkloreThursday and #FontSunday; maybe putting more effort into content themes on different days would grow the active audience as much as weaponising outrage.

The good thing about themed days is its in our gift as users to set them up and promote them. So if you have any ones you'd like to share (or growth hack) let me know and I'll try to signal boost them regularly.

More thoughts another time...