I am not a coder by any means, but I am a heavy social media user and know a lot about politics, sociology, psych, organizing, health, comms---and I admit, until I read this thread, I liked this article because it gave me a better reason for all the screw ups, beyond, "The Executives are dithering and have no business skills and social skills." Or the theory "The Executives do nothing because they don't care if women and vulnerable people die." Which is far more disturbing....it can't be true, even if it feels true.
I would give anything if they'd listen to users who have been around awhile. So few people worked there and also used it at the same time. (And users longingly miss the Fail Whale logo...)
As a user (250,000+ tweets) under a pseudonym, twitter has incredible uses, things Facebook and other platforms didn't do, because they were so closed and hard to search. They created echo Chambers, because you could only see people you already knew or were slightly connected too. Or worse, your mom or mother-in-law could find you. Twitter was so open--if I want to discuss philosophy or Japanese food or an MRI result, 24/7 I just search and people who love that are there. And pseudonyms had to exist, because thousands of people in real life have the same name. (just like the rest of the Internet back then and yes, now too) They thought people would just post status updates like, hey eating lunch, but we did way way more. They made it 140 chars with 20 chars reserved for names because many people had expensive tiny data plans, but could update by text message; allowing a much wider demographic to use it, and across multiple countries, even low tech ones with limited access.
The most critical piece tho is that users invented everything good about twitter (Sorry creators--but we did). TW allowed some html symbols, so a user put an @ in front of a user name to reply, and it worked! Users also invented hashtags, the first one was for organizing BarCamp--which was kind of a conference not about alcohol and the original manual RT, and MT for modified tweet, and commenting on top of someone's tweet, or at the end of it and we figured out how to shrink long urls to post links. bit.ly had no purpose til then, and many users became Developers and got full access to the API and we crowdsourced hundreds of changes and ideas, from pictures to videos to emoji to gifs to analytics, to accessible apps for people with vision, hearing, speech issues. All while making lots and lots of jokes.
They didn't start out with a heavy respect for pseudonyms, and privacy, and free speech--but TW learned it fast after the Green Iran Revolution, and after many patient users wanted to keep privacy because they had rare diseases, and mental health issues, and parents of kids with autism and speech issues took to it and found each other and felt less alone. It was less complicated than blogging and writing long stories on laptops after events happened. I could do everything from live tweeting a doctor's appt to an ER visit and get reactions from friends who could tell me what to ask.
We still tweet everything from recipes to exact instructions on how to ride a bike, how to organize groups like #occupy to crowd sourcing Flu symptoms and rashes, to who is watching what TV show and how cool it is to watch live sports "together" even for people who can't leave the house that night and meet.
Weekly hour long Chats take place under special hashtags like #hcsm for Health Care Social Media or #meded for medical education. (doctors and science fans and academics found twitter and they debate articles, techniques, crowdsource diagnoses)
Police and emergency responders and good Samaritans have used it to (swear to god, it's true) befriend people who sound troubled or suicidal and validate their pain and sadness and find them help.
It is to this day, the only platform I know that allows people from many different areas to find like-minded people and to bring together people across multiple subject areas.
Nothing else does it quite the same way. Especially with the ridiculous algorithms other platforms use.