A great use for the technology. But this ...

I haven't come up with a theory beyond Twitter hates tech communities but that feels off..

Might simply be "money". The "Web 2.0" business model, which actually sometimes makes money, is Revenue = Transactions per second X Revenue per Transaction - (Capital Expense + Operating Expense). It really is that simple.

Capital expense is both the cost of servers and what not which records quarterly as depreciation expense, operating expense is everything you pay per month, whether it is developer salaries, licensing fees, or network bandwidth charges. And transaction revenue is typically in units of $ (or local currency) per 1,000 transactions.

Twitter, is an information business. That is to say the value it provides to people who use it are the consumption of, or distribution of, information.

In previous technologies, one could inject "forced information distribution" (aka advertising) into the "good information" that people valued. And for MBA types without any vision that became their "go to" mantra. We can force ads on the users which people will pay us to do.

It is an adversarial relationship to be sure, there isn't much incentive for Twitter to be "compelling" like there is for audience metric based information services like television shows or movies. And there are plenty of technological mechanisms to utilize for injecting information and for collecting demographic data and reselling it.

The failure in that model, and the one that probably shut down the event tweet network, is that Twitter was not getting enough money from NYC_TechEvents and others for their use of the system in these ways. The "easy"[1] coin was personal data and forced impressions. As a result anything that interfered with those revenue streams was to be shut down. The road not taken was to exploit the time value of information and the imbalance between readers and writers.

There are a number of ways that information gains value, one is its timeliness. The canonical reference for this is stock market quotations. Getting a stream quotes that are 15 minutes delayed is "free", getting those same quotes within a few seconds costs money, and getting them within milliseconds costs exponentially more money. Notice that the "information" here is all the same, it is just "when" (or the time) you see it that is valuable. So let's apply a business model that collects the value in "timeliness" of Twitter.

Twitter keeps me up to date

To extract this value, create two tiers of service, one which is free and the Tweet stream is 15 minutes delayed, one which costs $4.99 / month and the tweet stream is instantaneous.

Twitter lets me reach my group

To extract this value, create two tiers of service. One is free and reaches 10 people per minute. Which is to say your tweet goes out and 10 random followers see it right away, and then in the next minute another 10 see it, and in the next minute another 10, until all of your followers see it. A paid account can increase this diffusion rate from 10 to 100 @$4.99/month, to a million $49.99/month.

These are just a couple of examples of creating a model where the more you value timeliness of the information, the more you have to pay for that. What this does is provide a system that captures the intrinsic value of timely information and allows you to create a value proposition around it. No advertising, just people talking to people, and some wanting to talk to bigger crowds or stay more informed etc, and a whole lot of people who are fine with things being delayed a bit because its free.

Its fun to model these things too. You can analyze what sort of return you would need to have a margin that sustains a business and it becomes just like modelling making widgets in a factory, all of the classic business mechanics work like you would expect. Pricing the value add is just as hard as it is in a goods economy, and pricing mistakes are just as costly. But it equalizes out exactly like it does for goods.

[1] The term easy here is a way of expressing a technique that has worked, for the definition "generated revenue" for worked, in other situations.