C.P.R.

Save Your R.I.P.s: Twitter Isn’t Dead Yet

The social-media giant is torn between its investors and core users. Can Twitter evolve while staying true to what made it great in the first place?
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By Paskova/Bloomberg /Getty Images.

Twitter suffered its own death hoax over the weekend.

The social-networking site, which has been put in a vise by investors to make product changes more appealing to mainstream users beyond its core base, had that same rabid, core group turn on it after BuzzFeed reported Friday evening that Twitter was getting rid of its reverse-chronological feed this week. The report suggested it would instead be replaced by algorithmic ordering, much like what Facebook does, allowing Twitter to choose what users see based on popularity and relevance. This shift away from seeing things in real time—the very thing that makes Twitter, well, Twitter—was received as a fatal flaw by many users. In no time, #RIPTwitter became a top trending topic on the platform, with many users saying their final good-byes to the social network they once loved.

This is hardly the first time tweeters have preemptively pronounced Twitter dead amid product tweaks. It happened when Twitter changed its “favorites” to “likes” and the corresponding stars to hearts several months ago; when the new Moments tab was placed where the Notifications one used to be; when it brought up the idea of moving beyond the 140-character limit. These temper-tantrums may simply show just how vital Twitter is to its core fan base, who seem so attached to its current form that any change feels like the end of days. And this puts Twitter in an impossible situation: How does it attract new users in order to compete against Facebook, Snapchat, and WhatsApp (and pacify its famously persnickety shareholders) while remaining true to its most virulent fan base? This is a challenge that every business faces over the generations. But Twitter, partially owing to the world it helped foment, has undergone a number of these changes within its mere decade-old existence.

Twitter C.E.O. Jack Dorsey played both sides when he tried to resuscitate his company from the #RIPTwitter bleeding. In a string of tweets over the weekend, he assured users that Twitter is, in fact, “live” and that the company never planned to reorder timelines in the coming week. He left the door open to refining the service and listening to user feedback.

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Dorsey’s weekend damage control addressed the most recent public funeral for the public company, but investors have felt that Twitter has been on life support for months. The stock has sunk by more than half over the last year, user growth has slowed since it went public more than two years ago, and top employees have left in droves over the last few months. The last thing Dorsey needed was a another reason for investors to believe the company was taking its last gasps before the company reports quarterly earnings on Tuesday.

But for all those ready to dance on Twitter’s grave, there are a number of people in the past weeks born of the social-networking service, who give investors reason to believe it’s not dead yet.

Last week, DeRay Mckesson, the activist who came to prominence chronicling the spate of race-related protests surrounding law enforcement over the last couple years, announced he was running for mayor of Baltimore. Mckesson was an administrator in the Minneapolis public schools when he started to use Twitter as a platform after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot by a white police officer in a St. Louis suburb in 2014. His star rose on Twitter, attracting 302,000 followers, including Beyonce, who only follows nine other people, allowing him to quit his job in the Minneapolis public schools to become a full-time activist and one of the most well-known leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Who’s to say whether McKesson, a 30-year-old Baltimore native, would have launched a political campaign or gained traction as an activist without his social-media platform. But it is indisputable that Twitter propelled his meteoric liftoff into public discourse and very quickly placed him at the table.

By the same token, pharma bro Martin Shkreli, whose star, by all sane accounts, should have crashed and burned long ago, extended his 15 minutes by five months by trolling everyone on Twitter. The former pharmaceutical executive came into the spotlight last September for raising the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent overnight, and in December, he was arrested and charged with securities fraud. In modern times, that’s more than enough to turn a man into a malefactor to be cut down and then forgotten when an equally villainous character comes into view.

But Shkreli, content to bask in the negative attention, used Twitter to make certain no one could forget why he was dubbed “pharma bro” in the first place. He insulted presidential hopefuls, tried to start feuds with rappers and radio personalities, called Congress “imbeciles,” and used it to promote his near-nightly live-streams, which attract hundreds of viewers each night.

At the same time, an entire news cycle was devoted to a Twitter exchange between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. The music world lit itself on fire when Kanye West went off on rapper Wiz Khalifa in a bizarre, beautiful Twitter rant that resulted in some obscene, some poetic tweets and an eventual kiss-and-make-up for all the world’s Twitter users to see.

Sure, Twitter’s problems may be that there are not as many of those users as investors would like. And perhaps it’s true, or even likely, that Twitter will never recapture its burning white heat; that it will never resonate with not-media-obsessives (who prefer Facebook); millennials (Snapchat); and whoever else (WhatsApp?). But perhaps the biggest mistake a company can make is ignoring the people who value it most. As Twitter attempts to grow, after all, it risks growing into a company that it is not.

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