I mean, it's extremely clear that current Twitter leadership doesn't understand that either. They're not competing with Twitter at its prime (or at least its peak influence; personally I preferred it when it was a lot smaller in the early 10s) from a few years ago; they're competing with a website that just went completely dark to the public internet and appears to be barely usable even if you're logged in.
I wonder, do you actually use it, or more to the point, did you pre-Musk? That's certainly a belief people have about the site, and it is certainly a facet of Twitter, but Twitter is (or was) only monetized outrage in the same way that Twitter is cat pictures or Twitter is porn or Twitter is celebrities. It was there, but unless you chose to engage with it you likely wouldn't see much of it (as the recommendation stuff started to break down under Musk, many people were surprised to see porn in the algorithmic feed; despite porn on Twitter being a huge deal, many users were surprised it was allowed because The Algorithm(TM) used to be good at hiding it from those who didn't engage with it).
I do think post-Musk that this effective auto-segmentation has become less of a thing, particularly for outrage/political stuff; the algorithmic stuff seems increasingly broken, and the auto-promotion of blueticks shoves all sorts of nonsense in your face. But for most of Twitter's lifespan, unless you were in that world, you didn't really see much of it.
Agreed that Twitter has improved a bit post-Musk, but it has a decade of ossified outrage culture baked in and that doesn’t change easily. Some notable improvements though include: “for you” and “trending” pages are no longer exclusively showing the worst representations of viewpoints I disagree with (still plenty of disagreement and idiocy, but no longer exclusively the most idiotic representations of the views I disagree with), Community Notes seems genuinely helpful at identifying mis/disinformation that pre-Musk Twitter would have happily boosted (even endorsed via Blue Check), and honestly even the “Blue Check no longer means endorsement but rather access to paid features” seems like a marked improvement. Twitter seems quite a lot more content-neutral without going full anarchy.
What makes you think so? Twitter has no moat, the functionality is easy to replicate. It's all about the user base.
And trying to "migrate" a user base from Instagram seems like a shot in the foot in this context, even if the whole mechanic of the platform is pretty much the same as twitter, the user base is already completely different
However, that doesn’t mean there can’t be a next big thing out of nowhere like TikTok.
(1) Network effects
(2) Infrastructure competency
I think Facebook can provide these faster at a higher level than anyone else who is attempting it. For profit, things that would help include:
(1) No need for profitability
(2) Profit synergies with an existing business
Again, Facebook is a strong competitor here. They can start at #1 and integrate to achieve #2
To get people to switch from Twitter to your service it helps to have:
(1) Brand recognition
(2) Also be a social network
(3) A marketing budget
However, I think getting people to switch is the hardest part for any network; it's affected by many factors. There is also the consideration of getting them to switch, stay, and not be pulled away by a future competitor.
Twitter with my Instagram friends won’t feel like Twitter.
