The Verge 2018 tech report card: Twitter
Twitter may be the most stagnant of the big social networks. The service, which has largely stopped adding users, is more of a static communication and information utility, and 2018 underscored that Twitter leadership wants to keep it that way, even when it proves a double-edged sword.
Keeping Twitter at the forefront of news and culture means, as a platform, it hardly ever undergoes any drastic changes. As a result, the company has left its trickiest problems unsolved while giving people who have yet to an open account little reason to ever do so.
As a public company, Twitter’s lack of user growth — the company seems to have plateaued at around 330 million users — has narrowed its ambitions to performing its...