A Look at Twitter After Nearly a Year Under Jack Dorsey ⇥ vanityfair.com

Much of this article’s length is spent on explaining Dick Costolo’s departure from Twitter and Dorsey’s re-hiring. But Nick Bilton, writing for Vanity Fair, also explores Twitter’s user retention problem. See if you can spot a theme within these two paragraphs:

Meanwhile, Dorsey was trying to figure out how to stop the user decline. He was also forced to face the reality that, in the years since he had last led the service, Twitter had become a vicious, often ruthless platform. Louis CK had recently thrown away his millions of followers, saying Twitter “didn’t make me feel good.” When Stephen Fry deactivated his account, he likened the site to someone taking a “turd” in a reservoir. Megyn Kelly repeatedly said that she could no longer look at Twitter because of the violent tweets from Donald Trump supporters.

[…]

Dorsey then mentioned something more revealing. The stagnant user growth, he conceded, was due in large part to the constant turmoil at Twitter. “There has been an ever shifting leadership, platform, and strategy, and it’s hard to see any momentum in that,” he said, digging into his third beef taco. […]

The issues that have plagued Twitter for the past several years seem institutional. It’s conflict and toxicity all the way down.