I agree, Twitter's management definitely has to take the blame here. It was their responsibility to manage the narrative, and I remember early on all the rumors of management squabbles. It's clear that those inside the company who wanted to build a cool dev platform lost out to those with dollar signs in their eyes who wanted to go for a moonshot.
I can't help but feel there was a third path which is to say: we've now outgrown our free-for-all dev roots, and we need to standardize the experience so we can improve it unilaterally, but let's do so with the acknowledgement that we have something special, something which may be worth more than 10x growth or 100x growth achieved by a tremendous cash burn. Obviously hindsight is 20/20, so I can't hold it against them too strongly, but it still really makes me sad.
I can't help but feel there was a third path which is to say: we've now outgrown our free-for-all dev roots, and we need to standardize the experience so we can improve it unilaterally, but let's do so with the acknowledgement that we have something special, something which may be worth more than 10x growth or 100x growth achieved by a tremendous cash burn. Obviously hindsight is 20/20, so I can't hold it against them too strongly, but it still really makes me sad.