I think they genuinely believed their own hype. And then instagram/snapchat happened and stole away an entire generation who cared more for narcissistic photos and sexting than snarky political jibes in 140 characters or less.
Snapchat is slower than a snail, it's UI is a mess without any kind of user manual, it eats battery like nothing else (because it ALWAYS keeps the camera on)...
The lack of a manual and secret feeling things you can do on Snapchat are part of the appeal. Most people learn how to do them from others and snapchat is often used while you are with some friends in contrast to FB or Twitter which are more used solo.
You learn fun things by asking each other or seeing people do them. It's counter intuitive but the squirreliness of the interface is one of it's selling points
Eh. Maybe. I'm pretty dessiccated and I can see the appeal. After only a few minutes of using it, you can see why it appeals to the youth of today. There's something just intuitive about it, and the ephemeral nature of the format is mildly addictive.
God yes. There's something so surreal about it taking 5500ms to load 605KiB worth of content over 87 requests to display a screen of ten 140-character tweets.
And their direct message section ... almost completely unusable. I've had it run so slowly that I could type out a sentence, stop, and watch it type out one character per second of the sentence I had typed.
Unfortunately this has just become the new norm on the web, so there's no longer any pressure on sites to optimize for speed/performance.
They are so desperate for revenue that the narrative and what is allowed to stay trending is something that can be bought. A good example of this is BLM (regardless of what you may think of the cause). I don't use twitter primarily because of its obvious censorship and the blatant propaganda use (BLM and arabic/islamic spring).
