My take on it is Twitter just isn't, as a company, very good at making software. This is from external observation and a couple of reports from friends who used to work there.
Yeah it really feels like IBM in the sense that it had some really amazing engineers that built the company up, and after they left, they have just been resting on those laurels ever sense. What have they truly innovated recently?
My sense is that lots of divided people (mainly fringe) have basically been silenced for years. Twitter has made it possible for those people to have a voice and more problematic made it super easy for malicious actors to mimic those people's ideas to make the situation worse than it really is.
My (probably unpopular) opinion is that they simply shouldn't have a voice. Twitter is bad for society period.
I feel similarly. Liberal ideals would say that everyone having a global voice is a good thing, but we haven't really seen things play out that way since social media became so dominant. At least not in the US.
Though it doesn't help, of course, that TwitFaceTube are designed to maximize engagement at the expense of everything else, which encourages inflammatory content. Maybe if they didn't, we wouldn't have this problem.
Idk, the particular flavor of outrage varies greatly depending on the platform. 4chan, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, all of the them are drastically different platforms with cultures that emergently form from early design decisions like anonymity, One-to-many vs many-to-many communication paradigms, thread layouts, and moderation decisions.
How do you figure the '50s? Times we've been more united than we are right now seem more the exception than the norm, to me, since the founding of the country. Hell we haven't even had an elected member of the Federal government kill or attempt to kill someone over a political dispute in a while.
If division can be fomented by giving everyone a megaphone, then the people were already divided, they just didn't know it. I don't agree with all of Twitter's moderation, but this is a symptom, not the disease.
Is it "really amazing engineers" or good management / culture that matters? You can get a "really amazing engineers" and put them in an environment where they can't exploit their talents.
This is of course anecdotal, but a friend of mine worked as an engineer at Twitter, and she said there was more focus on appearing as though they were industry leading engineers than there was focus on actual engineering quality.
