Re: Twitter's biggest Trade Secret
Twitter handles a huge amount of data and I expect there is some really clever engineering going on behind the scenes, but you've hit on an important truth here. Perhaps the most important thing that Lone Skum did not understand was that he was buying a community and he needed to operate it in terms of maintaining that community.
Instead he acted like he had a technology product and proceeded to chase the users away by making it progressively more obnoxious and harder to use, destroying its value in the process. The thing that made Twitter worthwhile was that for a long time everyone was there. I doubt there will be another platform like it after this fragmentation.
Twitter's management had been walking the tightrope of maintaining that userbase for a long time. I think had he not bought them out, they might have been failing by now anyway - being the poster children for "grow first, monetise later" starts to get tough when the interest rates on your loans are rising fast and you still haven't got around to making significant amounts of money.