Here's an interesting article on the issues Elon Musk is facing with Twitter. Right now users are finding it hard to tweet, and Musk has placed limits on user accounts. While it appears to be coming under attack from both within the site and from outside, this article points out that Musk is being disingenuous with his explanations.
Twitter cannot achieve economies of scale due to the way it is engineered. It may fold by the end of the year.
The key to understanding the Twitter dynamic is to see the difference between, (a) running a website, where it doesn’t really matter how many people come to look at the content (low server costs), and (b) running a user engagement system, where the costs to accommodate the data processing -which increase exponentially with a higher number of simultaneous users- are extremely expensive. Twitter’s entire platform is based on the latter.
There is no economy of scale in any simultaneous user engagement system. Every added user costs exponentially more in data-processing demand, because every user needs a response, and every simultaneous user (follower) requires the same simultaneous response. A Twitter user with 100 followers (simultaneously logged in) that takes an action – costs less than a Twitter user with 100,000 followers (simultaneously logged in), that takes an action.
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