Twitter should focus on live news and events, using human editors to create curated feeds
For Twitter, Future Means Here and Now — Here, in 140 characters or less, is some free advice for Twitter's next chief executive: Focus on live events. … That may sound a bit simplistic.
Context & Ripple Effects
This June 2015 column is free advice aimed at Twitter's incoming chief executive: stop competing as a social network and lean into live events, with human editors assembling the feeds. Within weeks the company acted on versions of it — Moments launched that October, with Stratechery framing the feature as Twitter reinventing the newspaper.
The arc that follows validates the thesis: by September 2016 Twitter was deliberately rebranding away from being known as a social network toward a central destination for news and live events, then in 2018 began building dedicated curated pages for events pushed across notifications and Explore. The 2015 advice turned out to be the opening move of a decade-long identity change rather than a one-off suggestion.
First-order effects
- Whoever took the chief executive job inherited a staffing question, not just a strategy: human curation makes editors a core product cost, reversing the assumption that ranking should be purely algorithmic.
- The immediate product consequence was Moments, which packaged tweets and video into editor-shaped narratives and gave Twitter a newspaper-like format to sell against the raw timeline.
Second-order effects
- Once curation became strategy, Twitter stopped marketing itself as a social network entirely — the 2016 repositioning changed how advertisers, media partners, and users categorized the company, trading network effects for destination traffic.
- Curation scaled from hand-built Moments to automated-but-edited surfaces: the 2018 event pages distributed curated content through notifications and Explore, and by 2019 followable topics were extending topic-based reach to new audiences — with The Interface noting the same mechanism risked polarizing them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Twitter's value shifts from the social graph to editorially structured discovery — the platform competes on being where events happen now, and its curation choices carry newsroom-like responsibility without newsroom governance.
- The tension exposed in followable topics — bigger audiences versus polarization — points to a structural problem for any algorithm-plus-editor hybrid: whoever curates the feed absorbs blame for its failures, a dynamic that has shadowed the company's moderation decisions ever since.
The trend: Twitter spent the decade after this column converting itself from a social network into an editorially curated live-events destination, with each curation layer — Moments, event pages, topics — trading network intimacy for newsroom-style gatekeeping.