Beginning of the end of Twitter?

As a father of two sons of the latest "generation" (23 and 18 years old) - I can tell you that they both see Twitter as an old person's social media. Today it's about Instagram, snapchat, and to a lesser degree Facebook. You are also seeing Tic Toc going viral, U-Tube and Pinterest are still solid, and then you have the up and comers like QZone mixed in. For my younger son, SoundCloud is his latest social media platform as he becomes more interested in recording and listening to music. In fact, state an interest and there is a social media app for that interest.

Twitter is simply too serious, not fashionable, not glitzy, and not a "thing" with the kids. Twitter is becoming less personal, less day to day,  and more about finding random followers that might be interested in your opinion in whatever it is you have an opinion about. If they want a social media to tell people what they are doing this weekend or to post pictures of their cat or dog, they do this on Facebook or Instagram. People don't do that on Twitter much anymore. 

Whereas Facebook has remained number one (with approximately 2 billion users), Twitter has fallen significantly. At latest count, they have about 350 million members, which is approximately half of what Instagram has. Interestingly, they just banned Donald Trump and pissed off about 80 million of those 350 million members. What sort of business model does this? Apparently one that doesn't want to continue to make a lot of money. 

Herein lies the issue with Twitter needing to eliminate their competition. Parler wakes up a couple of days after the Twitter banning of Donald Trump, followed by the the great Twitter purge of 2021, with a record seven million users on line at one time, and sees themselves as the number one download on both the Google and Apple play Stores. What happens if nearly a quarter of Twitter's users leave Twitter and go somewhere else? Well it would destroy their margins. 

I assume that Twitter decided to purge these accounts believing that the vast majority of the users would just turn around and recreate new accounts with new email information, and just decide to be "more careful" about what they post. It's almost impossible for Twitter to literally ban a person who otherwise is not famous. This was their way of just teaching these bad users a good lesson. Bringing them back "in line" and making them "take their medicine".  Those who lost accounts with thousands of followers would be upset. But they would learn their lesson and start over from the bottom again. 

I am pretty sure that Twitter did not foresee that many people would actually just jump ship and run off to the competition.

For me, when I take a deeper look at the issues that Twitter is facing, it seems like that drop of a few percentages of their stock prices is an underreaction. There may be no more turning back for Twitter in terms of placing politics ahead of business and they don't seem to have a plan in place to react to the new realities of social media. They appear to be losing market share in what is  a decreasing market.  They simultaneously have no plan to attract new users at the same time they are effectively telling existing users to pound sand. Sorry to repeat the concept, but at what point does this ever make a good business model?