Huge segments of the world don’t see value in Twitter (and they might have a point) and don’t use it. It’s the “public square” of a subset of people.

I’m interested and a bit nervous in what changes Musk will usher in. But I definitely see the opportunity for him to make a lot of money.

And they're never GOING to use it, because Twitter isn't for them.

The Tiktok crowd is not the Twitter crowd. The Twitter crowd is not the Facebook crowd. The only platform that truly has cross-group viability is instagram, and that's only because it's a visual platform.

Twitter is a place where you make short, concise statements and people yell at you. Remove the character limit and it's just a feature-barren Facebook but with a bunch of people you don't even personally know. Everybody has been crying that it can "be more." It doesn't want to "be more." "Being more" is antithetical to the spirit of the enterprise and will kill it.

Twitter totally missed the opportunity to turn Vine into Tiktok.

It's popular but it's mostly garbage where people scream at each other, among the bots and scammers. You can improve the interaction modes, improve discoverability etc. thus improving its value per user instead of inflating total number of users.

Make Twitter more popular by turning it into the same algorithmic garbage as every other platform.

> What unrealized potential does Twitter have left after 16 years of existence?

How much potential communication was left in the human race have after the first 7,000 years since written script started appearing? The answer is, most potential was still unexplored.

Everything in modern civilisation is still young. Especially new communication platforms.

That's a hand-wavy platitude about the general human condition that has nothing to do with Twitter specifically.

Yes, global communication marches on, but that says nothing about specific platforms. Just look at MySpace.

The potential value of a communications platform is always handwavy up to the point the revenue is realised. It is well-nigh impossible to forecast what the social media landscape will look like in the medium-long term; especially if someone cares about profit. Twitter has only been experimenting with making money since 2018.

Twitter had ample time before 2018 to experiment with making money, though. I'm not saying that Twitter should have known how to do that in 2006, but they probably should have by the time they IPO'ed 8 years later, in 2013.

And Glancing over their S-1, they're making money now with the same means that they were planning to in 2013.

So in other words, you don't know either. And that is fine.

> What unrealized potential does Twitter have left after 16 years of existence?

If there is unrealized potential, the "free speech" sites, like Gettr, etc. have not found much of it.

And potential doesn’t have to translate to financial success.

It has to, if you want to keep employing the engineers who build and run the system.

Musk can just bankroll Twitter as his pet project. Think Bezos and the Washington Post.

Twitter can employ the engineers to build and run the system just fine today.

Financially, I think it's pretty simple: charge more. There are core users who are addicted. It seems like something Musk would do?