Fixing Twitter's growth - Consumption first, creation second

Twitter has a ton of growth potential to unlock. After releasing their Q1 results, the stock dropped due to a lack of user growth. I personally think Twitter is going to be a gem that’s around for decades and that they’re in their first inning. The best growth is yet to come and here’s why:

Most users don’t want to tweet aka create. That’s right, most users don’t want to tweet and therefore don’t sign up for Twitter. They think it’s an all or nothing game – that in order to be a user of Twitter, they have to contribute content. Most users want to read great content from celebrities, news outlets, and friends that are on Twitter. Twitter needs to be the world’s greatest source of information that caters to content consumers more than content creators.

Rethinking the UI to be consumption first is how Twitter overcomes this hurdle. It should emphasize the stream and getting started without a username while de-emphasizing the need for creation, and vanity metrics like # of tweets. Maybe this needs to be unbundled into a separate app and can’t be done inside of the current Twitter client. Twitter needs to become as indispensable as TV for consuming information from sources you care about such as news outlets, celebrities, and friends.

I believe Semil Shah said that 90% of users consume content and 10% participate passively (commenting). We can assume that Twitter is then at only 10% of its capacity as it still needs to capture the other 90% of users that just purely want to follow information. It’s about following, NOT being followed.