Sam Thielman in the Guardian, of all places, notes that Twitter is starting to reap the consequences of converging into the progressive Borg. Their users are starting to leave, beginning with the early adopters.

Twitter has some structural problems. The first is the value in social media is that it allows free and rapid speech with minimal/no filtering. It helps if the service is free. The method of monetizing this is the same as most media: you sell access to the content to advertisers. Unlike the mass media, social media (Facebook is the most skilled exponent of this) micro target their advertisements.

Twitter has not cracked this. It is not making money. The burn rate is large, and the company will fall.

Twitter lost users in the last three months, the company said on Wednesday, and the news sent share prices into a nosedive.

Co-founder Jack Dorsey returned to lead the company last year and has shaken management to its core, laid off staff and instituted numerous changes to the service. So far his plans do not appear to be taking flight.

Growth in Twitter’s monthly active users has slowed, then stagnated, and now seems to have stopped entirely. The service’s user base is up 9% year-over-year, but against the past quarter it’s perfectly flat at 320 million.

Discounting “SMS Fast Followers,” who use the service via messaging platforms and tend to reside in emerging markets, Twitter’s user base declined for the first time, from 307 million to 305 million in the three months before 31 December.

Twitter’s share price fell 13% in after hours trading before bouncing back. It had already hit an all-time low this week.

The tendency to Shadowban at twitter is decreasing what value remains. I said minimal/no filters: when Twitter starts not allowing the tweets of those you want to follow to be seen then they are filtering.

The elite want this: but the elite care not a whit about the shareholders.

It’s pretty easy to tell when you’re being shadowbanned because your notifications decline dramatically. It’s also easy to see it in the 28-day profile.

Notice how despite the number of tweets being flat and the number of followers increasing, the number of impressions and profile visits dropped significantly at precisely the same time. As it happens, that’s right when I noticed my notifications declining and people began letting me know that they weren’t seeing my tweets.

The reason mentions don’t drop as heavily is because for an account with less than 10,000 followers, many of my mentions are not made in response to my tweets and are therefore not affected by the shadowban.

But never fear. Alternatives are on the way.

There is a fork coming. Many open source projects will be split, and the codes of conduct removed, so that the best code can stand. Most of the hard, core coding is not affected by such: it requires a very level head and skills to work at that level.

What the consumer will see is that the corporations that have built their business this way will fail, and those that used closed source and have let the social justice people affect their agenda will fall behind.

Because software evolves. Rapidly. And the mass media are three phyla behind the state of the art.