Twitter’s new homepage is great but it doesn’t solve the big issues

Less than a fourth of American adults use Twitter, far less than the 71% who use Facebook. While trailing behind Facebook in user numbers doesn’t really mean much, the fact that only 36% of Twitter’s users actually use the service daily is much more meaningful. In order to change this, the company has introduced a new homepage design that, while certainly a great step forward, isn’t nearly enough to fix what’s wrong with Twitter. 

I love Twitter. And given you’re reading this — an article posted to a tech journalism site about the strategic ambitions of a large public company — you probably love it too, seeing as how the site plays host to vibrant communities celebrating, ridiculing, and dissecting the ecosystems surrounding tech, media, and business. But you and I are in the minority. According to Pew, only 23 percent of Americans over the age of 18 use Twitter. Facebook, on the other hand, is used by 71 percent of American adults. These stats by themselves don’t necessarily spell disaster for the social network. Facebook has always dwarfed Twitter in size and, moreover, the platforms are fundamentally different — tweeted content reaches far beyond Twitter’s digital properties to travel all over the media landscape, from other websites and apps to national television broadcasts.