[ghaff]

Yeah. Maybe it's a failure of imagination on my part but it feels like Twitter pretty much is what Twitter is. It's a broadcast medium for people for whom that has value, which is very useful for some of us and not at all useful for many others. People understandably get up in arms when Twitter tries to make the timeline too heavily sponsored. There's no reason to believe subscriptions would work without tanking the user numbers.

Twitter has actually already made changes that make it more useful for its core audience. Increased character counts etc., for example, has allowed Twitter to essentially replace microblogging--or even short-form blogging generally.