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Twitter is pulling employees off of working on major consumer-facing features like audio Spaces, communities, and newsletters and instead plans to refocus their efforts on user growth and personalization, according to Bloomberg. The changes come as a pending buyout by Elon Musk is already casting a shadow on every move the company makes — and follows just weeks after Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced a pause on most hiring and fired both the company’s consumer product leader Kayvon Beykpour and the leader on the revenue side, Bruce Falck. Bloomberg’s report reveals some of the restructuring happening within Twitter under the direction of Jay Sullivan, the new head of product and interim head of revenue.
In a statement to Bloomberg, a Twitter spokesperson said, “We are making some updates to our consumer product team structure and roadmap to better focus on the areas that will have the greatest positive impact to the public conversation,” without specifying where the changes are. When Beykpour talked to us on the Decoder podcast last year, Twitter seemed lined up to take on companies like Substack, Clubhouse, and Patreon. At the time, it also had competition from other companies like Facebook in those areas. But a year later, Meta’s newsletter numbers seem unimpressive, and it’s given up on an attempt to build a number of audio features.
The only Twitter feature mentioned specifically by Bloomberg that’s definitely still in the works is the edit button announced earlier this year. Consistent with what Jane Manchun Wong uncovered about its tests, the report says it will allow edits within a certain time period of the original post and include a tweet’s revision history.
Earlier today, Twitter announced an end date for the availability of TweetDeck for Mac, although it’s unknown whether that has any connection to this reshuffling. Two features where we’ve seen continued development that could register as having “positive impact to the public conversation” include expanding tests of the Twitter Circles feature that takes a page from Instagram’s Close Friends playbook and its Birdwatch fact-checking setup.
