As a user I struggle to stay engaged with twitter - the moment I try to read, I am flooded with irrelevant content, yet the platform is the best place for niche interest information and fast niche information. The Signal-to-Noise ratio is too low. Here is how I would fix engagement and revenue:
1. Consider twitter a user's portfolio of interest channels and let us tab between our chosen channels immediately (multi-select box at the top where I can pick VCs, medicine, Design, Oscars, whatever - and it blends my feed for me)
2. Encourage floods of content and monetise curators filtering for quality - I can pay for subscription a feed of world news from WSJ, NYT, and other paid sources, and my subscription fee is distributed to them based on consumption. The best content wins and the quality editorials get rewarded for earning loyalty, not writing clickbait.
3. Enable paid advertising-free feeds.
4. Enable premium, niche feed advertising that is hyper relevant (If I have a spine medicine feed, an ad from Stryder would be very appropriate, but one from herbal remedies providers would be irrelevant). Building the curation mechanisms would draw top engineering talent in machine learning too.
5. Allow co-watching experiences during media events.
6. Allow me to filter out topics I want to avoid (and by doing that, you get more engagement and better ad targeting capabilities)
7. Open your developer ecosystem again and this time pay attention to what works and provide guarantees that you won't kill developer efforts. Those developers build bots for Facebook now and help their user engagement instead of yours.
The gist of it is: make your revenue model reward and improve quality. The moment you let advertisers lead you by the nose and dictate for obstructive anti-user product decisions, you will permanently lose your market to Facebook and others. I lead a hyper-niche collaboration network so happy to do a longer brainstorming session with Twitter people.