Abuse and misinformation are certainly the big issues but even more bigger and rather meta-issue is the strong hub-and-spoke model that Twitter promotes. Here's an example: You could tweet some of the most informative and useful tweets relevant to, say, robotics enthusiasts for day after day and years after year, and you might still end up with absymal engagement in terms of likes, retweets and followers. Meanwhile,…
That's not an issue of Twitter, but of human nature. I don't think technology can do anything about it. That is just wishful thinking about "future people" who spend their time learning and improving their skills 24/7, instead of slacking and having fun. Unrealistic - presumably people simply need time outs. You could argue that Twitter actually does well with that problem: after all, if you follow a robotics enthusi…
A thought experiment: Imagine Twitter was the only way to distribute information. How would that world look like? Everyone who doesn't have followers would almost have no chance of having followers and therefore their content will keep disappearing in Twitter blackhole regardless of how useful it might have been (given how bad their search is). Twitter algorithms takes rich-gets-richer phenomenon to whole new level. At times, it feels their algorithms wants to re-establish ancient model of nobility vs plebs. The whole notion of "follower" has negative connotations with implied power-play top-down relationship. I have seen people with mid-range follower count not following others even when they find them interesting because they don't want to ruin their followers/followee ratio. The notion of follower as opposed to friend or contact firmly puts in place one-way power structure, the information broadcast instead of information exchange model. Many folks have resorted to always following back any followers in protest of this model while many others resist following anyone who they don't consider their peers in power structure created by Twitter Universe.
A minimal fix Twitter can do is to identify good tweets from followers and occasionally show it to followees to at least have a shot at 2-way relationships. The current scheme of "likes" doesn't cut it because first one wins and everyone else gets buried deep. When people ask why Twitter is not so successful with larger population, not so much growing and still relatively quite small (after subtracting bots), I often get surprised they don't see above as the most fundamental issues with their model of social relationships itself.