The problem isn't that there are assholes on Twitter. They've always been there. Dealing with abusive people who want to shout down things they don't agree with has always been a downside to social media, especially if you share or talk about any remotely "controversial" topic. Twitter's lack of tools to help manage that problem didn't help but no amount of tools will completely fix the issue. It's a fact of life that a minority of people are just not very nice. The real problem is that there's no <i>benefit</i> to being on Twitter any more. The upside has vanished. The genuine conversations and <i>fun</i> side of Twitter has been lost. It's become a crowd of people all broadcasting without wanting to engage with their followers.<p>I suspect it's simply a network size problem - once Twitter hit a threshold of users it got too noisy. It's ironic that Twitter's value is considered to be the size of its audience whereas that might actually be the exact thing that's killing its usefulness.
If Twitter had an interest addressing abuse, Twitter would strive to make it easier to report abuse than to create it. Instead, retweeting is one touch and amenable to botting while reporting is convoluted and a linear.
Is this similar to perverts calling random women on the telephone? Now that I think about it, wouldn't it have been easy to detect the callers and punish them? Did that ever happen?
Twitter has become what comment section at Yahoo News once was, which ultimately what YouTube became.
The crowd has just shifted over to Twitter now. Nothing anywhere is any different, when it comes to unmonitored platforms.