Twitter is struggling. Its disappointing financial results, mass layoffs and declining user experience show things aren’t well for the little blue bird. And now this: the replacement of the beloved “fav” star with a heart.

The time has come to ask whether, given the purpose of Twitter in comparison to other social networks, it’s time for the investors and merchant bankers to get out of the way. A ubiquitous mass communications platform belongs not in Wall Street but in the commons.

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The hearts are the final straw: it’s time to nationalise Twitter.

The concept of nationalising social networks isn’t new. David Mitchell put forward a compelling case for Facebook’s nationalisation due to its de facto monopoly status.

But while Mark Zuckerberg has made a profitable business out of selling the intimate personal details of Facebook’s users to advertisers, Twitter is struggling to find a way to build revenue out of its platform.

Twitter is different to traditional social media networks like Facebook and MySpace. At its most basic level, it’s really just one giant chat room. Its value isn’t in connecting people who already know each other in real life, or reminding you that your teenage crush ended up with the school bully and they now have four kids, but in building relationships with people you otherwise would probably never meet or interact with.

It’s infrastructure for basic communication, which is why people are so upset over the change to hearts: imagine if, instead of saying “OK” on the phone to a relative stranger, you were forced to say “I love you”. It’s that basic.

Despite spinning the heart to existing users as a more “expressive” and “universal” symbol, Twitter has admitted the change is really about making the platform easier for new users.

But how many times can the company change what works in pursuit of more users before its base packs up and moves on? It’s not the relatively recent new features – sharing images, videos and Vines – that catapulted Twitter into the mainstream. It was the idea that your 140 character message, no matter how inane, could be read and shared across the world, sparking conversation, debate, new ideas and friendships.

Twitter hasn’t been successful because of decisions by investors – it’s been successful in spite of them.

So how do you monetise an intangible combination of excitement and trepidation sparked by the overwhelming awe of talking to the whole world?

Twitter’s attempts to squeeze money out of a product that users value purely because of it what it allows to be created, rather than what it creates itself, haven’t yet succeeded. In fact they risk alienating its existing base and pushing the product into irrelevancy.

Geo-blocking video content, injecting more and more advertising, selling access to curated content like Moments and trying to get more personal information out of users (by asking for your birthday, for example), all come across as desperate attempts to rapidly generate revenue and satisfy the demands of investors. But the less genuine Twitter becomes, the less likely users will stick around.

As well as providing an online space for socialising and discussion, Twitter plays an important role in the working lives of many – particularly journalists. Its ubiquity makes it a valuable space to find sources, get story ideas and break news. In fact, many news publications regularly publish stories consisting entirely of Tweets.

Activists and campaigners have used Twitter to bring important issues into the public sphere and force them to be taken seriously by both the media and politicians. #BlackLivesMatter is a powerful example of a Twitter hashtag that transformed into a movement for civil rights and racial justice.

Trying to revert this apparatus into a “regular” social media network, with all the gimmicks and shovelware that comes with that, fails to acknowledge that Twitter just can’t make money from its core purpose. That should be proof enough that casual social interaction and its ability to shape news and current affairs are anathema to the desire for profit.

Twitter hasn’t been successful because of decisions by investors, business developers and advertisers – it’s been successful in spite of them.

Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey cites the popular Citizens Band Radio movement of the 1970’s as a key inspiration for the platform. Calling Twitter usernames “handles” is a direct throwback to the days of CB Radio, where users would interact with one another, tell jokes and share information.

Ultimately CB Radio went out of the fashion with the advent of online chat rooms, which in turn have been replaced by social networks like Twitter.

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CB Radio wasn’t privately run. It was government administered and regulated. There was no point in trying to monetise it, because it wasn’t the platform itself that was valuable; it was the networks created by users that made it interesting and useful.

Like CB Radio, Twitter isn’t an end product. It’s infrastructure that plays too socially and politically useful a role to be left in the hands of investors and stockbrokers. Whether it’s through state nationalisation, some sort of global governance framework or a user maintained co-operative, it’s time to take Twitter out of the world of finance and put it firmly in the hands of the public – before it goes broke, or wrecks its user experience entirely, or both.