Another week, another catastrophic failure of policy at Twitter that's being eagerly exploited by its myriad competitors--and they truly are myriad. And yet, in spite of the momentary success of some of these platforms--Threads has gotten over 70 million signups as of this writing--none has quite ascended to the lofty heights of Twitter's influence at its height, where it seemed, for good or for ill (let's be honest, mostly ill), to be at the heart of every conversation among our world's epistemic elites. To understand why, we have to go to Azeroth. Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker once, tongue-in-cheek, called Twitter the best video game of all time, likening it to the then-still-popular wave of Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games, or MMORPGs, that were led by titles like World of Warcraft. Aside from the obvious connections--adopting an online persona in a gamified system entirely governed by earned metrics--we can also look at the fact that Twitter, like World of Warcraft, is surrounded by failed imitators.

In 2005, years before Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa came on the scene, two startups--ScanSoft and Nuance Communications--merged to pursue a burgeoning opportunity in speech recognition. The new company developed powerful speech-processing software and grew rapidly for almost a decade. Then suddenly, around 2014, it stopped growing. Nuance's story is far from unique. In all major industries and technology domains, startups are facing unprecedented obstacles.