It's most definitely issue of how Twitter ranks and promotes the content. To make content more visible, you must be popular in first place. To be popular, you must have your content more visible. It's a virtuous cycle 99.9% users cannot possibly break without winning random virality lotteries. I agree Pareto's law and exponential distribution applies in all social networks but for Twitter this is not only skewed by at least an order of magnitude but its current design and algorithms actively promotes this phenomenon instead of resisting it.
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.
Granted, it can be an issue of Twitter ranking content. After all, they could just decide to not ever show any robotics content at all, and only show celebrity sneezes.
What I mean by human nature is that humans will always follow celebrity sneezes, and seek to slack off.
I don't think Twitter could invent a ranking that would give the robotics enthusiast a following of 10 million people and weed out the celebrity person. They could do that - but people would stop using the service and switch over to Instagram.
One major issue, once social networks introduce ranking, is the question who they rank for. If the algorithm tries to maximize engagement, it will happily promote the celebrity sneezes. Of course algorithms could optimize for other things (personal development or whatever), limited by people actually keeping to use the service.
In the early days afaik Twitter had no ranking and filtering at all.
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.