As any social platform expands and reaches the online equivalent of middle age, there are often criticisms of what that growth requires and cries of “it was better when,” and Twitter (s twtr) is no exception to that rule. One of the most prominent complaints about the service — one that I have made myself in the past — is that as more and more people have joined the network, the signal-to-noise ratio has plummeted, and the stream has become increasingly filled with meaningless chatter about inanities like Justin Bieber’s latest PR stunt.

A recent piece in the New York Times, entitled “Valley of the Blahs: How Justin Bieber’s Troubles Exposed Twitter’s Achilles’ Heel,” is a good example of this genre. In it, writer Jenna Wortham (@jennydeluxe on Twitter) argues that the volume of users has changed the nature of Twitter, transforming it from a kind…