Interesting. I receive no emails and rarely any push notifications from Twitter. I use it every day while riding the bus, although I'm mainly a consumer and hardly tweet anymore.
Did you and I fall into different categories or something and somehow that led to you receiving invasive marketing where as all I ever see are a few promoted tweets? Pretty curious about this because you mention that your experience is happening to a large portion of the user base.
I used to receive multiple push notifications a day at a minimum, which was irritating to me because prior to this a push notification meant that someone was interacting with me, and that didn't hold true anymore. Twitter had broken that implicit contract with me.
As for what I had said in the parent comment, what I was trying to imply was that something has happened recently that has disengaged a significant (different than large portion, specifically meaning not insignificant) portion of its user base as evidenced by the deceleration in user growth. Apologies for any confusion. :)
My mental model jumped from significant to large too easily, sorry about that.
What notifications were you seeing? I'm trying to think what I would receive that wasn't another user interacting with me and all I can recall is something along the lines of 'User1, User2, ..., all liked User3's Tweet' where User1 and User2 were people I followed. But it was very strange because every now and then I get those notifications for high profile accounts and other times it would be like two friends liked a third friends tweet. Those notifications were quite sporadic though and don't bother me in the least.
Their Android widget used to show the latest tweet of a person a follow. Recently (few months, maybe?) it was only the most recent ad. I'll be damned if I dedicate a chunk of my home screen to whatever crappy ad Twitter wants to fling at me.
Did you and I fall into different categories or something and somehow that led to you receiving invasive marketing where as all I ever see are a few promoted tweets? Pretty curious about this because you mention that your experience is happening to a large portion of the user base.