Why Twitter is such a big deal (2009)

> and almost exclusively used only by people who were already heavy Facebook users.

Not at all true, not just for myself (never was a heavy Facebook user, was a heavy Twitter user in the beginning), but for lots of people around me, especially fellow developers.

> Some people just had to broadcast absolutely everything they did, often irrationally.

Maybe we followed way different people, but I didn't see any of that stuff. Most of my feed was people launching projects, and technical discussions about various news/ideas.

> Most everyone else tried to find a use for Twitter but couldn’t. I know many early users that either abandoned or deleted their accounts before 2010.

Lots of governments found use for it seemingly, and the citizens. Various levels of government in Spain still sends out more information via Twitter+RSS than they do on their own websites, for some weird reason. And it's been like that for years now.

Fitting as well to use 2010 as an example, as that's right around when the Arab Spring was in full action, largely because of social media in general but particularly Twitter, which saw huge increases in user activity in the countries starting their revolts, where governments were scrambling to censor people yet Twitter remained available.

> Eventually it just became a text broadcast interface via their client. That is good for people who want to build a following, but nobody else found a use for it.

Yes, eventually Twitter became a pipe to push data through, but they didn't like that so they slowly killed the API by making a bunch of weird moves about it and shutting down 3rd party clients. Eventually, the only people left on the platform were people chasing followers, rather than people chasing stimulating conversations, which is what I got out of Twitter when I used it more.

Twitter was a social accomplishment, not a technical one. It created its own new word (to tweet) and it did really feel, misleadingly, like a public utility rather than a private platform.

It’s also completely unreplicable today. There was a fun factor to it that justified starting out at zero followers—it was a game, so it was OK to start out at level 1–that isn’t there on any of the replacements. “Platform” has become some new kind of social credit score and no one enjoys it anymore. We either become “content creators” and get into that grind or remain obscure and hope our employers never bother to deanonymize us.

I remember in the beginning twitter was supportive of third party developers using it for all sorts of different things using its free API. I guess they decided they didn’t just want to be the protocol and closed off access.

Your first paragraph disagrees with the article and the second paragraph essentially restates it.

Just because it didn’t become SMS or reach Facebook scale doesn’t mean he was wrong.

The way nearly all sizable organizations think about public communication includes Twitter and it’s the de facto support channel for several industries.

> Most everyone else tried to find a use for Twitter but couldn’t. I know many early users that either abandoned or deleted their accounts before 2010.

So what changed? Why did twitter eventually become so popular?

I agree with this.

Perception around Twitter in the late 2000s and early 2010s was completely different to what it was today or 5 years ago.

I remember the tech buzz around Twitter where every VC considered it the next big thing because everyone they knew was on Twitter. It was a really classic case of "bubble think" (to me).

Twitter has never gone mainstream. It's used as a system for press releases, journalists and a few other niches. I really wonder if the journalism niche will dry up given the security concerns of who can read their DMs but that hasn't happened yet.

He's right about the fact that it's a company, owned by an individual. It's an impactfull company even if personaly as a non-user I've never seen any interest in it.

It doesn't have to have a use. It's an addictive form of enterntainment.

Some like Twitter better, others like facebook better. It's just different ambience.

The optimism and hopefulness got crushed under the boot of money. The spirit of sharing got crushed under the boot of copyright. The joy and excitement got crushed under the boot of metrics and engagement. In an alternate timeline, things could have gone a different way, but because the same old money and same old power structures controlled the direction of progress, we got the timeline where the Internet turned into Addictive Pay-per-view Disney.

it's a shame we can't recreate it somehow and even kept the optimism in a snapshot format. things weren't pretty, a bit clunky even. Unicode wasn't around, so encoding itself was a big deal all by itself. Internet was slow but it somehow retained the most critical part of application. there were many search engines, the first 5yrs or so when google arrived was the height of tech optimism for me, the search works so well it felt like magic. and most articles online were very personal. it felt like a village where people moved there voluntarily and were very eager to share with other villagers. alas.

Sounds like you just grew up. I hear lots of people romanticizing the good old days not thinking about all the people who thought those good days were actually their current bad days, they were simply older than you; and similarly, I see lots of young people saying that these recent times are the good days while older people lament their downturn.

The only thing that changed is that the people that were there are now grumpy middle aged people complaining that things have changed around them. Not realizing that it's they that have changed the most.

For technology optimism, look at younger generations. You are not going to find it in older generations. It's not a technical problem; it's a problem with aging. Young people are still expressing themselves online. Mostly not using any of the tools used by us older people. And good for them.

I grew up in the 1970s and 80s. I don't have a lot of patience for people of my own age these days. Not a lot of creativity there. Lovely people but just not very inspiring. Most of their great achievements are in the past. I try to keep some young people around me to keep me a bit more engaged. Much more fun. Young people haven't changed at all. I'm at risk of sliding into old age and being all grumpy about it. But I refuse to. Doesn't sound like a lot of fun.

It's not technology that's stopping people from expressing themselves but the fact that they no longer have the mental agility to make the most of what at the time were very primitive tools. If it was there (again) would you use it? Hint: it's still there and you are not using it like you used to! All the old tools still work. And there are some newer ones that work even better. The tools are there. But you aren't.

It’s because it’s okay to post mundane things on Twitter/X. It’s because tweets are short and are very fleeting.

An Instagram post takes up my whole screen and a picture is expected. Each post is given so much real estate and it makes you want to dress it up.

In the end, those different amounts of “friction” lends to posting different kinds of content.

It’s a vibe of a high end dinner establishment vs. a quick pickup place. They have their own lanes.

Twitter can’t be a news platform when tweets with links are suppressed

> Nothing about this sort of interaction is baked into the protocol as far as I can tell yet FB insta snap etc don’t work this way.

It's baked into the UI. Public by default.

Facebook is personal by default. You post stuff on 'your feed', you view 'your friends' updates.

Late in the game Facebook realised this was a problem and has tried to cram other stuff into people's feeds - viral content. And people hate it. People want their Facebook feed to be stuff from people they know and they see the other injected content (meme groups, assorted interest groups, comics, etc) as little more than extra adverts.

Contrastingly Twitter was always the public firehose and so while many people do not care for it, those that do, are opting into it, not trying to opt out.

Yet Twitter now X is just our modern day 4chan owned by the richest man in the world.

Never have ever seen such insane things (people shot point blank in the head & the gruesomeness of it) I didnt need to see (scrolling thru) and all thanks to X.

> Nothing about this sort of interaction is baked into the protocol as far as I can tell yet FB insta snap etc don’t work this way.

Neither does Twitter.

Its search is frequently broken to push whatever the new version of their algorithm decides to push. If Musk so wishes your entire feed will be just his rants (something I experienced a few weeks ago).

Pre-Musk and pre-algorithm Twitter was a good source of news, as it was near-realtime, and relevant to you. Now? No.

And when he bought it, it was

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Before computer science, it was defined as a way of speaking or acting between people in certain situations:

>the official procedure or system of rules governing affairs of state or diplomatic occasions.

"protocol forbids the prince from making any public statement in his defense"

>the accepted or established code of procedure or behavior in any group, organization, or situation.

"what is the protocol at a conference if one's neighbor dozes off during the speeches?"

> This describes all websites everywhere

You can't "follow" websites and get a uniform chronological feed of updates. That's partly why RSS exists, though it also doesn't give you a uniform feed of updates. That has to be constructed client side by downloading all updates for all subscribed feeds.

> It also describes NNTP

Which also doesn't provide a uniform feed of updates.

Twitter almost maps to finger (the protocol) perfectly.

My dictionary says this about "protocol":

> [In computing:] a set of rules governing the exchange or transmission of data between devices.

In the article, pg says this:

> The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients.

It seems obvious to me what pg is getting at, even though the other protocols he mentioned are all formal while Twitter's is not.

Never thought of it this way... It truly is a marketplace where opinions can be "bought"

> a marketplace for buying opinion

Never thought of it like that before

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More than half of the article is about the protocol being owned by a private company, so I don't think that's an oversight.

I'm a generation older. To me, there were three big shifts.

One was that Facebook/Twitter/etc. proved that web publishing could be made more convenient by making it more centralized, and that access to an audience was, in some way, more important than access to publishing tools. No matter how good open web publishing tools got, they couldn't compete with Facebook et. al. at providing some access to an audience, even if that audience was as small as your friends and family.

The second was a shift in who developed "internet infrastructure." In the 80s and 90s (and before), it was mainly academics working in the public interest, and hobbyist hackers. (Think Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, IETF for web/internet standards, or Dave Winer with RSS.) In the 00s onward, it was well-funded corporations and the engineers who worked for them. (Think Google.) So from the IETF, you have the email protocol standards, with the assumption everyone will run their own servers. But from Google, you get Gmail.

The third -- and perhaps most important shift -- was the move from desktop software to web + mobile software as the primary computing platform for most people. Such that even if you were a desktop user, you did most of your computing in the browser. This created a whole new mechanism for user comfort with proprietary fully-hosted software, e.g. Google Docs. This also sidelined many of the efforts to keep user-facing software open source. Such that even among the users who would be most receptive to a push for open protocols and open source software, you have strange compromises like GitHub: a platform that is built atop an open source piece of desktop software (git) and an open source storage format meant to be decentralized (git repo), but which is nonetheless 100% proprietary and centralized (e.g. GitHub.com repo hosting and GitHub Issues).

You ask how to "dismantle" this. I've long pondered the same question. I am not sure it can be dismantled. It doesn't seem like these shifts can be undone. Where I've personally ended up is that small communities of enthusiast programmers and power users can embrace open source, open protocols, and decentralization for its obvious benefits, but that it won't ever be a mass market again.

It's worth keeping in mind a few bright points: email, RSS/podcasts, the web

Email: One of the oldest parts of the Internet. Very open standard. Federated. Largely ad-free. Little lock-in (Though @gmail.com addresses are a potential serious risk). Lots of attempts (by Slack, etc.) to "kill" email because no corporation controls it.

RSS/podcasts: RSS (or Atom or whatever) should be way more popular, but it still lives on through podcasts where anyone can publish anywhere and subscribe to anything. hough Spotify and Apple are trying hard to lock things down, they haven't succeeded yet.

The web: Exists and is still largely open. Efforts to turn everything into a closed app haven't succeeded yet and attempts to lock down the web (e.g. web attestation) have failed so far.

I would say when Facebook arrived. But it wasn't so much "shift to corporate-owned", it was more that it allowed non-techies to put stuff on the internet for the first time. Us techies, we already had our hand-coded html web pages hosted at some (probably commercial) provider.

I think the answer is "usability". Look at all the community-made, non-commercial projects. They tend to suck because they weren't built for you. They were built for people with similar high investment into the thing they do, for experts or power-users. For them it works.

So IMO the key question is how to find motivation or time or money to solve someone else's problem, without being forced to maximize the money-making part. Because by now we can see exactly what happens when money is the primary goal. Everyone starts with good intentions (solving a problem), but the incentives are so powerful. If you don't follow them you'll start to struggle, long-term, or get out-competed by someone who maximizes the money-making part of the job.

There's a great CCC presentation by Moxie (Signal originator) on that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdM-XTRyC9c

~summarized in text form https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

Corporate ecosystems looked a lot like open protocols for so long, luring people in. Then things changed.

Part of it has to be zirp: when money isn’t free, companies suddenly look everywhere for extra cash flows.

Part of it is LLM training: it turns out that the free data can be packaged up and resold at astronomical valuations.

Our age gap is less then 10 years but here's my two cents: laziness/convenience. Back in the 90's and 2000's, you had to be ready to spend a lot of time fiddling with setups and maintenance as well as some MAJOR early days security flaws(think the IRC days). Corporate-owned ecosystems solved that problem: you log in and forget about it. They won with what some people call user experience. The lower the entry barrier, the quicker something picks up. Back when I was in school I was the biggest Nokia fanboi and even then I acknowledged that downloading a shady jar file and installing it on my phone was iffy. At a later stage when I was a bit older and could afford it, I got my first Android phone and the existence of a marketplace was a breath of fresh air. The problem is that few people(annoyingly even now) fail to realize or admit that those types of centralizations put handcuffs on your wrists the moment you say "OK, that works for me". Whether that's social logins, cloud providers, services or anything else - it's all the same. For example, if today, OpenAI decided to close off their API's for good, I recon tens if not hundreds of thousands of "AI" startups will collapse immediately since they fully rely on OpenAI's API's. Same with AWS, GCP, Azure or any other provider. And as we see with the current fiasco with twitter, tiktok and bambu labs just to name a few from the past two days, it is abundantly clear that people are in dire need of backups. As much as I used to find google drive and docs convenient, I've personally moved away and self-host everything now. The only thing I rely on(and only as a backup plan to access my home network) is a VPN I host over at Hetzner. But again - this is my backup.

Whether the corporations saw that as an opportunity at an early stage or they were at the right place, at the right time, I can't say. I'm more leaning towards the latter since I've worked at corporations and success in those environments is most commonly a moderately-educated gamble.

> As a relative "youngin" (I'm 27), at what point did we make the shift from protocols to corporate-owned ecosystems? What caused it?

41, in retrospect I'd say this change happened around 2000-2010, why being not-invented-here-syndrome as Web 2.0 became a thing with some corporations publishing free-to-integrate XML-based APIs (technically also JSON, but I never saw them until much later); every API was different, so the only part which could be seen as a "protocol" were the meta-level of "how to define any API" e.g. XML, JSON.

straight answer: facebook and linkedin. they were so good that they killed the independent, decentralized 1990s web. why bother setting up your own shop and communicating via protocol when you can just make a fb or lnkd page.

theres no dismantling it. every time we offer decentralized vs centralized solutions, the centralized wins because of convenience, funding, faster progress, take your pick (lmao look at bluesky/atproto, bitcoin/coinbase). It's not even primarily because of VC or Silicon Valley ethos. this is just raw human nature at work. you want this to change, propose whatever alternative you have to the normie in middle america and watch their blank stares.

Twitter took off because it is a journalism predigestion engine, and there's always someone saying something that you can make a headline out of.

You used to have to go out and talk to people to find out "people are saying", but that costs time and money, and local journalists were being culled hard.

With Twitter, you can can just choose and surface the juiciest, most unhinged takes and the clicks roll in. It's like crack for both sides.

The downside is it sane-washes the lunacy by promoting some guy, who used to be propping up the bar at the local pub and explaining his theories to anyone unlucky enough to sit nearby, to national news-worthy opinion-haver.