PG was/is completely wrong. Twitter was supposed to be the new SMS, or text message protocol, but that never happened. RSS is an example of a protocol in that space. At best, Twitter was/is an API.
In a practical utility perspective Twitter was a pub/sub broadcast system in the social media space. It was slim, fast, and real time in a way the Facebook wasn’t, due to a 140 character limit. Yet, it never seemed to become more than 10% of Facebook and almost exclusively used only by people who were already heavy Facebook users.
I remember the optimism around Twitter in 2007 because it was immediately evident that it was addictive to certain personalities. Some people just had to broadcast absolutely everything they did, often irrationally. 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.
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. In that regard YouTube is the Twitter replacement but YouTube had value otherwise that Twitter never could.
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.
There was definitely a period in time where you could use Twitter as public infrastructure, you could push data from anywhere with HTTP to it, and read it the same way. The firehouse was free to use too at one point, with a large ecosystem of (some even FOSS) 3rd party clients.
But then they killed that, and the ecosystem basically evaporated over night. I could understand if you started using Twitter after that, you'd get that feeling you described.
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There was definitely a period in time where you could use Twitter as public infrastructure, you could push data from anywhere with HTTP to it, and read it the same way.
Even at that time Twitter was not public infrastructure, but corporate-owned infrastructure that was temporarily a little bit more open than others regarding unofficial clients.
I thus know not one single person who at that time considered Twitter to be public infrastructure, since it simply never was.
It felt like public infrastructure. I don’t think anyone mistook it as such but its openness probably made many of us forget, at times, that it was private and things could change in an instant.
You introduce a point I have not seen discussed before which is that these type of content distribution platforms go through a process to find their global minima.
Twitter at the beginning you didn't know what it was going to be or what worked. Same with facebook and instagram. As time goes on these sites small features bring out their emergent properties of what 'works' there.
And once it has been 'figured out', it is not as fun. You know what you can expect there and people go there but it is no longer a dynamic feeling. Like watching the NBA today, it has been 'figured out'.
I think that may be what is the factor in the longevity of these platforms, once it is 'figured out', if what it is, appeals to enough of a large base.
Tik tok may have gone further because it never really was 'figured out' in that larger way. The algorithm really could give you wildly different content and different 'trends' would show up so it never reached that static boring point.
For these 'on the decline' sites you can almost predict exactly what you will see there and exactly what the discussions are. It is not longer an exciting TV show.
> 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.
I feel like you ignored the many qualifiers in the parent comment. I read it as painting broad generalizations rather than stating universal facts about all twitter users.
It wasn’t just the OP who noticed people posting fluff. It was a meme for a while that some people would recite their day to day via tweets. I remember conversations from everyday people on not knowing what to post on the app.
Niche communities formed but its utility was limited beyond that as evidenced by the growth of FB, YouTube and Instagram while Twitter plateaued. U
> I feel like you ignored the many qualifiers in the parent comment. I read it as painting broad generalizations rather than stating universal facts about all twitter users.
I read them as broad generalizations too, just wildly incorrect ones based on my own perspective from having been a Twitter user at that time, even if they're broad generalizations.
Also if you start your comment with "Author is completely wrong" and then put a bunch of broad generalizations that don't match with people's own experience, expect those people to also share their own experience.
Lots of people were confused about the purpose or utility of 'micro-blogging.' It only really clicked for people once you had minor celebrities using the platform to crowd-source information, advice, and ideas from fans.
My understanding of Twitter is that it is or was like your official personal Gazette[0] where you could broadcast what you are up to or whatever is on your mind at the moment. It has definitely different use cases for regular users and so for celebrities and government entities.
Also you can think of Twitter as a standalone spinoff of Facebook status updates user behaviour but with hashtags. I actually find Twitter more compelling than Facebook but somehow Twitter's management was able to ruin Twitter. Now we have not only Twitter but X, Threads, Bluesky and Mastadon. It is way too fragmented but imo they should all interop and work as an one ecosystem.
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.
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.
Twitter was never slim or lightweight. At the time, I remember checking its page weight only to find the website loaded over 100k of scripts and other cargo. With a 140 character limit, one can only conclude that the other 99.9% was malware and anti user algorithms, probably in an attempt to replicate Facebook.
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?
Twitter was almost immediately popular and it stayed popular, it's a revision of history to claim that it wasn't or that most people abandoned it in 2010. Twitter famously had scaling issues that resulted from demand for its use, and when the server was overloaded, they would print an image of a whale being carried by birds, the infamous "Twitter fail whale" (https://business.time.com/2013/11/06/how-twitter-slayed-the-...).
You can see in the article above that even in 2013 they were talking about Twitter's rise to prominence beginning in 2008.
Twitter was/is a fantastic resource for one-to-many social media communication. Celebrities flocked to it. Media publications analyzed it and ran stories on the platform. The API used to be quite open and basically free so it plugged into countless apps and was often used in hackathon projects. Hash tags became signal for trending topics. Even the public '@' tag (don't 'at' me bro) basically came from Twitter (or was at least, popularized by it). It was a phenomenon. Reaching 10% of Facebook's reach is hardly anything to scoff at (who had hit 1 billion users around the same time), and dwarfed the population of nearly every nation on earth. Twitter had outsized influence on the public conversation because you could get a message out to millions from a single account, which wasn't possible with Facebook due to friend requests (at the time, Facebook was more purely a friend-to-friend network and pretty sure you were restricted to at most 5K friends).
Twitter didn't even require a login to view Tweets. Embedded views in other apps helped to cement its virality.
There's "popular", then there's "every conference talk has @name in it instead of an email" and then there's "heads of state publish stuff there first instead of POSSE".
I'm not saying it wasn't popular, but it was not ubiquitous.
It's more ubiquitous than Facebook among people that matter in public discourse.
Basically anyone with a professional presence that involves talking to the public, publishing papers, blogs, open source projects, etc still uses Twitter to talk to the public. Lot of these people have a hidden or deactivated Facebook, but public Twitter.
This is what I call a failure to measure, or what smart people call bias. To ascend your opinion from silly to valid you only have to qualify two things:
How much more ubiquitous in this regard is Twitter than Facebook (as a percentage) and what real world impact does that number have?
People, in general, tend to invent their own reality. There are smart terms to describe that behavior from a variety of causes but dummies like me just tend to call it bullshit.
> it's a revision of history to claim that it wasn't or that most people abandoned it in 2010.
Whether this is true or not depends a lot on the social circle you are talking about. I am aware of quite a lot of people who abandoned Twitter after it became more closed with respect to the API, but I am also aware of quite a lot of people who nevertheless did stay.
It took many years for Twitter to become valuable and has since lost most of that value. It did not become profitable until 2018 and then became negative again in 2021. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
Twitter usage is also way down, but most analysts stopped using things like account numbers, message quantity, and visitor counts to account for any real concern years ago because most of it was determined to come from bots.
Twitter popularity is illusory. Its a broadcast system that the majority of its users, whether people or bots, solely sought to exploit for offsite metrics.
> Twitter popularity is illusory. Its a broadcast system that the majority of its users, whether people or bots, solely sought to exploit for offsite metrics.
Regardless of what you think people used Twitter for, there are real-world consequences from people using Twitter to communicate with each other. The Arab Spring is probably the biggest example for that, where people used it for activism, while the governments tried to ban it and survive the uprisings happening all around the Arab world.
I'm talking about popularity, not profitability. These are two vastly different things. That Twitter failed to convert its platform to become the advertising behemoths that Google and Facebook are is a failure of its business strategy and execution. The social network itself remained extremely popular and from your article:
> Twitter has 421 million monthly active users, adding 20 million in 2023
It's as popular is its ever been, however, there's been some rotation in demographics I suspect.
Consumer surplus isn't captures. It was very amusing to see the accidental live tweeting of the OBL operation by some guy who heard helicopters. Twitter crowdsourced analysis of ISIS propaganda lead to at least one airstrike. Facebook can't say that.
i think it got popular by people who noticed they can earn a lot of money by tricking others they have interesting things to say. (advertisement via influencers / trends / bots etc.). making it more popular would increase $$ on these things.
i wasn't in the super earlybirds users, but this is what i get from having used it. like any other social media really. trick people that its cool somehow and start shoving crap down all their senses you can reach.
platforms which don't do this, dont get big because they are kept small.
(maybe a bit cynical post, but i don't think its wrong.)
Hashtags became links around 2009, but I think it was just critical mass. Instead of yelling into the void, it became very easy to stumble upon a community or discussion around a hobby or event, and follows didn’t require approval like friending on Facebook. Because Twitter lacked structure, you didn’t have to find the right place to be or the right people to speak to, you’d just overlap due to retweets and hashtags. So it inverted in some ways the traditional structure of social networks, allowing for emergent and ephemeral events and places (and thereby main characters) to bubble up and recede. You could be part of something without ever having to be admitted. This was somewhat true of the blogosphere but the currency of trackbacks and comments there wasn’t quite as freewheeling and expansive.
If Facebook is the minimum for top-tier then there is only one top-tier social network. Being an order of magnitude off Facebook still makes the network one of the most popular social networks of all time.
The top tier is, essentially, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and TikTok. These are used by literally billions of people; with the exception of China, virtually everyone on earth is exposed to them fairly directly.
(Also Telegram and WhatsApp are a borderline case; they have the users, and they have social-network-like features, but most of the users are likely not _using_ the social-network-like features; they just use them as messaging apps).
The second tier is things like Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, Quora; these are in the 300-600 million user range, so they're big, but you don't have the same sort of universal exposure.
It's a stretch to call YouTube a social network along with the messaging apps. Facebook & Instagram are two products by the same company where social identity is literally shared across them. If your top tier is Meta + Chinese apps then we're just going to have to disagree.
"Popular" isn't quite the right word—"significant" might be a bit closer? In my country, at least, Twitter was adopted by the political, celebrity, and media class far more than Facebook ever was.
According to a discussion I had in person with Rabble, this is the correct answer. It was an evolution of TXT2MOB which was intended for flash protests. X is such a far far cry from the original intent.
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.
I wouldn't say he was completely wrong. He was right about "Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an advantage."
Twitter / X punches above its weight (in terms of regular metrics like MAUs and revenue) in terms of cultural impact. One can argue that it was responsible for delivering the 2024 election to Trump. This may have never happened if its original founders had tried to control and monetize it too soon.
Of course, but that contained the seeds of its own destruction. In so doing, Twitter got mangled beyond usefulness or recognition. Bluesky would have done about as well as running your own Mastodon instance, even though Bluesky's another centralized network, except that Twitter destroyed itself to accomplish that goal.
In a practical utility perspective Twitter was a pub/sub broadcast system in the social media space. It was slim, fast, and real time in a way the Facebook wasn’t, due to a 140 character limit. Yet, it never seemed to become more than 10% of Facebook and almost exclusively used only by people who were already heavy Facebook users.
I remember the optimism around Twitter in 2007 because it was immediately evident that it was addictive to certain personalities. Some people just had to broadcast absolutely everything they did, often irrationally. 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.
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. In that regard YouTube is the Twitter replacement but YouTube had value otherwise that Twitter never could.