3 ms·

twiiter is going into history as the utmost failure of human communication. How such a crippled way of communication (limited characters and structure) combined

• rchaud 7y ago
  The reason Twitter became big was coincidental more than anything else. It became the defacto tool used in the Iranian protests against Ahmedinejad in summer 2009 (and again in 2011 during the ME-wide uprisings) as the regime had blocked Facebook to keep a lid on international awareness. The use of Twitter gathered a ton of foreign media attention as there was no other source of primary information. And almost overnight, Twitter went from an obscure "microblog" (nobody's used that term in years) to "the pulse of what's happening now". The cable news media (and digital media startups a few years later) were a willing partner in its rise. Embedding people's tweets in their stories gave them the ability to generate "news" to fill their 24-hour programming at a fraction of the cost of doing investigative journalism. The latter is by its nature lengthy, wrapped in secrecy and doesn't always result in a scoop. Basically all the things that a ratings and ad-driven industry couldn't care less about.