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> In reality Twitter is more akin to YouTube than Facebook. There is a very big difference between Twitter and YouTube, and it's obvious once you know it. Loo

• causality0 4y ago
  Yeah, if you got famous exclusively on Twitter it's because you're a demagogue, not a content creator.
  • koonsolo 4y ago
    Can you name the MrBeast or PewDiePie of twitter?
    • smcl 4y ago
      Yes his name is @dril and he is more powerful than 100 of your Misters Beast or Pewdies Pie
      • koonsolo 4y ago
        @dril seems to come close (I didn't know him, probably because he only has 1.7M followers). On twitter he's only at place 5,391 (https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/dril https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/dril). MrBeast and PewDiePie are both millionaires ($40M-$100M) thanks to YouTube, and each have 111M followers, that's around 65x @dril. Can you state exactly what you mean with @dril == 100 * Mister Beast?
        • saagarjha 4y ago
          your problem is, that youre perfect, and everyone is jealous of your good posts, and that makes you rightfully upset.
          • smcl 4y ago
            (removes diaper,. revealing two sub-diapers ) Shall we continue?
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
        • smcl 4y ago
          I cannot
    • over_bridge 4y ago
      Elon Musk. Sure he's successful in the real world but having money doesn't make you a celebrity. I wouldn't recognize most of the Forbes list if I passed them in the street. He's actual famous, instead of Wikipedia famous, because of how he's engaged his supporters through Twitter. The chance to interact with him or have him like your meme is the content.
    • samatman 4y ago
      He was President of the United States for a minute there, strange though it is to think about. Ah, you say, but Donald Trump was famous before Twitter! He was, yes. But he wasn't President.
• threatofrain 4y ago
  There's not enough "room" to produce interesting content solely on Twitter vs YouTube — you have to hiccup out your value in segmented tweet threads. Thus if Twitter does provide value to followers it is in referencing outside material. Elon is supposedly directing Twitter engineers to go full-steam on reviving Vine so we'll see if that can turn things around.
  • Ar-Curunir 4y ago
    The vine crowd has long moved to Tiktok; even IG and YT couldn’t steal mindshare from them. Vine has no chance, given that they’re starting with a 6yr old product
    • beachy 4y ago
      I don't know much about Vine, but anecdotally I have ended up spending way too much time on YouTube reels, and have also now been drawn into the equivalent on Facebook, whatever that's called, and I barely use FB. So I don't think the super short form video market is a winner takes all one by any means. On the contrary there's plenty of room for genuine innovation in this space. For example FB short form videos don't have a dislike button, so I have no way to guide the algorithm, and YouTube reels seems to zero in on some local maximum (in my case, game of thrones and golf videos). There's so much room for improvement in this space.
    • threeseed 4y ago
      > Vine has no chance, given that they’re starting with a 6yr old product Unless the US government decides to ban TikTok which is a not so crazy possibility.
  • dragonwriter 4y ago
    > There’s not enough “room” to produce interesting content solely on Twitter While I think that Musk’s plan is going to backfire, it is worth noting that he tries to address this in a narrow respect, in that paid users under the new plan would be able to distribute longer video/audio content with tweets.
• paxys 4y ago
  > Then look at YouTube: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouT... > Almost all made famous by YouTube. I looked the top 50 in that list and maybe ~5 of them are what you describe. The rest are big music labels, TV channels, artists and other such independently popular figures, not very different from Twitter.
  • koonsolo 4y ago
    PewDiePie, MrBeast, Kids Diana Show, Like Nastya, Vlad and Niki in top 10. Great trolling.
  • minhazm 4y ago
    Unclear why this is getting downvoted, it is accurate statement. Only 20 of the top 50 channels are not brands. Of those 20 if you exclude music channels like BTS, Blackpink, Justin Bieber, etc. you're only left with 10 channels.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • JKCalhoun 4y ago
      Wait, didn’t Justin Bieber get his start on YouTube?
      • thaumasiotes 4y ago
        And if you exclude people like that, it turns out nobody becomes famous on YouTube.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
        • filoleg 4y ago
          Well yeah. If you exclude people like him who got famous on YouTube, then it, indeed, will turn out that nobody becomes famous on YouTube. I have zero idea what your point is trying to illustrate. What's so special about Justin Bieber that disqualifies him from being counted as someone who became famous on YouTube?
• oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  If you're famous, you'll almost certainly have a twitter account, although there are obviously exceptions. The same just doesn't seem to go for YouTube. Creating content on YT is a lot more time-consuming than creating it on Twitter, of course.
  • peter422 4y ago
    This is why YouTube is a platform with value and Twitter isn't.
    • Entinel 4y ago
      Marketing on Twitter is far more valuable than other platforms.
    • BbzzbB 4y ago
      That's silly. While you can't directly monetize your Twitter account, it can expand or straight up create your reach which you can use as a funnel to whatever monetizable content you have. That probably makes it less valuable for Twitter Inc., but it sure is valuable for Twitter users. As a recent example, think of Pieter Levels (@levelsio). You think he would've gotten $10k first day sales on his avatar AI project without his Twitter account's reach?
      • CamelCaseName 4y ago
        You can absolutely monetize your Twitter account directly. Sponsored Spaces Ticketed Spaces Super Follows Paid Newsletters Tips Twitter has made it INCREDIBLY difficult to find these products they've built, the insane thing is that they appear in one app but not others!
    • ARandomerDude 4y ago
      Some dude just paid $44B for Twitter. Presumably that means it has value.
      • 4y ago
• mym1990 4y ago
  In a way Twitter fills the space of being a proliferator of existing content, in a more concise form. In this way people don’t have to choose “do I create on platform X or Y” and instead they create on platform X and feel empowered to share on platform Y because it fills a different use case.
• jltsiren 4y ago
  Twitter is basically a broadcast platform for people who matter "in the real world". It gives them an easy way to reach their audience on their own terms without any middlemen. As a centralized platform, Twitter creates more value for those who follow than those who broadcast. Because the broadcasters are primarily known for something other than the "content" they create on the platform, they would find their audience anywhere. Followers, on the other hand, can conveniently follow many people on the same platform. Regardless of whether they are interested in global celebrities, local politicians, or professionals in a specific subfield, they can often find those people on Twitter. Blogs used to be popular among many of the groups you can now find on Twitter. I guess Twitter replaced them, because the short message format forces you to focus on the essentials. Creating a new post is much faster, and you will reach many more people, because reading the post is not a significant time investment.
  • ForHackernews 4y ago
    > on their own terms without any middlemen. Twitter is the middle-man.
    • habitue 4y ago
      Technically true, but I think the comment you're replying to was thinking of the era when celebrities had to go on late night shows in order for people to hear what they had to say. Like literally, the middle man had limited airtime and got to pick and choose who was allowed to be broadcast. If you had some opinions on the latest whatever, if no television station felt like interviewing you, you just told it to your friends or whatever like everybody else. No matter how famous you were.
  • junon 4y ago
    Twitter replaced blogs because blogs were not discoverable or aggregated. Twitter accounts are. Twitter was born out of the short "status updates" fad at the time, on both Myspace and eventually Facebook. Those were born out of MSN Messenger and other IM programs at the time that had customizable social profiles of sorts - including an updatable Status that was shown as a subtitle in your contacts' respective friends lists. I remember the general sentiment of Twitter when it started was that the short character count (120 characters or whatever it started with) was a fun novelty, nothing more. It wasn't seen as a "social network". Twitter gets its name in part from the saying "A little birdie told me ..." intersected with the fact that your phone twitches (vibrates) when you receive an update. It mimicked the other popular app names at the time that often omitted a vowel, such as 'flickr'. The original site was thus called twttr.com. The whole point was to be short, concise, non-serious communication. "Yo" tried to take this to the extreme several years later and ultimately failed (or pivoted, not sure which). When Twitter started gaining traction, it was clear that more involved discourse was nearly impossible with the shorter character count, thus the limit was bumped up to what it is now (240 or 280 or something). The initial response was, understandably, negative. People predicted at the time that this would devolve the platform into another battlegrounds for shouting matches and arguing just as Facebook had. In hindsight, they were mostly correct. Threads were also added to improve cohesion within lengthy conversations, and those features alone are now what form the core of Twitter's major feature set. It's worth noting that Twitter hasn't changed much, which is pretty widely regarded as a feature in itself and can earn long term retention even with on-the-fence users (see: Steam). However, this is mostly just my recollection of events.
• tootie 4y ago
  Nice observation. It's more like a direct marketing channel than an actual consumable. The most successful users are directing users to YouTube, e-commerce, voting booths or news sites to actually convert.
• malcolmocean 4y ago
  The idea that what matters most is having the most followers is very arbitrary and not relevant to many strategies for enjoying Twitter. In my experience, Twitter is best as a place to have conversations, and this is optimal at some number of followers below 10k. There are many accounts out there having an amazing time at small numbers, having curated a medium-sized following of people who are interested in talking with them about the things they want to talk about.
  • youngtaff 4y ago
    Yup, that’s how I use Twitter. It’s how I found my tribe and became part of a small specialist community 14 years ago
• yafbum 4y ago
  If I were YouTube right now, I'd be evaluating the opportunity to eat Twitter's lunch as it'll get distracted by a randomizing new owner. The YouTube posts product really isn't relevant in the current YouTube app, but as a separate experience focused on posts, it might have some value for non-creators on the platform. Bad as it is, YouTube has more of its act together than Twitter when it comes to designing and enforcing content moderation policies at scale.
  • qwertox 4y ago
    Today while selecting a handle I was wondering why YT is doing this. There is no real added value except for using a standardized symbol used in social networks. In my eyes YT is no social network, even though many claim it is. The comment section, where the discussion and interaction takes place, is like SMS is to WhatsApp, in the sense that it has no surface to enrich dialogue. For example, you can't add images in replies to a comment, comments can't be embedded in websites. I don't see how they can expand to a multimedia platform, which is what Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are. They're just a video platform and lack everything else which could move it towards a multimedia platform.
• kergonath 4y ago
  > Twitter has no real "content creators", YouTube does. I don’t understand the logic. They can be both well known outside of Twitter and create content. Sure, that is not their source of income, but it is harder to monetise a Twitter account, so that’s more or less by design. From the point of view of random people there is not really any functional difference.