17 ms·

Why Twitter is such a big deal (2009)

163 points by Olshansky 2y ago

DeepYogurt 2y ago
> The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. Like multicast IP
- ok123456 2y ago
  If your router chose your IGMP groups for you.
woopwoop 2y ago
I hate to be blandly negative, but this deserves (deserved?) it. This is dumb. Message boards had this property, as did blogs. There is nothing meaningful in this short essay. Edit: if you think message boards and blogs were too specific, here are a couple of other media with this property: radio and television.
- amgreg 2y ago
  I think the OP is posting this in the context of the other front-page discussion of the Bluesky protocol. I think in this context it is interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42752703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42752703
  - woopwoop 2y ago
    I don't fault op for posting it. I agree that it's an interesting historical artifact, but intrinsically the essay is dumb.
- swyx 2y ago
  i hate to be blandly negative on your comment, but jesus christ. pg made this call in april 2009, and twitter turned out to be a $40b company that may have potentially swung multiple elections. and you are here in 2025 taking the face value argument that "Message boards had this property, as did blogs.", and ignoring the fact that when you post things on twitter both important people AND the unwashed masses actually read it, and they are all hooked on a unique form factor only twitter owns. threads and mastodon and truth social can tout bullshit MAUs all they like but only twitter is twitter. sure, pg didnt communicate with the hindsight specificity i just did, but he was directionally correct for the approximately correct reason (without explicitly saying that "any new protocol must have critical adoption to be meaningful" but that is implied in pgland).
  - baobabKoodaa 2y ago
    comparing twitter to TCP/IP, SMTP and HTTP is dumb beyond belief, regardless of how much money the person made betting on the right horse for the wrong reasons
    - swyx 2y ago
      then you are being too strict about your analogies on what a protocol is, and your technologist hat (being precise > being directionally accurate) is getting in the way of being a better business person (job to be done is king).
      - baobabKoodaa 2y ago
        one can be directionally accurate for the wrong reasons and that's what happened here. there's no need to salvage anything. he was wrong.
      - dangus 2y ago
        I don't think that's really true in this case. Predicting that something will be a big deal and grow fast isn't what's at issue here. And yes, even in 2009 you could have made that prediction about Twitter. The issue here is that it is being spoken of as a protocol, which isn't just some kind of analogy. It is a word with a literal definition. And we can now see that the end result is largely negative. It's not a public protocol, all of its content is behind a login wall. It didn't even join the fediverse. Essentially, pg is imaginging something more like Bluesky or Mastodon and the fediverse, but for Twitter, which never came close to materializing. I think Twitter will inevitably go down in history as being much more like an extended runtime edition of MySpace: yet another social network that became popular, made its founders who sold the company rich, but ultimately became a dying/dead entity under the next batch of management.
        oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
        > The issue here is that it is being spoken of as a protocol, which isn't just some kind of analogy. It is a word with a literal definition. Every word has a literal definition, but every word also has an infinite variety of meaning, with nuance and subtlety that depends on context. It is quite obvious that Paul Graham didn't mean that Twitter was literally "another HTTP". I take the meaning to be something like "Twitter is an open platform that is widely-used enough to enable communication between other services" — not the case now, of course, but it certainly was at the time.
ryanhecht 2y ago
As a relative "youngin" (I'm 27), at what point did we make the shift from protocols to corporate-owned ecosystems? What caused it? The rise of the VC funding model? The Silicon Valley ethos of "build an MVP, grow quickly without making money," and users adopting corporate owned solutions because they're easy? If so, how do we dismantle this? Not from a technical perspective -- atproto for example seems powerful enough -- but from a social/economic/mindshare perspective.
- blfr 2y ago
  There's a great CCC presentation by Moxie (Signal originator) on that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdM-XTRyC9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdM-XTRyC9c ~summarized in text form https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
  - ryanhecht 2y ago
    This is fascinating (if a bit discouraging) take from someone who would definitely know better than most! I like to THINK that atproto's ability to easily move one's data between providers makes it less susceptible to the "Gmail problem," but I think I'm being naively optimistic
  - fsflover 2y ago
    > ~summarized in text form https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ The answer from Matrix is here: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom/ https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom... Related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35141223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35141223
- swyx 2y ago
  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.
blfr 2y ago
Fairly sure I remember pg's(?) longer post where he explores that Twitter is not only a new protocol, not only popular, not only private but also it completes the matrix: there's one to ~one long-form communication (smtp), one to many long-form (http); one to ~one short-form (various IMs), and finally one to many short-form (twitter).
- arnvald 2y ago
  Interestingly with chat groups that people can sign up, IMs like Telegram fill that one-to-many short-form niche
edude03 2y ago
Around when Elon bought twitter he said (paraphrased) that twitter was the realtime news platform. It’s something I feel like is true in a way that should be true for other social media platforms but isn’t. For example, say I’m in traffic on the highway. Searching 401 might in this example surface tweets from other drivers on the highway talking about traffic and/or posts about an accident they came across. 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.
- loloquwowndueo 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Keyframe 2y ago
    Maybe he's interested in realtime offers for cryptocurrencies or 1/10 of a thread with videos you wouldn't believe! Premise was good, execution terrible, and ever since Musk took over it's suffocated in spam with a spice of right wingery to it.
  - sparky_z 2y ago
    Who said they were driving?
    - loloquwowndueo 2y ago
      > say I’m in traffic on the highway. Searching 401 Takes a lot of good faith to not think the above implies they’re searching twitter while sitting in traffic in a car they’re driving. They never said “I can ask a passenger to search…” or anything of the sort.
      - new_user_final 2y ago
        English is not my first language and I clearly understand that it implies that that-person wants to know why the cars are not moving (traffic) while sitting in a car as a driver or passenger.
flessner 2y ago
How could it ever be considered a protocol? It's a platform - a marketplace for buying opinion.
- RIMR 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 2y ago
    (...plus came up with Bayesian spam filtering, plus wrote the book on Lisp macros, plus revolutionized startup investing). It's only astounding because your assumptions are false. pg is nothing like a pointy-haired boss. What he is is a highly curious and lazy (in the good sense of the word) hacker who is bored by busywork. How you managed to arrive at the inverse image of that is such a feat of pathfinding that I'd be interested in the steps by which you got there.
    - andrewmcwatters 2y ago
      Because it's a terrible blog post. If you applied this criticism to any other author, it would be valid. But because it's pg it's different? No, it's still a bad post. There are a plethora of other reasons Twitter was a big deal. It being a "protocol" wasn't one of them.
      - dang 2y ago
        Getting from that post to the GP's dramatic assessment of PG as a person would be a disappointing feat of pathfinding.
      - tptacek 2y ago
        I don't think the post has held up, but the "it's not a protocol, it's just HTTP on top of TCP/IP" is a lame argument. It's clearly a protocol. I've been doing protocol engineering work since the mid-1990s, and people have been saying things built on top of HTTP aren't "protocols" since HTTP went mainstream. I was one of them, in the 1990s! That was dumb of me; most new important protocols since then have been built on top of HTTP, and I expect that to continue. The subtext of these "it's not even a protocol" arguments are that Paul Graham doesn't know what a protocol is, which is not a plausible argument. Why make it?
exogeny 2y ago
Does Paul not know what a protocol is? How is Twitter a protocol in any way?
- davorak 2y ago
  If I remember correctly early on there was both the firehose of all tweets you could access and easy to call apis to post tweets. So there were a set of programmatic standards to control how you could communicate, which sounds close enough to me for a blog post. But only if memory serves correctly, I do not know the timelines off the top of my head.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  The Twitter of 2009 was a rather different beast to the Twitter of the 2020s. Open APIs were a big part of it, and the idea that people would upload all sorts of random data into their feeds which others could tap into. (In practice, it never went much further than running apps, book reviews or calorie counters).
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  It's pretty inconceivable that he doesn't know what a protocol is. Far more likely is that he is using the term "protocol" with a meaning you either are unable, or refuse, to understand.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
samsquire 2y ago
In early 2000-2007 I felt technology optimism (things like Digg, slashdot) about new websites and there was a hopefulness about new technology (file sharing) The spirit of new technology that "there is something new" and the "this is how things work from now on" (WAP websites, floppy disks, guest books, simple 1megabyte web hosting, geocities, fan sites, myspace, WhatsApp on cheap phones). In other words, every new thing was something that may have been before but it was "this is how things work from now on". The platform defines and upholds the character of interaction. Twitter and Reddit do that and as pg highlights how twitter recipients is by algorithm. (From OP: "where you don't specify the recipients.") I have fond memories of writing HTML from magazines and in the eras before me it was handwriting text games into BASIC interpreters.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  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.
  - energy123 2y ago
    Not untrue, but also not the only thing going on. The authoritarian movements of the 20th century wouldn't have been possible without mass media. But it wasn't the profit motive that was the prime culprit for this enablement. Ideologues found they had a powerful tool at their disposal to channel people's grievances towards an enemy, and to bind a large group of people behind this ideology. The inventors of the printing press and the radio didn't intend for it to be used this way.
    - mschuster91 2y ago
      > The inventors of the printing press and the radio didn't intend for it to be used this way. Well, at least the printing press was created to print the Bible - the "Gutenberg bible", named after its inventor, was the first mass produced book in the world [1], so it can be said that it was intended to get a large group of people behind an ideology. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible
bryanlarsen 2y ago
I remember around that time saying "ahh, i get it. Twitter is RSS for normal people. The size limits mean it is unsuitable for discussion, but it's perfect for a headline plus link. Combine that with enough size to be a status update a la old style Facebook." Obviously I was very wrong, but I wish i wasn't.
robertwebb 2y ago
[dead]
kristopolous 2y ago
There was a time when techcrunch went from broadly covering technology to being 95% Twitter stories. It was pretty irritating
- grues-dinner 2y ago
  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.
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    Social media gives the unqualified and stupid a voice. It's the television of the Internet
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    > With Twitter, you can can just choose and surface the juiciest, most unhinged takes and the clicks roll in. I think that says a lot more about the media than Twitter itself. Yes, it built upon the concept, but TV reports have been doing the same thing ever since the invention of the vox pop.
    - grues-dinner 2y ago
      Yes, it's not specifically Twitter's fault that it can be can used it to mass produce "both sides" and ragebait at near-zero marginal cost. But IMO it's still a large part of why it took off. When it started in 2006, every media personality was almost immediately absolutely hooked on it. You couldn't move for columnists talking about what they'd seen there, gushing about how great it was and the news articles would embed anything that would get a click. Even my university newspaper had a satirical fake "what's happening on Twitter", mocking the overuse of Twitter as a source in news media. And that was the start of the academic year 2006-7: it was already a meme within the year of launch. Yes, vox pops have been around since it was realised that the person on the street might have telegenic hot takes, but you have to pack up, go out to a specific place and interview enough people there to get all the takes you need. That's tens of thousands in gear, a minimum of two people (camera operator, interviewer) plus a stack of editing. Twitter just meant you could sift tens of thousands of takes, possibly from all over the world and select for the maximum engagement. And because the tweets could and did go national, every kook out there was posting madly in hopes of getting noticed.
SoftTalker 2y ago
When twitter first came out I did not understand what it was good for or why anyone would be interested in it. Still don’t really. I’ve never had an account and have only looked at tweets when someone sends me a url
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
alganet 2y ago
Seems like a reasonable assumption for that time.
kristianc 2y ago
Twitter wasn't ever really a new protocol in the same way as the others, as it was owned entirely by a private company. Protocols are open standards that anyone can implement and use without needing permission from or reliance on a single entity. Twitter, by contrast, has always been a proprietary platform, entirely controlled by a private company, which fundamentally undermines the comparison. Most of the challenges Twitter has comes from not actually being a protocol. If Twitter had been designed or evolved as a decentralized protocol, it would have avoided many of the issues it faces today.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Kiro 2y ago
  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.
kalleboo 2y ago
At the time, the idea of "Twitter as a protocol" was pretty hot during the flurry of third-party apps using the API both for posting and browsing; I remember implementing a "post a photo every day challenge" site using hashtag search, and these use cases seemed exciting at the time, creating a "cloud" of posts you could contribute to or dip into. Then Twitter chose to go for the more boring route of monetization via ads and selling access to the firehose, closing up the API more and more, which then lead to the creation of App.Net as an alternative, if anyone remembers that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
nobunaga 2y ago
Can we syop giving this guy attention? What a ridiculous post he is nothing but another VC that will Write anything to support himself, his investments and other VCs and people here who praise him for his ‘insight’ are not helping. What a ridiculous post that provides no value or insight.
austin-cheney 2y ago
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.
- azangru 2y ago
  > 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?
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    I mean, define ‘so popular’. It has never been in the top tier of social networks, usage-wise; it’s generally been an order of magnitude off Facebook.
    - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
      "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.
    - chrisco255 2y ago
camgunz 2y ago
I think there's no sense of the word where Twitter is a new protocol. Nevermind the technical HTTP stuff (Twitter is no analog to TCP/IP, SMTP, or HTTP), it's just a microblogging website? > The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients This describes all websites everywhere. It also describes NNTP.
- afro88 2y ago
  > 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.
  - camgunz 2y ago
    > That has to be constructed client side by downloading all updates for all subscribed feeds. Either the Twitter frontend or app has to do this, because Twitter is a web API. So either Twitter isn't a new protocol or every blog, forum, etc is a new protocol, with isn't really an interesting statement. >> It also describes NNTP > Which also doesn't provide a uniform feed of updates. I'm not clear on what you mean by "uniform feed", but let me introduce you to NEWNEWS: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3977#page-64 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3977#page-64 If it helps to find middle ground, I do think the AT protocol is a new protocol. I don't necessarily think it's a good idea or an improvement on NNTP, but it at least isn't just a microblogging website.
- nailer 2y ago
  Twitter almost maps to finger (the protocol) perfectly.
ribadeo 2y ago
This Paul Graham fella seems to be a trumpet of bad ideas. His hype-takes on tech influence laypeoples notions of the world. His failure to clarify how tech functions is misleading. Techne is the Greek word for hand. Xitter is a megaphone owned by and fully utilized by a misanthropic bully. In no way shape or form is it a voice of the people. It is weighted multicast media with owners and nobility and a feed and an algorithm for prioritizing the owner and the nobility in the feed. A protocol? Ha! We knew it wasn't a protocol or layer for anything before the so-called Arab Spring. How many bad ideas has Paul Graham defended? Despite the continuing proliferation of crypto-currency pyramid schemes, and their continuing ability to fool investors, they are a net negative for a planet in the throes of a climate meltdown. Despite the reverent tones of baffled journalists speaking of LLMs as AI, despite the tech CEOs claiming that developers will be replaced tomorrow, anyone who knows anything about LLMs rolls their eyes, amd yet Paul will reliably write apologies for yet another destructive wave of investments in lousy scamware companies. The king of bad ideas, chewed into bite size pieces for the masses. What do i know, I'm obviously very unhip in this sort of fabricated false world.
- simianparrot 2y ago
  My impression is Paul, and many like him, have lived in a world of abstractions for so long their brain believes it’s real. And since they wield influence on a lot of people, their brains spouting such nonsense can _make_ it «real» in the markets. Markets which are themselves an abstraction entirely separated from the reality they are meant to represent. But at some point reality catches up with everyone, but it will be at the cost of people hidden by the abstractions before it hits people like PG.
rsolva 2y ago
ActivityPub is today what Paul thought he saw in Twitter in 2009. Except AP it is not owned by a private company, which in hindsight, seems like a critical factor if a protocol should be able to survive and thrive for decades.
- graypegg 2y ago
  I would really like to see AP get some more implementations. Mastodon dominates most of the AP usage on the web as far as I know, so the specific Mastodon quirks on top of the AP spec are sort of de facto standard now. It's not quite like a private company, but it does shoehorn AP into being just what Mastodon does, rather than a more generic publishing protocol. or maybe we need more generic clients. Something that can consume mastodon et. al. posts! Would be neat to have Lemmy + Mastodon + personal blog posts etc mixing together into a single feed, RSS style.
  - rsolva 2y ago
    Mastodons share of the AP network fell to ~70% the last few days alone, due to a huge influx of users to Pixelfed (fleeing from Instagram). I myself run my own GoToSocial server at home, so I am doing my part to increase the diversity of AP implementations :) I have also been thinking in the lines of a generic "all-in-one" client. The only reason this is not common yet, is old habits from decades of captivity in silos. I believe we will see such clients developed in the next few years.
  - rsolva 2y ago
    I have had Bonfire [0] on my check-later list for a while, they seem to aim for a more generic use of the AP protocol. They also offer their services [1] to make custom implementations on top of their toolkit. Seems promising! [0] https://bonfirenetworks.org/ https://bonfirenetworks.org/ [1] https://bonfirenetworks.org/mosaic/ https://bonfirenetworks.org/mosaic/
secretsatan 2y ago
Twitter indirectly kicked off a love of programming in me again after an aquantance said he was a programmer for writing a script to unknowingly aid with gold pump and dump campaigns
spacebanana7 2y ago
Twitter was such a big deal because it digitised the social networks of analogue media. Pretty much anybody on TV did well on Twitter whether they made their name in politics, sports, news or reality TV. Nobody else will ever be able to do this because those analogue social networks don't exist anymore in a way that's separate from Twitter.
Havoc 2y ago
Bizarre definition of a "protocol" as it stands today Did twitter have some sort of open API back then or what was he talking about?
- Clubber 2y ago
  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?"
  - Havoc 2y ago
    Given that he’s talking about TCP I don’t think he meant diplomatic protocols here
stevenAthompson 2y ago
Twitter is popular for the same reason Tiktok is, most people can't read without great effort. Fifty-four percent of Americans read below the sixth grade level. The character limit and resulting lack of nuance made it an ideal platform for the modern semi-literate user. Tiktok is obviously even better, as it requires no literacy.
liontwist 2y ago
I think Paul wrote a genuine post here, but let’s remember that he explicitly uses his media and readership to promote his investments. This is PR.
d--b 2y ago
Remember that this was back in the day when Twitter had a failry large number of users, but anyone that wasn't on it just shrugged and said stuff like "I don't want to know what people eat for breakfast". It wasn't obvious at all that Twitter would become something of a news platform. PG sort of made something up talking about protocols. But it was probably because of that protocol that Twitter, and news feeds in general took off. So I think PG was not too far off on that one.
recursive 2y ago
I remember getting notified that bike race results were posted by twitter. My phone didn't support apps. This seemed like such a cool use case. I understood that better than any of the subsequent iterations of twitter. I never learned the syntax of the messages or how to navigate the app. It all felt foreign. But pushing a message to a group of people that manage their own subscription via SMS was golden for a minute.
gist 2y ago
> Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an advantage. This is the way in part things were done 'back then' (and for sure even now). As people might recall search engines like excite.com (long long gone as a practical search engine) made statements that you'd never be able to pay for search rank (and google didn't monetize at first either). Noting that monetizing requires also people to set that up, sell, market and manage it.

163 points by Olshansky 2y ago

DeepYogurt 2y ago

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

ok123456 2y ago
If your router chose your IGMP groups for you.

woopwoop 2y ago

I hate to be blandly negative, but this deserves (deserved?) it. This is dumb. Message boards had this property, as did blogs. There is nothing meaningful in this short essay. Edit: if you think message boards and blogs were too specific, here are a couple of other media with this property: radio and television.

amgreg 2y ago
I think the OP is posting this in the context of the other front-page discussion of the Bluesky protocol. I think in this context it is interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42752703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42752703
- woopwoop 2y ago
  I don't fault op for posting it. I agree that it's an interesting historical artifact, but intrinsically the essay is dumb.
swyx 2y ago
i hate to be blandly negative on your comment, but jesus christ. pg made this call in april 2009, and twitter turned out to be a $40b company that may have potentially swung multiple elections. and you are here in 2025 taking the face value argument that "Message boards had this property, as did blogs.", and ignoring the fact that when you post things on twitter both important people AND the unwashed masses actually read it, and they are all hooked on a unique form factor only twitter owns. threads and mastodon and truth social can tout bullshit MAUs all they like but only twitter is twitter. sure, pg didnt communicate with the hindsight specificity i just did, but he was directionally correct for the approximately correct reason (without explicitly saying that "any new protocol must have critical adoption to be meaningful" but that is implied in pgland).
- baobabKoodaa 2y ago
  comparing twitter to TCP/IP, SMTP and HTTP is dumb beyond belief, regardless of how much money the person made betting on the right horse for the wrong reasons
  - swyx 2y ago
    then you are being too strict about your analogies on what a protocol is, and your technologist hat (being precise > being directionally accurate) is getting in the way of being a better business person (job to be done is king).
    - baobabKoodaa 2y ago
      one can be directionally accurate for the wrong reasons and that's what happened here. there's no need to salvage anything. he was wrong.
    - dangus 2y ago
      I don't think that's really true in this case. Predicting that something will be a big deal and grow fast isn't what's at issue here. And yes, even in 2009 you could have made that prediction about Twitter. The issue here is that it is being spoken of as a protocol, which isn't just some kind of analogy. It is a word with a literal definition. And we can now see that the end result is largely negative. It's not a public protocol, all of its content is behind a login wall. It didn't even join the fediverse. Essentially, pg is imaginging something more like Bluesky or Mastodon and the fediverse, but for Twitter, which never came close to materializing. I think Twitter will inevitably go down in history as being much more like an extended runtime edition of MySpace: yet another social network that became popular, made its founders who sold the company rich, but ultimately became a dying/dead entity under the next batch of management.
      - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
        > The issue here is that it is being spoken of as a protocol, which isn't just some kind of analogy. It is a word with a literal definition. Every word has a literal definition, but every word also has an infinite variety of meaning, with nuance and subtlety that depends on context. It is quite obvious that Paul Graham didn't mean that Twitter was literally "another HTTP". I take the meaning to be something like "Twitter is an open platform that is widely-used enough to enable communication between other services" — not the case now, of course, but it certainly was at the time.

ryanhecht 2y ago

As a relative "youngin" (I'm 27), at what point did we make the shift from protocols to corporate-owned ecosystems? What caused it? The rise of the VC funding model? The Silicon Valley ethos of "build an MVP, grow quickly without making money," and users adopting corporate owned solutions because they're easy? If so, how do we dismantle this? Not from a technical perspective -- atproto for example seems powerful enough -- but from a social/economic/mindshare perspective.

blfr 2y ago
There's a great CCC presentation by Moxie (Signal originator) on that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdM-XTRyC9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdM-XTRyC9c ~summarized in text form https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
- ryanhecht 2y ago
  This is fascinating (if a bit discouraging) take from someone who would definitely know better than most! I like to THINK that atproto's ability to easily move one's data between providers makes it less susceptible to the "Gmail problem," but I think I'm being naively optimistic
- fsflover 2y ago
  > ~summarized in text form https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ The answer from Matrix is here: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom/ https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom... Related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35141223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35141223
swyx 2y ago
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.

blfr 2y ago

Fairly sure I remember pg's(?) longer post where he explores that Twitter is not only a new protocol, not only popular, not only private but also it completes the matrix: there's one to ~one long-form communication (smtp), one to many long-form (http); one to ~one short-form (various IMs), and finally one to many short-form (twitter).

arnvald 2y ago
Interestingly with chat groups that people can sign up, IMs like Telegram fill that one-to-many short-form niche

edude03 2y ago

Around when Elon bought twitter he said (paraphrased) that twitter was the realtime news platform. It’s something I feel like is true in a way that should be true for other social media platforms but isn’t. For example, say I’m in traffic on the highway. Searching 401 might in this example surface tweets from other drivers on the highway talking about traffic and/or posts about an accident they came across. 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.

loloquwowndueo 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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- Keyframe 2y ago
  Maybe he's interested in realtime offers for cryptocurrencies or 1/10 of a thread with videos you wouldn't believe! Premise was good, execution terrible, and ever since Musk took over it's suffocated in spam with a spice of right wingery to it.
- sparky_z 2y ago
  Who said they were driving?
  - loloquwowndueo 2y ago
    > say I’m in traffic on the highway. Searching 401 Takes a lot of good faith to not think the above implies they’re searching twitter while sitting in traffic in a car they’re driving. They never said “I can ask a passenger to search…” or anything of the sort.
    - new_user_final 2y ago
      English is not my first language and I clearly understand that it implies that that-person wants to know why the cars are not moving (traffic) while sitting in a car as a driver or passenger.

flessner 2y ago

How could it ever be considered a protocol? It's a platform - a marketplace for buying opinion.

RIMR 2y ago
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- dang 2y ago
  (...plus came up with Bayesian spam filtering, plus wrote the book on Lisp macros, plus revolutionized startup investing). It's only astounding because your assumptions are false. pg is nothing like a pointy-haired boss. What he is is a highly curious and lazy (in the good sense of the word) hacker who is bored by busywork. How you managed to arrive at the inverse image of that is such a feat of pathfinding that I'd be interested in the steps by which you got there.
  - andrewmcwatters 2y ago
    Because it's a terrible blog post. If you applied this criticism to any other author, it would be valid. But because it's pg it's different? No, it's still a bad post. There are a plethora of other reasons Twitter was a big deal. It being a "protocol" wasn't one of them.
    - dang 2y ago
      Getting from that post to the GP's dramatic assessment of PG as a person would be a disappointing feat of pathfinding.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      I don't think the post has held up, but the "it's not a protocol, it's just HTTP on top of TCP/IP" is a lame argument. It's clearly a protocol. I've been doing protocol engineering work since the mid-1990s, and people have been saying things built on top of HTTP aren't "protocols" since HTTP went mainstream. I was one of them, in the 1990s! That was dumb of me; most new important protocols since then have been built on top of HTTP, and I expect that to continue. The subtext of these "it's not even a protocol" arguments are that Paul Graham doesn't know what a protocol is, which is not a plausible argument. Why make it?

exogeny 2y ago

Does Paul not know what a protocol is? How is Twitter a protocol in any way?

davorak 2y ago
If I remember correctly early on there was both the firehose of all tweets you could access and easy to call apis to post tweets. So there were a set of programmatic standards to control how you could communicate, which sounds close enough to me for a blog post. But only if memory serves correctly, I do not know the timelines off the top of my head.
Earw0rm 2y ago
The Twitter of 2009 was a rather different beast to the Twitter of the 2020s. Open APIs were a big part of it, and the idea that people would upload all sorts of random data into their feeds which others could tap into. (In practice, it never went much further than running apps, book reviews or calorie counters).
oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
It's pretty inconceivable that he doesn't know what a protocol is. Far more likely is that he is using the term "protocol" with a meaning you either are unable, or refuse, to understand.

deleted 2y ago

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samsquire 2y ago

In early 2000-2007 I felt technology optimism (things like Digg, slashdot) about new websites and there was a hopefulness about new technology (file sharing) The spirit of new technology that "there is something new" and the "this is how things work from now on" (WAP websites, floppy disks, guest books, simple 1megabyte web hosting, geocities, fan sites, myspace, WhatsApp on cheap phones). In other words, every new thing was something that may have been before but it was "this is how things work from now on". The platform defines and upholds the character of interaction. Twitter and Reddit do that and as pg highlights how twitter recipients is by algorithm. (From OP: "where you don't specify the recipients.") I have fond memories of writing HTML from magazines and in the eras before me it was handwriting text games into BASIC interpreters.

ryandrake 2y ago
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.
- energy123 2y ago
  Not untrue, but also not the only thing going on. The authoritarian movements of the 20th century wouldn't have been possible without mass media. But it wasn't the profit motive that was the prime culprit for this enablement. Ideologues found they had a powerful tool at their disposal to channel people's grievances towards an enemy, and to bind a large group of people behind this ideology. The inventors of the printing press and the radio didn't intend for it to be used this way.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > The inventors of the printing press and the radio didn't intend for it to be used this way. Well, at least the printing press was created to print the Bible - the "Gutenberg bible", named after its inventor, was the first mass produced book in the world [1], so it can be said that it was intended to get a large group of people behind an ideology. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible

bryanlarsen 2y ago

I remember around that time saying "ahh, i get it. Twitter is RSS for normal people. The size limits mean it is unsuitable for discussion, but it's perfect for a headline plus link. Combine that with enough size to be a status update a la old style Facebook." Obviously I was very wrong, but I wish i wasn't.

robertwebb 2y ago

[dead]

kristopolous 2y ago

There was a time when techcrunch went from broadly covering technology to being 95% Twitter stories. It was pretty irritating

grues-dinner 2y ago
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.
- kristopolous 2y ago
  Social media gives the unqualified and stupid a voice. It's the television of the Internet
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  > With Twitter, you can can just choose and surface the juiciest, most unhinged takes and the clicks roll in. I think that says a lot more about the media than Twitter itself. Yes, it built upon the concept, but TV reports have been doing the same thing ever since the invention of the vox pop.
  - grues-dinner 2y ago
    Yes, it's not specifically Twitter's fault that it can be can used it to mass produce "both sides" and ragebait at near-zero marginal cost. But IMO it's still a large part of why it took off. When it started in 2006, every media personality was almost immediately absolutely hooked on it. You couldn't move for columnists talking about what they'd seen there, gushing about how great it was and the news articles would embed anything that would get a click. Even my university newspaper had a satirical fake "what's happening on Twitter", mocking the overuse of Twitter as a source in news media. And that was the start of the academic year 2006-7: it was already a meme within the year of launch. Yes, vox pops have been around since it was realised that the person on the street might have telegenic hot takes, but you have to pack up, go out to a specific place and interview enough people there to get all the takes you need. That's tens of thousands in gear, a minimum of two people (camera operator, interviewer) plus a stack of editing. Twitter just meant you could sift tens of thousands of takes, possibly from all over the world and select for the maximum engagement. And because the tweets could and did go national, every kook out there was posting madly in hopes of getting noticed.

SoftTalker 2y ago

When twitter first came out I did not understand what it was good for or why anyone would be interested in it. Still don’t really. I’ve never had an account and have only looked at tweets when someone sends me a url

deleted 2y ago
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alganet 2y ago

Seems like a reasonable assumption for that time.

kristianc 2y ago

Twitter wasn't ever really a new protocol in the same way as the others, as it was owned entirely by a private company. Protocols are open standards that anyone can implement and use without needing permission from or reliance on a single entity. Twitter, by contrast, has always been a proprietary platform, entirely controlled by a private company, which fundamentally undermines the comparison. Most of the challenges Twitter has comes from not actually being a protocol. If Twitter had been designed or evolved as a decentralized protocol, it would have avoided many of the issues it faces today.

deleted 2y ago
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Kiro 2y ago
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.

kalleboo 2y ago

At the time, the idea of "Twitter as a protocol" was pretty hot during the flurry of third-party apps using the API both for posting and browsing; I remember implementing a "post a photo every day challenge" site using hashtag search, and these use cases seemed exciting at the time, creating a "cloud" of posts you could contribute to or dip into. Then Twitter chose to go for the more boring route of monetization via ads and selling access to the firehose, closing up the API more and more, which then lead to the creation of App.Net as an alternative, if anyone remembers that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net

nobunaga 2y ago

Can we syop giving this guy attention? What a ridiculous post he is nothing but another VC that will Write anything to support himself, his investments and other VCs and people here who praise him for his ‘insight’ are not helping. What a ridiculous post that provides no value or insight.

austin-cheney 2y ago

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.

azangru 2y ago
> 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?
- rsynnott 2y ago
  I mean, define ‘so popular’. It has never been in the top tier of social networks, usage-wise; it’s generally been an order of magnitude off Facebook.
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    "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.
  - chrisco255 2y ago

camgunz 2y ago

I think there's no sense of the word where Twitter is a new protocol. Nevermind the technical HTTP stuff (Twitter is no analog to TCP/IP, SMTP, or HTTP), it's just a microblogging website? > The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients This describes all websites everywhere. It also describes NNTP.

afro88 2y ago
> 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.
- camgunz 2y ago
  > That has to be constructed client side by downloading all updates for all subscribed feeds. Either the Twitter frontend or app has to do this, because Twitter is a web API. So either Twitter isn't a new protocol or every blog, forum, etc is a new protocol, with isn't really an interesting statement. >> It also describes NNTP > Which also doesn't provide a uniform feed of updates. I'm not clear on what you mean by "uniform feed", but let me introduce you to NEWNEWS: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3977#page-64 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3977#page-64 If it helps to find middle ground, I do think the AT protocol is a new protocol. I don't necessarily think it's a good idea or an improvement on NNTP, but it at least isn't just a microblogging website.
nailer 2y ago
Twitter almost maps to finger (the protocol) perfectly.

ribadeo 2y ago

This Paul Graham fella seems to be a trumpet of bad ideas. His hype-takes on tech influence laypeoples notions of the world. His failure to clarify how tech functions is misleading. Techne is the Greek word for hand. Xitter is a megaphone owned by and fully utilized by a misanthropic bully. In no way shape or form is it a voice of the people. It is weighted multicast media with owners and nobility and a feed and an algorithm for prioritizing the owner and the nobility in the feed. A protocol? Ha! We knew it wasn't a protocol or layer for anything before the so-called Arab Spring. How many bad ideas has Paul Graham defended? Despite the continuing proliferation of crypto-currency pyramid schemes, and their continuing ability to fool investors, they are a net negative for a planet in the throes of a climate meltdown. Despite the reverent tones of baffled journalists speaking of LLMs as AI, despite the tech CEOs claiming that developers will be replaced tomorrow, anyone who knows anything about LLMs rolls their eyes, amd yet Paul will reliably write apologies for yet another destructive wave of investments in lousy scamware companies. The king of bad ideas, chewed into bite size pieces for the masses. What do i know, I'm obviously very unhip in this sort of fabricated false world.

simianparrot 2y ago
My impression is Paul, and many like him, have lived in a world of abstractions for so long their brain believes it’s real. And since they wield influence on a lot of people, their brains spouting such nonsense can _make_ it «real» in the markets. Markets which are themselves an abstraction entirely separated from the reality they are meant to represent. But at some point reality catches up with everyone, but it will be at the cost of people hidden by the abstractions before it hits people like PG.

rsolva 2y ago

ActivityPub is today what Paul thought he saw in Twitter in 2009. Except AP it is not owned by a private company, which in hindsight, seems like a critical factor if a protocol should be able to survive and thrive for decades.

graypegg 2y ago
I would really like to see AP get some more implementations. Mastodon dominates most of the AP usage on the web as far as I know, so the specific Mastodon quirks on top of the AP spec are sort of de facto standard now. It's not quite like a private company, but it does shoehorn AP into being just what Mastodon does, rather than a more generic publishing protocol. or maybe we need more generic clients. Something that can consume mastodon et. al. posts! Would be neat to have Lemmy + Mastodon + personal blog posts etc mixing together into a single feed, RSS style.
- rsolva 2y ago
  Mastodons share of the AP network fell to ~70% the last few days alone, due to a huge influx of users to Pixelfed (fleeing from Instagram). I myself run my own GoToSocial server at home, so I am doing my part to increase the diversity of AP implementations :) I have also been thinking in the lines of a generic "all-in-one" client. The only reason this is not common yet, is old habits from decades of captivity in silos. I believe we will see such clients developed in the next few years.
- rsolva 2y ago
  I have had Bonfire [0] on my check-later list for a while, they seem to aim for a more generic use of the AP protocol. They also offer their services [1] to make custom implementations on top of their toolkit. Seems promising! [0] https://bonfirenetworks.org/ https://bonfirenetworks.org/ [1] https://bonfirenetworks.org/mosaic/ https://bonfirenetworks.org/mosaic/

secretsatan 2y ago

Twitter indirectly kicked off a love of programming in me again after an aquantance said he was a programmer for writing a script to unknowingly aid with gold pump and dump campaigns

spacebanana7 2y ago

Twitter was such a big deal because it digitised the social networks of analogue media. Pretty much anybody on TV did well on Twitter whether they made their name in politics, sports, news or reality TV. Nobody else will ever be able to do this because those analogue social networks don't exist anymore in a way that's separate from Twitter.

Havoc 2y ago

Bizarre definition of a "protocol" as it stands today Did twitter have some sort of open API back then or what was he talking about?

Clubber 2y ago
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?"
- Havoc 2y ago
  Given that he’s talking about TCP I don’t think he meant diplomatic protocols here

stevenAthompson 2y ago

Twitter is popular for the same reason Tiktok is, most people can't read without great effort. Fifty-four percent of Americans read below the sixth grade level. The character limit and resulting lack of nuance made it an ideal platform for the modern semi-literate user. Tiktok is obviously even better, as it requires no literacy.

liontwist 2y ago

I think Paul wrote a genuine post here, but let’s remember that he explicitly uses his media and readership to promote his investments. This is PR.

d--b 2y ago

Remember that this was back in the day when Twitter had a failry large number of users, but anyone that wasn't on it just shrugged and said stuff like "I don't want to know what people eat for breakfast". It wasn't obvious at all that Twitter would become something of a news platform. PG sort of made something up talking about protocols. But it was probably because of that protocol that Twitter, and news feeds in general took off. So I think PG was not too far off on that one.

recursive 2y ago

I remember getting notified that bike race results were posted by twitter. My phone didn't support apps. This seemed like such a cool use case. I understood that better than any of the subsequent iterations of twitter. I never learned the syntax of the messages or how to navigate the app. It all felt foreign. But pushing a message to a group of people that manage their own subscription via SMS was golden for a minute.

gist 2y ago

> Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an advantage. This is the way in part things were done 'back then' (and for sure even now). As people might recall search engines like excite.com (long long gone as a practical search engine) made statements that you'd never be able to pay for search rank (and google didn't monetize at first either). Noting that monetizing requires also people to set that up, sell, market and manage it.