4 ms·

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 s

• 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
      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.
      • rsynnott 2y ago
        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.
        • spunker540 2y ago
          Is HN third tier?
          • zrail 2y ago
            HN isn't even in the conversation.
        • badgersnake 2y ago
          WeChat also has billions of people.
        • chrisco255 2y ago
          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.
  • austin-cheney 2y ago
    It was cheaper for mainstream media to write a tweet than issue a traditional press statement. But, that’s it.
    • theGnuMe 2y ago
      Least ye forget Trumpy Trump!
  • chrisco255 2y ago
    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-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.
    • wink 2y ago
      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.
      • chrisco255 2y ago
        It had 100M plus daily active users (and 400M unique hits) even in 2011: https://searchengineland.com/twitter-hits-100-million-active-users-92243 https://searchengineland.com/twitter-hits-100-million-active... It was not as ubiquitous as Facebook, but it was certainly more ubiquitous than RSS by a long shot.
  • thom 2y ago
    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.
  • chvid 2y ago
    It got to a critical mass for political banter and quick news. Became the go to place for that and probably still is.
    • hajhatten 2y ago
      Twitter reached critical mass way before politics infected every post
  • barrenko 2y ago
    I think it's pretty simple, the world just evolved from the overly complicated tags and tagging in general.
  • sim7c00 2y ago
    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.)
• petra 2y ago
  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.
• dominicrose 2y ago
  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.
• anshulbhide 2y ago
  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.
  • theGnuMe 2y ago
    Twitter And Reddit.
  • Applejinx 2y ago
    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.
  • libertine 2y ago
    Out of curiosity, do you consider Twitter and X the same thing? I'm asking because you are placing them side by side.
• maiar 2y ago
  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.
  • adampk 2y ago
    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.
  • integricho 2y ago
    It never felt like a public utility, and it most definitely always felt like a corporate company-controlled private platform.
    • diggan 2y ago
      What time frame are we talking about here? 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.
• markisus 2y ago
  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.
  • alt227 2y ago
    IMO that was the day that twitter died, when they pulled the access to the public API which was originally the USP of the service.
• rhubarbtree 2y ago
  > Twitter was supposed to be the new SMS, or text message protocol, I think you've missed his point. He doesn't mean a technical protocol, he means a conceptual one.
• diggan 2y ago
  > 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.
  • fourside 2y ago
    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
    • diggan 2y ago
• fredgrott 2y ago
  and it failed for that wrong SMS assumption....
• iambateman 2y ago
  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.
• jmyeet 2y ago
  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.
• bumchaks 2y ago
  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.
• paulryanrogers 2y ago
  > 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. Did you mean RCS instead of RSS? I can see it going either way.
• redmajor12 2y ago
  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.
  • Smithalicious 2y ago
    What kind of character limit would justify 100k of scripts?
  • samwyse 2y ago
    That was later. Initially, you could post to Twitter by sending an SMS message. No scripts to load, no tracking of what you were doing.