4 ms·

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. Twitt

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.
  - bpodgursky 2y ago
    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.
    - austin-cheney 2y ago
      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.
- vasco 2y ago
  > POSSE, a social web and IndieWeb abbreviation for "Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere", a strategy for content producers. Had to google, might save someone time.
austin-cheney 2y ago
This is all bias, and its a fact defying fiction. 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/ 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.
- wbl 2y ago
  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.
- diggan 2y ago
  > 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. The use of social media (and Twitter specifically) is well studied as well, in case you're open to learning more: https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=arab+spring https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=arab+spring
- chrisco255 2y ago
  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.
aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> 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.

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.
- bpodgursky 2y ago
  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.
  - austin-cheney 2y ago
    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.
vasco 2y ago
> POSSE, a social web and IndieWeb abbreviation for "Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere", a strategy for content producers. Had to google, might save someone time.

austin-cheney 2y ago

This is all bias, and its a fact defying fiction. 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/ 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.

wbl 2y ago
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.
diggan 2y ago
> 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. The use of social media (and Twitter specifically) is well studied as well, in case you're open to learning more: https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=arab+spring https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=arab+spring
chrisco255 2y ago
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.

aleph_minus_one 2y ago

> 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.