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.
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.
It never felt like a public utility, and it most definitely always felt like a corporate company-controlled private platform.
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.
> 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.
Even at that time Twitter was not public infrastructure, but corporate-owned infrastructure that was temporarily a little bit more open than others regarding unofficial clients.
I thus know not one single person who at that time considered Twitter to be public infrastructure, since it simply never was.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
I read them as broad generalizations too, just wildly incorrect ones based on my own perspective from having been a Twitter user at that time, even if they're broad generalizations.
Also if you start your comment with "Author is completely wrong" and then put a bunch of broad generalizations that don't match with people's own experience, expect those people to also share their own experience.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/04/23/le-twittre
“I’m a twitter shitter!” - Penny Arcade, 2008
Lots of people were confused about the purpose or utility of 'micro-blogging.' It only really clicked for people once you had minor celebrities using the platform to crowd-source information, advice, and ideas from fans.
My understanding of Twitter is that it is or was like your official personal Gazette[0] where you could broadcast what you are up to or whatever is on your mind at the moment. It has definitely different use cases for regular users and so for celebrities and government entities.
Also you can think of Twitter as a standalone spinoff of Facebook status updates user behaviour but with hashtags. I actually find Twitter more compelling than Facebook but somehow Twitter's management was able to ruin Twitter. Now we have not only Twitter but X, Threads, Bluesky and Mastadon. It is way too fragmented but imo they should all interop and work as an one ecosystem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What kind of character limit would justify 100k of scripts?
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.
> 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?
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-...).
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.
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.
> 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.
It had 100M plus daily active users (and 400M unique hits) even in 2011:
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.
> 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.
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/
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.
It was cheaper for mainstream media to write a tweet than issue a traditional press statement. But, that’s it.
Least ye forget Trumpy Trump!
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.)
It got to a critical mass for political banter and quick news. Became the go to place for that and probably still is.
Twitter reached critical mass way before politics infected every post
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.
I think it's pretty simple, the world just evolved from the overly complicated tags and tagging in general.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Out of curiosity, do you consider Twitter and X the same thing? I'm asking because you are placing them side by side.
Twitter And Reddit.
> 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.
and it failed for that wrong SMS assumption....
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> we got the timeline where the Internet turned into Addictive Pay-per-view Disney
Call me a cynic, but I really think that was the inevitable outcome. It's just flawed human nature. Yes, there are outliers - good people who make and keep that vision to the best of their ability. But the overwhelming majority will always be there to drive it towards the dismal outcome you're witnessing now.
I think it's human nature under capitalism. I think before the 1800s there were loads of different societies that valued things like community and mutual support over "got mine".
This is the fundamental assertion of anarchism -- people generally like helping each other and like feeling useful. If basic needs were covered, we'd use most of our time doing things that felt meaningful, and those things would make everyone's lives better.
They're not the majority. The majority is simply overwhelmed by the blind focus of the dedicated few willing to burn anything they don't see as having immediate value. That means trust goes out the window.
Duverger's law is to blame, the idea that only two parties were viable because any third option would just split the vote and make the former majority lose. It became just as effective, if not more effective, to undermine the opposition and destroy competition itself.
It's a coordination problem. We've begun to solve it in training of AI models, having both a capability coach (model of purely what are valid patterns) and a moral coach (model of how those valid patterns affect the feelings of human observers). It creates compromise between capability and human goals, but creates at least a basic level of alignment, with more layers of filtering and iterative generation as options to catch mistakes at time of inference instead of training.
In politics, the "left" is the raw capability, but it focuses so much on being accurate that it can lose track of the goals that really matter, and the strategy necessary to reach those goals. The "right" is dedicated to a particular goal, sometimes so much so that it denies "obvious" reality in order to focus on blind faith to its cause.
The two "sides" NEED each other. That wisdom has been lost. Moloch, the idea of a demon representing the outcome of selfish incentives benefiting the individual but hurting everyone as a result, reigns supreme.
The only way out that I can see is a voting system with partial weights and moderately more expressiveness. Give too much expressiveness and you create a purity test ruled by a single party and scoring points on how "American" or $MyState they are. Give too little and you get what we have now, the frying pan and the fire trying to herd people into their camp until everyone lands in the fire anyway.
If instead of voting for {+1, 0, 0, ...} without repeats, we used a system with {+1, +0.5, -0.5} without repeats (no double scoring of candidates, no duplicating scores) each district should end up with a dynamic stability of maybe 3-5 parties. The negativity would be in the hands of the voters. The candidates would be incentivized to use constructive campaigns, because negativity would be diluted, and if they went negative they'd attract even more negativity to themselves.
Even more fundamentally if you apply those weights to the outcomes of a Nash Equilibrium, such as nuclear war, armed standoff, or even destructive war between economic powers, the win-lose outcomes are on parity or lower than the win-win outcome if such a win-win possibility exists.
I really think this problem represents the Great Filter. If we can't learn from it, we're doomed, whether to ourselves or to our AI systems learning and inheriting the selfish form of the logic from us. Government needs to be the result of win-win interactions or it will be unstable.
The founding fathers, the framers of the US Constitution, recognized the need to balance greed against greed, self-interest tempered by respect of that in others. The government was split into 3 branches, and Washington warned us of the dangers of partisanship. We didn't have the math to solve it, then, but now we do: Partial votes at the state level creating healthy, constructive, honest competition. The principle that actually Made America Great, enabled by opportunity itself.
I don't think it easily could have gone another way. Progress follows incentives, and money is a strong incentive. Only very fundamental changes to copyright and "publishing accountability" legislation could have put us on another path.
money and the realization that this "new" web was half computing half society .. and we now get the same need for rules, safety, morality as in the real world
it's a shame we can't recreate it somehow and even kept the optimism in a snapshot format. things weren't pretty, a bit clunky even. Unicode wasn't around, so encoding itself was a big deal all by itself. Internet was slow but it somehow retained the most critical part of application. there were many search engines, the first 5yrs or so when google arrived was the height of tech optimism for me, the search works so well it felt like magic. and most articles online were very personal. it felt like a village where people moved there voluntarily and were very eager to share with other villagers. alas.
The only thing that changed is that the people that were there are now grumpy middle aged people complaining that things have changed around them. Not realizing that it's they that have changed the most.
For technology optimism, look at younger generations. You are not going to find it in older generations. It's not a technical problem; it's a problem with aging. Young people are still expressing themselves online. Mostly not using any of the tools used by us older people. And good for them.
I grew up in the 1970s and 80s. I don't have a lot of patience for people of my own age these days. Not a lot of creativity there. Lovely people but just not very inspiring. Most of their great achievements are in the past. I try to keep some young people around me to keep me a bit more engaged. Much more fun. Young people haven't changed at all. I'm at risk of sliding into old age and being all grumpy about it. But I refuse to. Doesn't sound like a lot of fun.
It's not technology that's stopping people from expressing themselves but the fact that they no longer have the mental agility to make the most of what at the time were very primitive tools. If it was there (again) would you use it? Hint: it's still there and you are not using it like you used to! All the old tools still work. And there are some newer ones that work even better. The tools are there. But you aren't.
I would say that is young people have different, and IMO lower, expectations.
People of our age group expected internet technologies to be democratising and empowering. Instead they have become centralised and controlled.
PG is is right that Twitter's advantage was that it did not feel like it was owned by a private company. The problem is, that that feeling was entirely incorrect. Unlike open protocols things controlled by private companies are inevitably enshittified.
> I would say that is young people have different, and IMO lower, expectations.
This is obviously true, despite young people and old people who want to argue against all reason that nothing of significance has changed. If you don’t want to be perceived as old/cranky there’s huge pressure to lower your own expectations, stop pointing out problems, to actively make excuses for problems and to shout down anyone else.
I’m not even sure what to point out as evidence here since it’s so ubiquitous, but for a simple example.. surfing the internet is a hilarious anachronistic metaphor since it implies a free and frictionless experience that takes you anywhere. We browse fewer sites owned by fewer companies, using way more effort and tactics to dodge all kinds of thirsty and user hostile bullshit, even before we discuss things like AI slop and misinformation. It’s not surfing as much as lurching horribly, like riding on a bike uphill with square wheels.
We also pay for more things that in the end we own less of. Sure you can still hack your phone to act like the unrestricted computing device that it actually is, you can spend a bunch of effort ripping the drm off the ebooks, audiobooks, and music that you “own”. But it’s a constant time and energy suck that you eventually get tired of revisiting. Despite or perhaps because of AI, even autocomplete on my phone is worse than it was 5 years ago (apparently it prefers “Horta” as the complete for “hier” instead of “hierarchy”, presumably because brand names have been weighted more than English? Good thing we’ve advanced beyond simple dictionaries, hurray for progress?)
Realistic techno optimism is kind of predicated on things gradually improving instead of on steady decline. Anyway, the decline wouldn’t be so irritating if we could at least agree to curb this whole “same as it ever was!” commentary.. it’s naive and not enlightened. We can’t begin to fix problems that we won’t acknowledge.
> People of our age group expected internet technologies to be democratising and empowering.
*People of your age group who knew and had access to Internet
30 years ago, most people were not using internet. They did not expect anything from something they did not know anything about.
Nowadays internet is a daily tool for billions from all age, from most countries and from many economic levels. It has been democratized. It has empowered a lot of people. And I'm sure many would like it to help do more of it. I'd bet more than during your time.
I was born in 83, and yeah this drives me nuts too. My cohort will be like, "I hate social media; it's done bad things to kids, society, and me personally, but I have accounts on all the major platforms, I spend at least 2 hours a day on them, I might even work at one or even aspire to be an influencer."
Good lord it's so annoying. We're in charge now! We're literally writing gushing posts about Bluesky when it's solved exactly zero of the problems Twitter had (I guess it won't automatically switch you back to algorithmic feed, but honestly probably just give it time to enshittify).
Maybe I'm making too much out of what is essentially a collective action problem, but it's kind of heartbreaking to watch my generation sleepwalking into this weird social media abyss. Just don't keep walking! Quit making the abyss deeper!
Sounds like you just grew up. I hear lots of people romanticizing the good old days not thinking about all the people who thought those good days were actually their current bad days, they were simply older than you; and similarly, I see lots of young people saying that these recent times are the good days while older people lament their downturn.
This is not necessarily just a matter of perception if society is indeed generally on a downward arc.
This sounds melodramatic yet it's quite trivial to list countless things that have become much worse, while it's somewhat more difficult to list things that have become much better.
It's the issue with economic/technological development as the main milestone. Would you rather live as an aristocrat in Ancient Greece, or in poverty in the US today? Basically nobody would pick the latter choice but by the things we would typically list as better, a person in poverty today would have while our Ancient Greek could only dream of such. But it seems there's more to life than smartphones, medicine, and air conditioning.
bots, perpetual scams, enshittification, walled gardens, ai slop make me think things were better back in the day objectively content wise. no doubt the speed and general base tech has improved though
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.
It’s because it’s okay to post mundane things on Twitter/X. It’s because tweets are short and are very fleeting.
An Instagram post takes up my whole screen and a picture is expected. Each post is given so much real estate and it makes you want to dress it up.
In the end, those different amounts of “friction” lends to posting different kinds of content.
It’s a vibe of a high end dinner establishment vs. a quick pickup place. They have their own lanes.
I want to piggyback to compare TikTok and YouTube. It is so much easier to post a quick fifteen second clip on TikTok on their mobile app. Compare to the same on YouTube, I feel a lot more friction. I don't know if it is justified but maybe I haven't used TikTok enough to be afraid there. For example, I learned early on that a video of a party with music playing in the background is a bad idea™ on YouTube.
Yeah I think it comes down to two things
1) the low friction leading to more mundane things being posted 2) the norm being text content not from people you necessarily follow / people who aren’t “celebrities” so mundane relatable things tend to bubble up.
I do wonder if one day video understanding LLMs will be able to understand what a photo/video is about and show you content that’s relevant to you
Twitter can’t be a news platform when tweets with links are suppressed
You mean it can't be a link platform.
Maybe thats a good thing. It forces content to be posted to X directly instead of click baiting you into ad infested, paywalled, dark pattern websites.
The only losers here are legacy media.
Links are incredibly useful. Leaving aside the dubious benefit of the idea that we want everything to "be inside the same app" (an idea that is essentially 'platform lock-in rephrased as a feature'), a huge amount of useful content is already on web pages with URLs. The ability to share those resources quickly is essential. There's zero benefit to forcing users into copying and pasting existing text into a medium with extreme formatting limitations and no ability to handle dynamic content or inline images. And there is negative benefit from moving content from the open web to a site that requires a login.
Some things already exist on other sites, and are worth pointing people to.
Also, Twitter isn't a great format for longer posts. And trying to prevent people from leaving your site is itself a user-hostile dark pattern.
Btw, what ads? Is that some nonsense that silly people without ublock origin have to deal with?
You really want all information to be locked up into a proprietary platform controlled by Musk?
And Twitter is the ultimate “dark pattern”
If you suppress posts where people include the source you are effectively promoting posts that do not include their sources. This gives more power to people who post opinion as fact and outright trolls. It is the fundamental problems with Twitter today, shitposters get amplified while people who try to refute with sources get suppressed.
the funny thing about your post is that twitter itself is now an ad infested, paywalled, dark pattern website/app.
If you think it isn't paywalled you're thinking about it too superficially, you are paying by volunteering to be the product in the form of having an active account, and without an active account the site/app is effectively completely useless for about a year now.
This might've been true when Twitter was still Twitter, but now it's X, it has dropped below the average - it IS the ad-infested, paywalled, dark pattern website. Linking out is (even more of) a positive.
> 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.
Neither does Twitter.
Its search is frequently broken to push whatever the new version of their algorithm decides to push. If Musk so wishes your entire feed will be just his rants (something I experienced a few weeks ago).
Pre-Musk and pre-algorithm Twitter was a good source of news, as it was near-realtime, and relevant to you. Now? No.
Can you see profiles without logging in again?
Something that really pissed me off is how much of a "support channel" it became for things like my internet provider. If the internet went down their twitter was often the only place you could get info.
Yeah I hate that kind of "Well, everyone uses it", whether it's Twitter or WhatsApp or anything. Even POTS and email are pretty shit in their own way
Yet Twitter now X is just our modern day 4chan owned by the richest man in the world.
Never have ever seen such insane things (people shot point blank in the head & the gruesomeness of it) I didnt need to see (scrolling thru) and all thanks to X.
> 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.
It's baked into the UI. Public by default.
Facebook is personal by default. You post stuff on 'your feed', you view 'your friends' updates.
Late in the game Facebook realised this was a problem and has tried to cram other stuff into people's feeds - viral content. And people hate it. People want their Facebook feed to be stuff from people they know and they see the other injected content (meme groups, assorted interest groups, comics, etc) as little more than extra adverts.
Contrastingly Twitter was always the public firehose and so while many people do not care for it, those that do, are opting into it, not trying to opt out.
What's amazing is it seems nobody (big/public) is trying to really make a thing which is personal as you describe. It's all twitter rip-offs, microblogging narcissistic megaphone attempts.
I don't care a bit about bluesky, and while I check on my Mastodon feed a few times a week I don't interact there much either. This "look at me, whole world!" phenomenon is of very little interest to me. I despise what Meta has become, but I don't see an alternative yet to FB.
> What's amazing is it seems nobody (big/public) is trying to really make a thing which is personal as you describe.
The problem is the monetisation of it.
> 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.
The problem I have on Twitter now is that folks hijack that and post tweets about totally unrelated stuff (usually crypto). Take you example that there is a huge wreck on the 401 and you want to find out what's going on. Go on Twitter and the top post will be something like:
"Get your Airdrop to $NEWCRYPTO Today. iPhone 12, 401 Crash, Cute Cats"
And when he bought it, it was
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Who said they were driving?
> 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.
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.
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Came here to say same, sad to see this downvoted.
Stay off your smartphones when behind the wheel. I don’t care how slow you are going or how important you think you are. If it’s urgent pull over.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
Twitter almost maps to finger (the protocol) perfectly.
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.
How could it ever be considered a protocol?
It's a platform - a marketplace for buying opinion.
My dictionary says this about "protocol":
> [In computing:] a set of rules governing the exchange or transmission of data between devices.
In the article, pg says this:
> The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients.
It seems obvious to me what pg is getting at, even though the other protocols he mentioned are all formal while Twitter's is not.
It seems like that could apply to many other ways of messaging though, not all of them online. I'm not sure the "new" bit is really correct. Perhaps the potential scale or reach of a message is what matters.
Never thought of it this way... It truly is a marketplace where opinions can be "bought"
> a marketplace for buying opinion
Never thought of it like that before
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> He only ever got SSL working on his personal website in 2023.
I also added SSL to a site "too late" by hivemind standards. It's static HTML and contains nothing sensitive. I guess maybe a malicious ISP could theoretically inject ads or something.
I don't think he believed it was a protocol in a literal sense, but that people were using it like one. It had an open API at the time and both production and consumption of tweets was often automated. It didn't really work out that way longer-term, but it wasn't crazy to guess that it might.
It wouldn't be HN if it's been six hours without attempting to shame someone with HTTPS demagoguery.
> Twitter was just HTTP over TCP/IP. It was never a protocol. It was a website.
I think it was also a text service in the very beginning.
Which was the reason for the short text length of posts.
(...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.
Dang, I really respect your work here and in general you do a great job, but I think you overstepped here in auto-collapsing this comment thread and replying (edit: To clarify for anyone coming to this later, the GP comment was collapsed by moderator action at the time of writing. It is now flagged by user flags, which I think is entirely appropriate.)
PG gets a lot of flack on HN, some comments better-considered than others. Most of us are able to tell the difference and file the mindless attacks appropriately. We don't need you to rush to his defense, and in fact you doing so is likely counterproductive.
You've often said that you take a policy of moderating less, not more, when YC is involved. This interaction and moderation action breaks that pattern, which is harmful.
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.
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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?
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?"
Given that he’s talking about TCP I don’t think he meant diplomatic protocols here
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.
I'm a generation older. To me, there were three big shifts.
One was that Facebook/Twitter/etc. proved that web publishing could be made more convenient by making it more centralized, and that access to an audience was, in some way, more important than access to publishing tools. No matter how good open web publishing tools got, they couldn't compete with Facebook et. al. at providing some access to an audience, even if that audience was as small as your friends and family.
The second was a shift in who developed "internet infrastructure." In the 80s and 90s (and before), it was mainly academics working in the public interest, and hobbyist hackers. (Think Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, IETF for web/internet standards, or Dave Winer with RSS.) In the 00s onward, it was well-funded corporations and the engineers who worked for them. (Think Google.) So from the IETF, you have the email protocol standards, with the assumption everyone will run their own servers. But from Google, you get Gmail.
The third -- and perhaps most important shift -- was the move from desktop software to web + mobile software as the primary computing platform for most people. Such that even if you were a desktop user, you did most of your computing in the browser. This created a whole new mechanism for user comfort with proprietary fully-hosted software, e.g. Google Docs. This also sidelined many of the efforts to keep user-facing software open source. Such that even among the users who would be most receptive to a push for open protocols and open source software, you have strange compromises like GitHub: a platform that is built atop an open source piece of desktop software (git) and an open source storage format meant to be decentralized (git repo), but which is nonetheless 100% proprietary and centralized (e.g. GitHub.com repo hosting and GitHub Issues).
You ask how to "dismantle" this. I've long pondered the same question. I am not sure it can be dismantled. It doesn't seem like these shifts can be undone. Where I've personally ended up is that small communities of enthusiast programmers and power users can embrace open source, open protocols, and decentralization for its obvious benefits, but that it won't ever be a mass market again.
It's worth keeping in mind a few bright points: email, RSS/podcasts, the web
Email: One of the oldest parts of the Internet. Very open standard. Federated. Largely ad-free. Little lock-in (Though @gmail.com addresses are a potential serious risk). Lots of attempts (by Slack, etc.) to "kill" email because no corporation controls it.
RSS/podcasts: RSS (or Atom or whatever) should be way more popular, but it still lives on through podcasts where anyone can publish anywhere and subscribe to anything. hough Spotify and Apple are trying hard to lock things down, they haven't succeeded yet.
The web: Exists and is still largely open. Efforts to turn everything into a closed app haven't succeeded yet and attempts to lock down the web (e.g. web attestation) have failed so far.
All three of those are commendable open standards. All three are on life support.
Email is immensely concentrated amongst a literal handful of large players, and intercommunications between those are fraught. (My Protonmail messages to Mozilla Pocket's QA team are rejected by their Gmail service, and have been for years.) Spam, confidentiality, privacy, and trust of asserted identity are all overwhelming problems. I make all but no personal use of email and haven't for years, despite first using the medium in the 1980s.
RSS has been strongly deprecated by major players. Its one bright point are podcasts (based on RSS), though that is also increasingly centralised and commercialised. The number of pods which are ad-free has been ever-shrinking, and those ads are exceedingly poor. Major publishers managed to make their RSS feeds all but useless (teasers of stories, abysmal formatting, ads/nags). Small blogs are still a source, but they're hardly the vanguard they once were.
The Web's standards process has been utterly captured by Google on all three of the publisher, ad/tracking, and browser endpoints. Scrap it and start over is my general recommendation. Gemini (the protocol, not the AI engine) is an interesting but insufficient start. (I'd like to see more structured documents with notes/references at a minimum supported.)
So yes, open standards still "exist" for some value of existence. But they're far from healthy.
What about realtime+mobile chat ?
Mastodon and RCS are lightyears from consolidating X/whatsapp/messenger/telegram/signal/discord/slack/teams/etc.
Email+notifications is a joke, lacking groups features, true undo, large attachments and video codecs, etc.
XMPP has existed since 1999, but has only seen mainstream adoption inside walled garden apps that never supported federation or shut it off early on. It was possible to use Facebook and Google chat from a generic XMPP client for a long time.
> What about realtime+mobile chat ?
See, the discontinuity is at the App Store and mobile shift. It was iPhone and App Store that destroyed equal human right to code and run, turning it into elite privilege to profit by code. And the escape hatch known as the Web is slowly closing.
I would say when Facebook arrived. But it wasn't so much "shift to corporate-owned", it was more that it allowed non-techies to put stuff on the internet for the first time. Us techies, we already had our hand-coded html web pages hosted at some (probably commercial) provider.
I think the answer is "usability". Look at all the community-made, non-commercial projects. They tend to suck because they weren't built for you. They were built for people with similar high investment into the thing they do, for experts or power-users. For them it works.
So IMO the key question is how to find motivation or time or money to solve someone else's problem, without being forced to maximize the money-making part. Because by now we can see exactly what happens when money is the primary goal. Everyone starts with good intentions (solving a problem), but the incentives are so powerful. If you don't follow them you'll start to struggle, long-term, or get out-competed by someone who maximizes the money-making part of the job.
It’s hard to not see it as techies being sold out by non-techies.
Is it ironic that it was Facebook that helped “techies” get paid because they didn’t play along with the employee price fixing cartel of Apple/google/adobe/intel/disney/etc?
But even before that we had Livejournal, we had Geocities, we had forums. There were lots of places for non-techies to post.
There's a great CCC presentation by Moxie (Signal originator) on that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdM-XTRyC9c
~summarized in text form https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
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
> ~summarized in text form 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...
Related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35141223
Our age gap is less then 10 years but here's my two cents: laziness/convenience. Back in the 90's and 2000's, you had to be ready to spend a lot of time fiddling with setups and maintenance as well as some MAJOR early days security flaws(think the IRC days). Corporate-owned ecosystems solved that problem: you log in and forget about it. They won with what some people call user experience. The lower the entry barrier, the quicker something picks up. Back when I was in school I was the biggest Nokia fanboi and even then I acknowledged that downloading a shady jar file and installing it on my phone was iffy. At a later stage when I was a bit older and could afford it, I got my first Android phone and the existence of a marketplace was a breath of fresh air. The problem is that few people(annoyingly even now) fail to realize or admit that those types of centralizations put handcuffs on your wrists the moment you say "OK, that works for me". Whether that's social logins, cloud providers, services or anything else - it's all the same. For example, if today, OpenAI decided to close off their API's for good, I recon tens if not hundreds of thousands of "AI" startups will collapse immediately since they fully rely on OpenAI's API's. Same with AWS, GCP, Azure or any other provider. And as we see with the current fiasco with twitter, tiktok and bambu labs just to name a few from the past two days, it is abundantly clear that people are in dire need of backups. As much as I used to find google drive and docs convenient, I've personally moved away and self-host everything now. The only thing I rely on(and only as a backup plan to access my home network) is a VPN I host over at Hetzner. But again - this is my backup.
Whether the corporations saw that as an opportunity at an early stage or they were at the right place, at the right time, I can't say. I'm more leaning towards the latter since I've worked at corporations and success in those environments is most commonly a moderately-educated gamble.
Yeah, I think it's clear that laziness/convenience is the answer.
You're absolutely right about people needing backups -- but ofc selfhosting is too huge a hurdle to expect most folks to embark on.
I wonder what can be done to make the "better" options easier. Can this even be done by the private sector alone given the incentives of capitalism? I'm unsure.
Given how many things we've seen happen in the social media space back-to-back (Elon taking over Twitter, Meta pandering to the new US governing party, TikTok's ban), I can't imagine these events will slow down. That at least fills me with hope that more people will wonder "does it have to be this way?" ...obviously that won't be enough for true mass adoption, but it's a start
I think there are two aspects to this:
* The software: different open source solutions have very different requirements at a high level: language, platform or even system requirements. Say you want to take messaging off centralized platforms: you need to host something like Matrix, which is very well made and polished but takes a lot of resources to run. Alternatively, you could use Jabber, which scales like no other but is an absolute hell to setup and maintain. Same can be said about music, videos, movies and all other things
* Operations: probably simple if you ask someone on HN, but you still need to understand networking, operating systems and file systems. I started using Linux when I was 11 in the distant 2000, and even now I'm not very enthusiastic if I have to make some changes to my zfs. You also need to consider backups and security and resources. Say you wanna run openstreetmap(which we recently started doing at work). Awesome but that requires an ungodly amount of fiddling in addition to an astonishing amount of time needed to unpack, even on enterprise hardware.
If you are in the tech world, https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted is a great place to start. But if you want to make it simpler... Idk... A lot of people would need to put in a lot of effort, as in build a linux distro around this idea, along with "recommended hardware", one click install(a very dumbed down equivalent of portainer), and some backup and alerting mechanisms built into the system. It's a tough question and frankly I don't have the answer.
> As a relative "youngin" (I'm 27), at what point did we make the shift from protocols to corporate-owned ecosystems? What caused it?
41, in retrospect I'd say this change happened around 2000-2010, why being not-invented-here-syndrome as Web 2.0 became a thing with some corporations publishing free-to-integrate XML-based APIs (technically also JSON, but I never saw them until much later); every API was different, so the only part which could be seen as a "protocol" were the meta-level of "how to define any API" e.g. XML, JSON.
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.
It's because platforms can deal with feature complexity and UX standardisation in a way that protocols can't.
Multi-protocol clients tend to end up a mess compared to the integrated experience of a platform which can provide a single source of truth for identity, authentication, and so on.
Netscape Communicator ticked many of the boxes of Facebook years earlier, but by kludging together NNTP, HTTP, SMTP, POP3, FTP etc., and that's before you consider the difficulty of moderating an open syndication like Usenet or IRC, or the pain in the ass that email spam had become by the early 00s.
Protocol/standards people like to think they care about UX, but for platform companies, user growth and retention literally pays their bills. It's just a different set of incentives.
And to be clear, I prefer the more open internet, but UX wise, it never stood a chance against normie-optimised, integrated platforms.
Also, around ~2000 or so, most of the "big" movies ran their own websites. There's the infamous Space Jam site [1], but there was even websites made for relatively obscure movies like Pretty Persuasion (whose URL I cannot seem to find but I remember looking at it when it was relevant).
I remember when MySpace came along, I started to see movie studios started creating dedicated MySpace pages for their films instead of dedicated sites.
It makes sense; MySpace was free and had built-in marketing via their "friends" system. You're not messing with hosting, or domain names, or even programmers, and unlike other free hosting systems, it wasn't considered lame to have `Check Us Out On MySpace` (whereas it would have been considered lame to have `geocities.com/myMovie`).
Apply this to most other industries, and you have what we have now.
It isnt so much that they "were so good".
It isnt like the people using the net before facebook etc just stopped what and how they were doing things and moved to facebook.
The large tech firm offering were easier, it allowed people access to the internet in an easy to use way who would not otherwise have done so.
The internet in 2000 was a much much smaller place with far different demographics.
maybe it was the worse discoverability of groups. at some point google became more about commerce than actually listing information high in their result pages. if you search on facebook, communities related to specific topics pop up immediately. even whatsapp now shows "popular groups" around certain themes in the app, even though none of your phone contacts is in any such group.
and by google not showing forums or blogs (especially new ones) as top results any more (mostly because of pre-llm spam websites) they just didnt get any more users.
facebook split up the "advertising" part and the connecting people / groups part, e.g. facebook's search wouldn't show ads.
I personally that this lack of friction really pushed social media sites forward, while the rest of the internet got kneecapped by google more and more like a boiling frog.
> propose whatever alternative you have to the normie in middle america and watch their blank stares.
We also overestimate how important the web in general is to many 'normies'. It was only a little over 10 yrs ago that I had to convince my wife (20-something at the time) that she had a reason to get a smartphone. We're so far apart on the adoption curve that it's very difficult to understand each other. As generations shift, I expect attitudes about lock-in, privacy, dependency etc will as well.
decentralized twitter is just useless. i don’t understand the appeal.
when it comes to things like TOR they make sense and are sticky, or minecraft servers (if that counts). decentralization can be desirable, even something bitcoin like (distributing a ledger) can probably have something to offer if used to solve a problem.
I get what you’re saying, though. I think decentralization will be in vogue again, when it solves real problems.
In theory you could create a decentralized uber, possibly even something cash based, if anonymity ever becomes a concern again. Some services don’t necessarily need to be built by companies, they can be unnecessary middle men. It makes sense for drivers to run nodes themselves, be their own bosses, etc.
Kind of a neat idea now I want to build it.
Something like that may not get users immediately but something will inevitably happen that will get people interested in that kind of idea.
You definitely have a point. I have trouble accepting just how much people will give up for convenience!
Centralized moderation is a big thing.
Usenet was a very open system, where iirc moderation sometimes happened per discussion group but otherwise everyone individually had to ignore bad actors (add to killfile). It scaled badly with more people and spammers. Arguably it started going downhill 30 years ago. Found a decade old discussion:
Corporate ecosystems looked a lot like open protocols for so long, luring people in. Then things changed.
Part of it has to be zirp: when money isn’t free, companies suddenly look everywhere for extra cash flows.
Part of it is LLM training: it turns out that the free data can be packaged up and resold at astronomical valuations.
The difference between protocols and these social media giants is like the difference between C and Excel.
Basically when assholes like Paul Graham got involved and dumped absolute mountains of money into applications like Reddit and Dropbox that take concepts that exist in open protocols but implement them in closed moneytisable ways.
The trend was well underway in the mid-aughts, though some might argue that early forum systems, including Slashdot (Slashcode), phpBB, and even AOL forums were precursors (all were Web / app alternatives to Usenet / NNTP, effectively). If you count custom BBS forum software, the trend goes back even further to the early dial-up era of the 1980s. We're talking 300--1200 baud modems here, none of that fancy fast 48/56Kbps stuff.
One of the challenges with open-protocols-based systems is protocol stasis. That is, once a protocol is developed and in wide use, agreeing collectively on change is hard. I've seen this directly (largely on the user-side) with Diaspora* (the platform, whilst it has some good basics, is tragically stuck with design decisions from a decade and a half ago), and Mastodon (itself an attempt to break out of stasis within IRC, StatusNet, GNU Social, and WebFinger). The two sides of that debate tend to register as purist/absolutists who cotton no variance from spec, and expand-and-embrace radicals who are seeking to adapt the protocol for private gain. (The truth of course is that both positions are considerably more nuanced, of course, and good or bad motivations may well exist on either side.)
We're seeing part of this play out with HTML/HTTP (now largely captured by Google) and SMTP (largely moribund) where on the one hand a highly complex spec largely serving the interests of publishers and advertisers over readers exists (HTML/HTTP) (see especially Drew Devault's account of how insanely complex it is to write an HTML renderer from scratch), and in the case of SMTP, many failures (privacy, security, spam, workflow integration) of email to adapt to new needs and concerns.
The result is that we rely less on open standards (making lock-in more prevalent, and new entry more challenging), existing standards are either static (SMTP) or so bloated as to lock out new entrants (HTML/HTTP), and larger aspects of online exchange get locked into proprietary stacks, protocols, platforms, and actors, with what development does occur largely addressing corporate rather than community / societal needs.
For someone who was pitched on the promise and liberation of information technologies from the 1970s onward, and was present as the modern Web and online world has emerged, it's tremendously disappointing, though there've been some lessons learned, if by me rather than the world at large. It's been interesting to watch major social rights advocates, of both the digital and broader stripes, come to terms with this (EFF, ACLU, and others), and shift their tunes considerably.
For the younger set who didn't experience this, or the older set who've forgotten or weren't paying attention, it's increasingly revealing to visit works being published over the course of this development, beginning with some of the earliest RAND monographs in the 1960s, whether cautionary or enthusiastic. I find the cautionary takes have worn better.
A partial bibliography here: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105074933053020193>
I'd add to that Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and Andrew Shapiro's Control Revolution, both published in 1999.
<https://archive.org/details/codeotherlawsofc0000less>
<https://archive.org/details/controlrevolutio00andr>
Alvin Toffler's Future Shock addresses this specific issue only slightly, but is another historically interesting and significant take on what was, now over fifty years ago, the future of technological, informational, and cultural development:
<https://archive.org/details/isbn_0553132644>
As I've noted here recently, that book's prognostications can be divided into TK-count, ahem, three categories: technical, psychological, and social. The first is largely over-optimistic, with a general (though not total) exception in the case of information technology. The latter is strongly cautionary and relatively accurate. The third now reads as hopelessly outdated, largely as it has become the current socio-cultural environment.
See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42688251>
Books on the impact of media and society are also worth considering. Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eisenstein#The_Print...>, as well as earlier works by McLuhan, Harold Innis, and Walter J. Ong. I'm increasingly convinced that changes to information technology and systems, from the advent of speech, writing, and maths to the present, have absolutely profound impacts on the societies in which they emerge (and those proximate to them). They act as power-multipliers on other technological advances, notably in agriculture, metallurgy, fuels, mechanics, electromagnetism, etc., but even on their own are highly underappreciated.
When Google killed RSS. That was a definite slide against interoperable protocols and towards closed platforms.
It wasn't just RSS. Google search now deprioritizes smaller sites.
"Ecosystems" have a network effect. If everyone is on Facebook and you want to be seen, you have to be on Facebook. But the open web is an ecosystem. If people are going to Google Reader or web search engines to find content then if you want to be seen you create a blog.
But then Google murdered them, which damaged the ecosystem. In theory you could create a new search engine and a browser with solid RSS support etc. and if that's what people start using then you get the open web back. But that's a) not that easy to do and b) would have to gain market share fast enough that the things you want to index haven't already atrophied and died.
So now we have to push the rock back up the hill and build something good enough that it can start gaining rather than losing usage share as an ecosystem, but this time learn from past mistakes. In particular, don't let anybody become a single point of failure like Google was when they decided to kill everybody.
News to me. RSS is still around and it was almost a decade after Google killed its reader that my feeds stopped working.
RSS/Atom was near universal until Google killed their Reader product and reduced support in other products like Chrome. From there RSS market share has declined considerably and consistently:
https://openrss.org/blog/how-google-helped-destroy-adoption-...
They also killed Usenet. Google has been a force for evil for a long time.
In the big picture, I think this is just the recurring story of capitalism. The big players can seize the market. Nearly every industry or medium offers economies of scale that favor large investors. And everything facing the public turns into this advertising and analytics game. So, yes, it's driven by VC money that can buy user attention and drown out the small hobbyists who cannot invest so much in marketing nor features.
I think the answer to your "dismantling" question would be similar to antitrust actions against railroads, steel industry, etc. a century ago. It takes political will and sensible regulation. Economics favor the capital, not democracy or other social values. As in with other mass consumer markets, I think the consumers also enable this in a tragedy of the commons scenario. They each can make self-serving compromises for convenience and enjoyment and ignore the externalities.
By the way, before the internet protocols dominated, there were bulletin board systems (BBSs) and unix-to-unix copy protocol (UUCP) networks. These had some grassroots kind of community federation but also got more commercial consolidation over time. Handwaving a bit, this included systems like Compuserve and AOL. In some ways, USENET was the biggest social media that made the transition from UUCP to internet. It too eventually suffered from the same erosion of its userbase and attacks by commercial consolidation and neglect, before the web.
You may as well wonder why there were railroad barons instead of railroads being public access.
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.
There was a time when techcrunch went from broadly covering technology to being 95% Twitter stories. It was pretty irritating
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.
> 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.
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.
Social media gives the unqualified and stupid a voice. It's the television of the Internet
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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).
Interestingly with chat groups that people can sign up, IMs like Telegram fill that one-to-many short-form niche
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.
> The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients.
Like multicast IP
If your router chose your IGMP groups for you.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seems like a reasonable assumption for that time.
Does Paul not know what a protocol is? How is Twitter a protocol in any way?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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
Twitter’s api was comprehensive and open back then. So was Facebook’s. You had a world where there was a centralized social graph and a centralized communication hub that everyone could build off of.
Certainly a different time.
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).
If he had written "Twitter is important because a critical mass of important people use it to communicate directly with the general public" I would not have called the essay dumb. What he actually wrote is that Twitter was a new messaging protocol which was (a) obviously not true at the time and (b) a red herring.
I'm not quite sure why he expressed himself in a way that is easily misunderstood. He probably shouldn't have used "protocol" as the word/concept he wanted to communicate. I think what he was trying to say, is that it was a new/fresh modality of communication - a new way to communicate, by having public channels you could stream to.
The same way giving people access to email opens up new behaviour, or access to networked computers allows new behaviour. Or similar to how Job's iPhone drove people to a new behaviour. Also, until they locked down their APIs in the name of control and monetization, it had a feel of access to a new protocol.* I am fully aware twitter is not an RPC specced protocol.
Yes, a venture capitalist in the software space in san francisco made a call about such a company while it was in a bull run.
On the other hand, the post is 100% wrong, it's not a protocol and to the extent it is, it was not innovative (How is it fundamentally different than facebook?)
I know this was written 15 years ago, but that's what's interesting about it, it's a remnant from a previous era and it shows what the hype was.
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.
I don't fault op for posting it. I agree that it's an interesting historical artifact, but intrinsically the essay is dumb.
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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