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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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).<p>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.")<p>I have fond memories of writing HTML from magazines and in the eras before me it was handwriting text games into BASIC interpreters.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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 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?<p>> The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients<p>This describes all websites everywhere. It also describes NNTP.
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."<p>Obviously I was very wrong, but I wish i wasn't.
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?<p>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.
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.<p>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.
Twitter wasn't ever really a new protocol in the same way as the others, as it was owned entirely by a private company.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net</a>
> Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an advantage.<p>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".<p>It wasn't obvious at all that Twitter would become something of a news platform.<p>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.<p>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:<p>there's one to ~one long-form communication (smtp), one to many long-form (http);<p>one to ~one short-form (various IMs), and finally one to many short-form (twitter).
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.
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
Twitter is popular for the same reason Tiktok is, most people can't read without great effort.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>A protocol? Ha! We knew it wasn't a protocol or layer for anything before the so-called Arab Spring.<p>How many bad ideas has Paul Graham defended?<p>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.<p>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.<p>The king of bad ideas, chewed into bite size pieces for the masses.<p>What do i know, I'm obviously very unhip in this sort of fabricated false world.
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.<p>Edit: if you think message boards and blogs were too specific, here are a couple of other media with this property: radio and television.
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