[HN Gopher] Why Twitter is such a big deal (2009)
___________________________________________________________________
Why Twitter is such a big deal (2009)
Author : Olshansky
Score : 158 points
Date : 2025-01-19 18:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| woopwoop wrote:
| I hate to be blandly negative, but this deserves (deserved?) it.
| This is dumb. Message boards had this property, as did blogs.
| There is nothing meaningful in this short essay.
|
| Edit: if you think message boards and blogs were too specific,
| here are a couple of other media with this property: radio and
| television.
| amgreg wrote:
| I think the OP is posting this in the context of the other
| front-page discussion of the Bluesky protocol. I think in this
| context it is interesting.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42752703
| woopwoop wrote:
| I don't fault op for posting it. I agree that it's an
| interesting historical artifact, but intrinsically the essay
| is dumb.
| swyx wrote:
| i hate to be blandly negative on your comment, but jesus
| christ. pg made this call in april 2009, and twitter turned out
| to be a $40b company that may have potentially swung multiple
| elections. and you are here in 2025 taking the face value
| argument that "Message boards had this property, as did
| blogs.", and ignoring the fact that when you post things on
| twitter both important people AND the unwashed masses actually
| read it, and they are all hooked on a unique form factor only
| twitter owns. threads and mastodon and truth social can tout
| bullshit MAUs all they like but only twitter is twitter.
|
| sure, pg didnt communicate with the hindsight specificity i
| just did, but he was directionally correct for the
| approximately correct reason (without explicitly saying that
| "any new protocol must have critical adoption to be meaningful"
| but that is implied in pgland).
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| comparing twitter to TCP/IP, SMTP and HTTP is dumb beyond
| belief, regardless of how much money the person made betting
| on the right horse for the wrong reasons
| swyx wrote:
| then you are being too strict about your analogies on what
| a protocol is, and your technologist hat (being precise >
| being directionally accurate) is getting in the way of
| being a better business person (job to be done is king).
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| one can be directionally accurate for the wrong reasons
| and that's what happened here. there's no need to salvage
| anything. he was wrong.
| dangus wrote:
| I don't think that's really true in this case.
|
| Predicting that something will be a big deal and grow
| fast isn't what's at issue here. And yes, even in 2009
| you could have made that prediction about Twitter.
|
| The issue here is that it is being spoken of as a
| protocol, which isn't just some kind of analogy. It is a
| word with a literal definition.
|
| And we can now see that the end result is largely
| negative. It's not a public protocol, all of its content
| is behind a login wall. It didn't even join the
| fediverse.
|
| Essentially, pg is imaginging something more like Bluesky
| or Mastodon and the fediverse, but for Twitter, which
| never came close to materializing.
|
| I think Twitter will inevitably go down in history as
| being much more like an extended runtime edition of
| MySpace: yet another social network that became popular,
| made its founders who sold the company rich, but
| ultimately became a dying/dead entity under the next
| batch of management.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > The issue here is that it is being spoken of as a
| protocol, which isn't just some kind of analogy. It is a
| word with a literal definition.
|
| Every word has a literal definition, but every word also
| has an infinite variety of meaning, with nuance and
| subtlety that depends on context. It is quite obvious
| that Paul Graham didn't mean that Twitter was literally
| "another HTTP". I take the meaning to be something like
| "Twitter is an open platform that is widely-used enough
| to enable communication between other services" -- not
| the case _now_ , of course, but it certainly was at the
| time.
| ec109685 wrote:
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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.
| woopwoop wrote:
| 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.
| fifticon wrote:
| 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.
| timeon wrote:
| > I'm not quite sure why he expressed himself in a way
| that is easily misunderstood.
|
| You both agree that expression is wrong. Why do you have
| to further recreate argument of the blog? These
| discussion based on loose associations are pointless and
| everyone will talk past each other.
| ryanhecht wrote:
| As a relative "youngin" (I'm 27), at what point did we make the
| shift from protocols to corporate-owned ecosystems? What caused
| it? The rise of the VC funding model? The Silicon Valley ethos of
| "build an MVP, grow quickly without making money," and users
| adopting corporate owned solutions because they're easy?
|
| If so, how do we dismantle this? Not from a technical perspective
| -- atproto for example seems powerful enough -- but from a
| social/economic/mindshare perspective.
| blfr wrote:
| 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/
| ryanhecht wrote:
| This is fascinating (if a bit discouraging) take from someone
| who would definitely know better than most!
|
| I like to THINK that atproto's ability to easily move one's
| data between providers makes it less susceptible to the
| "Gmail problem," but I think I'm being naively optimistic
| fsflover wrote:
| > ~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
| swyx wrote:
| 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.
| ryanhecht wrote:
| You definitely have a point. I have trouble accepting just
| how much people will give up for convenience!
| bflesch wrote:
| 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.
| tempest_ wrote:
| 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.
| cwalv wrote:
| > 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.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
| hmmokidk wrote:
| 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.
| axegon_ wrote:
| 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.
| ryanhecht wrote:
| 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
| axegon_ wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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_Eisen
| stein#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.
| ben_w wrote:
| > 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.
| Matumio wrote:
| 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.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| It's hard to not see it as techies being sold out by non-
| techies.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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?
| rconti wrote:
| But even before that we had Livejournal, we had Geocities, we
| had forums. There were lots of places for non-techies to
| post.
| veltas wrote:
| The difference between protocols and these social media giants
| is like the difference between C and Excel.
| saltcured wrote:
| 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.
| xnx wrote:
| 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.
| asah wrote:
| 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.
| Zak wrote:
| 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.
| asah wrote:
| XMPP leaked the features that drove these other apps to
| win - not the same.
| fsflover wrote:
| > What about realtime+mobile chat ?
|
| https://matrix.org
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| When Google killed RSS. That was a definite slide against
| interoperable protocols and towards closed platforms.
| BeetleB wrote:
| News to me. RSS is still around and it was almost a decade
| after Google killed its reader that my feeds stopped working.
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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-...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| 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.
| badgersnake wrote:
| They also killed Usenet. Google has been a force for evil for
| a long time.
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| 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.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| 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.
| janalsncm wrote:
| 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.
| Linosaurus wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9987679
| goldenchrome wrote:
| You may as well wonder why there were railroad barons instead
| of railroads being public access.
| blfr wrote:
| Fairly sure I remember pg's(?) longer post where he explores that
| Twitter is not only a new protocol, not only popular, not only
| private but also it completes the matrix:
|
| there's one to ~one long-form communication (smtp), one to many
| long-form (http);
|
| one to ~one short-form (various IMs), and finally one to many
| short-form (twitter).
| arnvald wrote:
| Interestingly with chat groups that people can sign up, IMs
| like Telegram fill that one-to-many short-form niche
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| > The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you
| don't specify the recipients.
|
| Like multicast IP
| ok123456 wrote:
| If your router chose your IGMP groups for you.
| edude03 wrote:
| 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.
| troupo wrote:
| > 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.
| tempest_ wrote:
| 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.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| 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
| bruce511 wrote:
| It's hard to communicate without first agreeing on the
| medium of communication.
|
| When joining a group its easiest to simply adopt the
| choice the group has already made.
|
| Companies chose Twitter because lots of people (their
| customers) already used it. If their customers move, and
| indicate a preference, they'll happily move too.
|
| Personally I don't use Twitter. Lots of businesses post
| on Twitter, and they're welcome to do so.
|
| I do use WhatsApp. Which has traditionally been business
| unfriendly. The odd business will connect with me that
| way, but that's rare.
|
| Email, web, phone, IRL - these all seem to be working
| well here, but your mileage may vary. Hopefully you have
| some choices.
| timeon wrote:
| The thing is that one did not need to be Twitter user to
| check updates from company on Twitter when needed. This
| is no longer that easy. That is why some companies (in my
| country, like train company) move to platforms that can
| be viewed without account. There are no many users there
| but anyone can follow link there when he needs it.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Twitter can't be a news platform when tweets with links are
| suppressed
| jaimex2 wrote:
| 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.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| 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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This doesn't really make sense without a well reasoned
| out argument.
|
| How can your opinion outweigh that of the various
| decision makers who originally agreed to implement it...?
| schneems wrote:
| > Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web, chose the name
| "World Wide Web" because he wanted to emphasize that, in
| this global hypertext system, anything could link to
| anything else
|
| https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/01/why-the-
| web...
|
| The net is fundamentally about linking things together.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Why does this matter?
|
| Berners-Lee doesn't have de jure, or de facto, authority
| over anything, on behalf of any jurisdiction...?
|
| Certainly not in deciding definitions with reasonable
| prospects of being accepted in all relevant jurisdictions
| of the US, let alone the entire world...
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Berners-Lee was brought up as a rejoinder to _various
| decision makers who originally agreed to implement it_ ,
| being that the www is more original than twitter, and
| fwiw he's not an American.
|
| It's quite exasperating to find someone arguing that
| there is some benefit to regression towards applications
| which don't link into other applications. Why be on the
| web at all?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| You haven't addressed the question.
|
| Why does it matter what he thinks or thought about this
| or that topic?
|
| Opinions can't suddenly transmute into facts, regardless
| of anyone that has ever existed in human history.
| error_logic wrote:
| If someone limits your options to only two, or even one
| source of resources, are you better off?
|
| This discussion thread emerged from the suggestion of
| "maybe that's a good thing." Is it?
|
| It's a question of trust, competition, and whether
| there's so much destruction of honest competition that
| only the destructive and twisted competition remains,
| keeping people afraid to venture into the unknown,
| willing to perpetuate the cycle of destroying competitors
| and endangering civilization itself.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| How does this relate to the prior comment?
| error_logic wrote:
| A walled garden can protect, or it can enslave. Eye of
| the beholder. This thread was about creating a walled
| garden by downranking external links.
| schneems wrote:
| > How can your opinion outweigh that of the various
| decision makers who originally agreed to implement it?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Are we not talking about opinion vs opinion ? What
| twitter engineers think is good for twitter vs what web
| engineers think is good for the web ? I don't really
| follow what your assertion is, I would be happy to
| elaborate my position if you elaborate yours.
| judahmeek wrote:
| > How can your opinion outweigh that of the various
| decision makers who originally agreed to implement it...?
|
| Through subjectivity, of course.
| meiraleal wrote:
| there's just one decision maker in Twitter
| Applejinx wrote:
| Now there is. Didn't used to be, and it cost a startling
| amount of money for that to be the case, and it was done
| to achieve a purpose rather than to make Twitter better
| at being Twitter. Something of a pyrrhic victory, that.
| skyyler wrote:
| >This doesn't really make sense without a well reasoned
| out argument.
|
| It seemed well reasoned to me... ?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You really want all information to be locked up into a
| proprietary platform controlled by Musk?
|
| And Twitter is the ultimate "dark pattern"
| wodenokoto wrote:
| "Good thing" doesn't have to mean good for you. It could
| mean good for the platform.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I think the numbers and the ad revenue tell that story.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| 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?
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| 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.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| harrall wrote:
| 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.
| mcny wrote:
| 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(tm) on YouTube.
| edude03 wrote:
| 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
| aorloff wrote:
| And when he bought it, it was
| paul7986 wrote:
| 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.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > 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"
| flessner wrote:
| How could it ever be considered a protocol?
|
| It's a platform - a marketplace for buying opinion.
| RIMR wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| (...plus came up with Bayesian spam filtering, plus wrote the
| book on Lisp macros, plus revolutionized startup investing).
|
| It's only astounding because your assumptions are false. pg
| is nothing like a pointy-haired boss. What he is is a highly
| curious and lazy (in the good sense of the word) hacker who
| is bored by busywork. How you managed to arrive at the
| inverse image of that is such a feat of pathfinding that I'd
| be interested in the steps by which you got there.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Because it's a terrible blog post. If you applied this
| criticism to any other author, it would be valid.
|
| But because it's pg it's different? No, it's still a bad
| post. There are a plethora of other reasons Twitter was a
| big deal. It being a "protocol" wasn't one of them.
| dang wrote:
| Getting from that post to the GP's dramatic assessment of
| PG as a person would be a disappointing feat of
| pathfinding.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't think the post has held up, but the "it's not a
| protocol, it's just HTTP on top of TCP/IP" is a lame
| argument. It's clearly a protocol. I've been doing
| protocol engineering work since the mid-1990s, and people
| have been saying things built on top of HTTP aren't
| "protocols" since HTTP went mainstream. I was one of
| them, in the 1990s! That was dumb of me; most new
| important protocols since then have been built on top of
| HTTP, and I expect that to continue.
|
| The subtext of these "it's not even a protocol" arguments
| are that Paul Graham doesn't know what a protocol is,
| which is not a plausible argument. Why make it?
| hoahmarineman wrote:
| We get it though; gotta white knight for your meal ticket
|
| But your prior lived experience isn't exactly useful to the
| rest of us.
|
| To the outside observer you're Robin defending Batman,
| peddling anecdotes about someone you'd actually feel
| something for if they died. To everyone else he could have
| died in the ditch a decade ago and we'd never have noticed.
|
| You know all about neuroscience but fail to spot why you'd
| be biased. Same old self selecting biology like everyone
| else.
| dang wrote:
| It's true that when I'm fond of somebody, I tend to
| respond to false attacks on them. Not because of "meal
| tickets" but just human feeling.
|
| It's true that things look different on the outside,
| though one might add that people who routinely jump to
| cynical conclusions about others don't make very good
| Hacker News commenters.
|
| But what made you think I know anything about
| neuroscience?
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > We get it though; gotta white knight for your meal
| ticket
|
| This is a rather presumptive conclusion. Unless, of
| course, you have specific knowledge corroborated by
| others such that this assertion is more than a trite ad
| hominem.
|
| Full disclosure: I am not associated with anyone who
| owns, administers, or in any way runs this site.
|
| Nor am I "white knighting for a meal ticket."
| lolinder wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| It seems plainly offtopic (and flamebaity and name-
| calling) to me, but ok, I've uncollapsed the subthread.
|
| As for replying: sorry, but as I said at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763996, when
| people I'm fond of are maligned, I'm going to respond.
| That has nothing to do with YC, that has to do with being
| human. (Another recent example was
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42685972.)
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The problem here is the mixing of administrative powers
| (collapsing of subthread) and expression of private
| opinions.
|
| One is _ideally_ an unbiased, mechanical action subject
| to a rigid set of publicized conditions to which the
| comment(s) concerned are applied. So-and-so comment(s)
| are moderated so-and-so because they violate so-and-so in
| the guidelines, for example.
|
| The other is (by your own admission) a biased, emotional,
| personal action subject and liable only to yourself.
|
| The two are mutually incompatible when performed
| together.
| dang wrote:
| I can't (and don't want to) do this job purely
| mechanically, and never have. I doubt it's possible, and
| if it is, I doubt it would make for good moderation.
|
| Actually, though, collapsing the GP subthread was just
| that sort of application of the site guidelines. It's
| obvious (IMO) that the subthread is flamebaity and well
| offtopic. I reversed that decision as a courtesy to
| lolinder and a nod to the "moderate less when YC is
| involved" principle--even though it was the correct call
| from the unbiased/mechanical/rigid side of the ledger.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Let me put it this way then: You're mixing the
| professional with the personal.
|
| Administering and moderating Hacker News is your job,
| that is correct. You also admitted that the rebuttal and
| moderation action this all stems from was driven by
| personal emotions (your liking Paul Graham). Your
| personal emotions have nothing to do with your
| professional job, the two are irrelevant to each other.
|
| It's this mixing of professional and personal that is the
| problem. Not performing your job consistently will draw
| criticism, but mixing the two will cause even more
| fundamental criticism as was the case here.
|
| Personally, I think the correct way of handling this
| would have been one of two ways: A) Engage in moderating
| the thread and refrain from acting personally. Or B)
| Engage in the thread personally and recuse yourself from
| the thread professionally, asking another moderator to do
| the work.
| dang wrote:
| I don't believe the professional and the personal can be
| completely separated. People can't stop being human and
| what does "personal" mean, at bottom, but that?
|
| It's true that we shouldn't act on each other purely out
| of our own emotion but that's true personally too, not
| just professionally.
|
| If you try to exclude emotion from human activity,
| including internet moderation, it ends up running the
| show anyways, just more crudely and unconsciously. Better
| to consciously give it a place--hopefully an appropriate
| place.
|
| Questions like this have come up over the years and my
| sense (you may disagree of course) is that the community
| is happier with moderators who show feeling sometimes and
| can be related to personally. I could be wrong about
| that, but if so, it should have caused large problems
| long before now.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I dunno, I've been personally corrected by you and I
| prefer that you in turn can be corrected and can show
| human opinion like anyone else. So I would say you're
| right about that, and I'm more likely to be comfortable
| being corrected in future as needs must.
|
| So, carry on I guess? :)
| tayo42 wrote:
| > 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.
| sroussey wrote:
| Which was the reason for the short text length of posts.
| Zak wrote:
| > _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.
| likeabatterycar wrote:
| It wouldn't be HN if it's been six hours without attempting
| to shame someone with HTTPS demagoguery.
| sctb wrote:
| 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.
| verzali wrote:
| 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.
| eleveriven wrote:
| Never thought of it this way... It truly is a marketplace where
| opinions can be "bought"
| fergie wrote:
| > a marketplace for buying opinion
|
| Never thought of it like that before
| exogeny wrote:
| Does Paul not know what a protocol is? How is Twitter a protocol
| in any way?
| davorak wrote:
| If I remember correctly early on there was both the firehose of
| all tweets you could access and easy to call apis to post
| tweets. So there were a set of programmatic standards to
| control how you could communicate, which sounds close enough to
| me for a blog post.
|
| But only if memory serves correctly, I do not know the
| timelines off the top of my head.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| The Twitter of 2009 was a rather different beast to the Twitter
| of the 2020s. Open APIs were a big part of it, and the idea
| that people would upload all sorts of random data into their
| feeds which others could tap into.
|
| (In practice, it never went much further than running apps,
| book reviews or calorie counters).
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| 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.
| samsquire wrote:
| In early 2000-2007 I felt technology optimism (things like Digg,
| slashdot) about new websites and there was a hopefulness about
| new technology (file sharing) The spirit of new technology that
| "there is something new" and the "this is how things work from
| now on" (WAP websites, floppy disks, guest books, simple
| 1megabyte web hosting, geocities, fan sites, myspace, WhatsApp on
| cheap phones).
|
| In other words, every new thing was something that may have been
| before but it was "this is how things work from now on". The
| platform defines and upholds the character of interaction.
| Twitter and Reddit do that and as pg highlights how twitter
| recipients is by algorithm. (From OP: "where you don't specify
| the recipients.")
|
| I have fond memories of writing HTML from magazines and in the
| eras before me it was handwriting text games into BASIC
| interpreters.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The optimism and hopefulness got crushed under the boot of
| money. The spirit of sharing got crushed under the boot of
| copyright. The joy and excitement got crushed under the boot of
| metrics and engagement. In an alternate timeline, things could
| have gone a different way, but because the same old money and
| same old power structures controlled the direction of progress,
| we got the timeline where the Internet turned into Addictive
| Pay-per-view Disney.
| energy123 wrote:
| Not untrue, but also not the only thing going on.
|
| The authoritarian movements of the 20th century wouldn't have
| been possible without mass media. But it wasn't the profit
| motive that was the prime culprit for this enablement.
|
| Ideologues found they had a powerful tool at their disposal
| to channel people's grievances towards an enemy, and to bind
| a large group of people behind this ideology.
|
| The inventors of the printing press and the radio didn't
| intend for it to be used this way.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The inventors of the printing press and the radio didn't
| intend for it to be used this way.
|
| Well, at least the printing press was created to print the
| Bible - the "Gutenberg bible", named after its inventor,
| was the first mass produced book in the world [1], so it
| can be said that it was intended to get a large group of
| people behind an ideology.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible
| krige wrote:
| Actually, no. The Gutenberg bible was not the goal of the
| printing press, although it might have been a business
| savvy move for a variety of reasons. We know that,
| possibly even before profitable Church orders of
| indulgences, it was used to print poem(s), of which one
| is still preserved in a museum, predating the bible by
| about 5 years.
| klez wrote:
| Let me nitpick here. The fact that something was printed
| before the Bible doesn't prove that spreading the Bible
| was not, in fact, the primary motive to invent the
| printing press. It could just mean that Gutenberg went
| with smaller stuff first.
| brink wrote:
| > 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.
| ternnoburn wrote:
| 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.
| photonthug wrote:
| I mostly agree but propose another amendment: this is
| human nature under late-stage capitalism. Capitalism is
| pretty great in the beginning / middle, and can go on for
| a very long time in such a way that the interests of
| corporations, consumers, labor, and governments are all
| basically aligned. Late-stage is a very different game in
| all respects though.
|
| One risk we are facing now is that when most of the
| people alive have only seen the perversions of
| unregulated and unapologetic late-stage capitalism, they
| will think this is what it always has to look like. The
| impulse to switch to a polar opposite or burn everything
| down is ill advised but becomes hard to ignore.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| So many modern problems can be traced to 1971. [1] That
| is the year that the US defaulted on our obligations
| under Bretton Woods effectively ending the system and
| causing currencies to become completely fiat, enabling
| governments to effectively print unlimited funny money.
|
| This perverts capitalism so hard because you now end up
| with tens of trillions of dollars being dumped into the
| economy in horribly inefficient ways and so behaviors
| that make one likely to get some of this become far more
| economically relevant than just making the best product.
|
| Our current economic system is obviously completely
| unsustainable at this point and may well end up being one
| of the shortest lived economic experiments ever. That's
| particularly ironic because, as you alluded to, for most
| of everybody alive today this is just how it's always
| been!
|
| [1] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > So many modern problems can be traced to 1971. [1] That
| is the year that the US defaulted on our obligations
| under Bretton Woods effectively ending the system and
| causing currencies to become completely fiat, enabling
| governments to effectively print unlimited funny money.
|
| Correlation != causation. Yes, the end of Bretton-Woods
| certainly played its part, but there are other
| independent causes for most of the things that can be
| seen in the graphs - first and foremost, the oil crises
| of 1973 and later and the impact of the policies of
| Nixon, Reagan and Thatcher, as well as simple but massive
| technological progress that made the economical shifts
| (such as the decline in agriculture and industry as a
| share of the economy) possible in the first place.
|
| Automation and IT in general are the largest drivers of
| the latter - more efficient and powerful diesel engines
| made a lot of farm labor all but redundant, and IT
| enabled constructing and orchestrating ever larger and
| larger things, all the way from machines to global sized
| corporations, and the resulting efficiency gains of scale
| were mostly looted by the rich elites.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| There is one straight forward causal mechanism -
| excessive money printing sends the monetary supply
| skyrocketing and directly drives inflation.
|
| It's not hard to deal with inflation for the wealthy. You
| will generally have substantial wealth invested in
| inflation resistant appreciating assets, businesses can
| pass the inflation on to the customer, and so on.
|
| But for labor it's a different story. Not only do you
| suffer far more from price increases with little in the
| way of offsetting assets, but inflation allows wages to
| 'secretly' grow stagnant or even decrease.
|
| What I mean is that since e.g. 2020, the CPI has
| increased by 18%. So if you're not earning at least 18%
| more, you're more earning less than you did in 2020.
|
| Without inflation this doesn't work. Workers' raises
| would actually increase their real earnings.
|
| It's not hard to see how this single issue causally
| drives much of what happened in 1971 (and beyond.)
|
| Notably the excessive money printing began somewhat
| before 1971 which is what caused the default that
| eventually happened in 71.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The end of the Bretton-Woods agreement is not the root
| cause; that in and of itself is downstream of the US
| government prosecuting a bullshit war in Vietnam for the
| last decade and change. To be clear, this is not the US
| government "perverting capitalism", this is the
| capitalist class abandoning a fiscal constraint they
| found inconvenient in order to continue a pissing match
| against the existential threat of communism. There is no
| world in which capitalism stays under a "sound money"
| gold standard, stops fighting interventionist wars, and
| doesn't immediately either get cornered by the Soviet
| Union[0] or obliterated by an ascendant American left.
|
| With few exceptions, the government in the US acts on
| behalf of the capitalist class, not in opposition to it.
| There is no "pure" capitalism that would exist if the
| government just left free markets alone. _Capitalists_
| won 't leave the free market alone. Capitalists will take
| ownership and control over the chokepoints of the
| economy, government or no[1], granting them their own
| sovereign territory they can levy taxes on. This is a
| state - a monopoly on the legitimate use of force - whose
| territory is not of a city or a nation but of a market
| niche.
|
| This system is sustainable in some ways and not in
| others. _Yes_ , the market is distorted, which means it
| sucks for us, but the people who own the market-state
| don't actually feel that punishment. Which means they
| won't stop. Something has to actually _force_ them to
| stop.
|
| [0] Analogous to how the PRC has cornered the modern
| neoliberal west today.
|
| [1] To be clear, nation-states are also culpable in this
| process, both through sins of omission (failing to
| enforce antitrust law) and sins of commission (creating
| legal monopolies that form new economic chokepoints to
| conquer)
| zanellato19 wrote:
| Since the beginning of capitalism involved owning slaves,
| I find that very hard to believe.
|
| This romanticization of early stage capitalism is awful.
| What is late stage capitalism? Because civil rights and
| women rights have been pretty recent in the grand scheme
| of things, so in that sense Capitalism was upheld and had
| most of its lifetime in a scheme that crushed the
| majority of its people I find the theory of:
|
| > Capitalism is pretty great in the beginning
|
| really hard to swallow.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| In the early days of capitalism there was plenty of
| authentic scarcity for it to work against. Its problems
| probably weren't any less, but the juice was plausibly
| worth the squeeze because the alternatives were terrible.
|
| Now, most of us are working to maintain artificial
| scarcities, rather than mitigate authentic ones, and
| there are a lot more of us. So the a randomly chosen
| effect of our system is more likely to be negative
| because it's being chosen in a context that's very far
| from that long lost age when capitalism seemed necessary.
|
| I think that's what makes it late-stage, when it's found
| to have more side-effect than desired effect. Like a
| yeast which started turning sugar into alcohol at a
| prodigious rate but then later the alcohol concentration
| is toxic to it and more effort is spent trying to filter
| it out than anything to do with its original purpose.
| error_logic wrote:
| Capitalism is still necessary, we just forgot what it
| took to save capitalism from itself during the great
| depression and have opened ourselves up to turning into
| modern Russia.
| isk517 wrote:
| Not a die hard defender of capitalism by any means but
| this is a gross over simplification. If you look at all
| of the alternatives during the early stages of capitalism
| the vast majority had oppression as a built in feature.
| It didn't bring about utopia but it did offer the best
| advantages over the competition, up until the competition
| all went under.
| error_logic wrote:
| If everyone has destruction of the competition as their
| primary goal, everyone suffers. The voting system itself
| incentivizes that, and now competition is going to be
| driven underground and emerge destructively just as it
| did in the USSR.
|
| Extremes of left and right-wing politics _both_ require
| excessive force to implement.
|
| We need a voting system that will overcome the nash
| equilibrum of mutually assured destruction by assigning
| weights to the _outcomes_ of collective responsibility
| for our interactions, not just "be selfish or not" on an
| individual level or "stay in the frying pan or put some
| people in the fire" politically.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Can you expand on this weighting idea you have re:
| voting?
| error_logic wrote:
| 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.
| mongol wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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
| alliao wrote:
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| 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.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| 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.
| shombaboor wrote:
| 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
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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.
| graemep wrote:
| 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.
| arkh wrote:
| > 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.
| graemep wrote:
| > Nowadays internet is a daily tool for billions from all
| age
|
| Which we expected
|
| > It has been democratized.
|
| Anything but. More people using it not democratising it.
| More people sharing control is democratising.
|
| > It has empowered a lot of people
|
| Not as much as it should have, not anywhere like as much.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| It has been democratized in one angle, that of the
| technical ability to use the internet being taught and
| disseminated wide enough that people can use it, it has
| been privatized in another angle meaning that while
| people can travel through the internet it is through
| private grounds they travel, and private tolls they must
| pay.
| photonthug wrote:
| > 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.
| graemep wrote:
| I know young people who acknowledge this, but they do not
| see changing it as a realistic aim. They may be right.
|
| I think that like many other things, this reflects
| political and cultural expectations at large. The west
| has become centralising and centrally controlled. Unlike
| the Soviet Union that control is shared between the
| government and big business, but it is still far more
| centralised and regulated than the west was a few decades
| ago.
|
| This also relates to things like privacy, policing and
| security, education (the Act the British government wants
| to pass at the moment is a good example of the state
| taking more control, both from individuals and
| centralising its own institutions), economic policy,
| building infrastruture...... pretty much everything.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 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.
| kristopolous wrote:
| There was a time when techcrunch went from broadly covering
| technology to being 95% Twitter stories. It was pretty irritating
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Twitter took off because it is a journalism predigestion
| engine, and there's always someone saying something that you
| can make a headline out of.
|
| You used to have to go out and talk to people to find out
| "people are saying", but that costs time and money, and local
| journalists were being culled hard.
|
| With Twitter, you can can just choose and surface the juiciest,
| most unhinged takes and the clicks roll in. It's like crack for
| both sides.
|
| The downside is it sane-washes the lunacy by promoting some
| guy, who used to be propping up the bar at the local pub and
| explaining his theories to anyone unlucky enough to sit nearby,
| to national news-worthy opinion-haver.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Social media gives the unqualified and stupid a voice. It's
| the television of the Internet
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > With Twitter, you can can just choose and surface the
| juiciest, most unhinged takes and the clicks roll in.
|
| I think that says a lot more about the media than Twitter
| itself. Yes, it built upon the concept, but TV reports have
| been doing the same thing ever since the invention of the vox
| pop.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Yes, it's not specifically Twitter's fault that it can be
| can used it to mass produce "both sides" and ragebait at
| near-zero marginal cost.
|
| But IMO it's still a large part of why it took off. When it
| started in 2006, every media personality was almost
| immediately absolutely hooked on it. You couldn't move for
| columnists talking about what they'd seen there, gushing
| about how great it was and the news articles would embed
| anything that would get a click. Even my university
| newspaper had a satirical fake "what's happening on
| Twitter", mocking the overuse of Twitter as a source in
| news media. And that was the start of the academic year
| 2006-7: it was already a meme within the year of launch.
|
| Yes, vox pops have been around since it was realised that
| the person on the street might have telegenic hot takes,
| but you have to pack up, go out to a specific place and
| interview enough people there to get all the takes you
| need. That's tens of thousands in gear, a minimum of two
| people (camera operator, interviewer) plus a stack of
| editing. Twitter just meant you could sift tens of
| thousands of takes, possibly from all over the world and
| select for the maximum engagement. And because the tweets
| could and did go national, every kook out there was posting
| madly in hopes of getting noticed.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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
| alganet wrote:
| Seems like a reasonable assumption for that time.
| kristianc wrote:
| 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.
| Kiro wrote:
| More than half of the article is about the protocol being owned
| by a private company, so I don't think that's an oversight.
| kalleboo wrote:
| 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
| nobunaga wrote:
| Can we syop giving this guy attention? What a ridiculous post he
| is nothing but another VC that will Write anything to support
| himself, his investments and other VCs and people here who praise
| him for his 'insight' are not helping. What a ridiculous post
| that provides no value or insight.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| PG was/is completely wrong. Twitter was supposed to be the new
| SMS, or text message protocol, but that never happened. RSS is an
| example of a protocol in that space. At best, Twitter was/is an
| API.
|
| In a practical utility perspective Twitter was a pub/sub
| broadcast system in the social media space. It was slim, fast,
| and real time in a way the Facebook wasn't, due to a 140
| character limit. Yet, it never seemed to become more than 10% of
| Facebook and almost exclusively used only by people who were
| already heavy Facebook users.
|
| I remember the optimism around Twitter in 2007 because it was
| immediately evident that it was addictive to certain
| personalities. Some people just had to broadcast absolutely
| everything they did, often irrationally. Most everyone else tried
| to find a use for Twitter but couldn't. I know many early users
| that either abandoned or deleted their accounts before 2010.
|
| Eventually it just became a text broadcast interface via their
| client. That is good for people who want to build a following,
| but nobody else found a use for it. In that regard YouTube is the
| Twitter replacement but YouTube had value otherwise that Twitter
| never could.
| azangru wrote:
| > Most everyone else tried to find a use for Twitter but
| couldn't. I know many early users that either abandoned or
| deleted their accounts before 2010.
|
| So what changed? Why did twitter eventually become so popular?
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, define 'so popular'. It has never been in the top
| tier of social networks, usage-wise; it's generally been an
| order of magnitude off Facebook.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| "Popular" isn't quite the right word--"significant" might
| be a bit closer? In my country, at least, Twitter was
| adopted by the political, celebrity, and media class far
| more than Facebook ever was.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| If Facebook is the minimum for top-tier then there is only
| one top-tier social network. Being an order of magnitude
| off Facebook still makes the network one of the most
| popular social networks of all time.
| rsynnott wrote:
| The top tier is, essentially, Facebook, Instagram,
| Youtube and TikTok. These are used by literally billions
| of people; with the exception of China, virtually
| everyone on earth is exposed to them fairly directly.
|
| (Also Telegram and WhatsApp are a borderline case; they
| have the users, and they have social-network-like
| features, but most of the users are likely not _using_
| the social-network-like features; they just use them as
| messaging apps).
|
| The second tier is things like Snapchat, Twitter,
| LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, Quora; these are in the
| 300-600 million user range, so they're big, but you don't
| have the same sort of universal exposure.
| spunker540 wrote:
| Is HN third tier?
| zrail wrote:
| HN isn't even in the conversation.
| badgersnake wrote:
| WeChat also has billions of people.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| It was cheaper for mainstream media to write a tweet than
| issue a traditional press statement. But, that's it.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Least ye forget Trumpy Trump!
| chrisco255 wrote:
| 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.
| wink wrote:
| There's "popular", then there's "every conference talk has
| @name in it instead of an email" and then there's "heads of
| state publish stuff there first instead of POSSE".
|
| I'm not saying it wasn't popular, but it was not
| ubiquitous.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| 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.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| It's more ubiquitous than Facebook among people that
| matter in public discourse.
|
| Basically anyone with a professional presence that
| involves talking to the public, publishing papers, blogs,
| open source projects, etc still uses Twitter to talk to
| the public. Lot of these people have a hidden or
| deactivated Facebook, but public Twitter.
| vasco wrote:
| > POSSE, a social web and IndieWeb abbreviation for
| "Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere", a
| strategy for content producers.
|
| Had to google, might save someone time.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| 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.
| wbl wrote:
| Consumer surplus isn't captures. It was very amusing to
| see the accidental live tweeting of the OBL operation by
| some guy who heard helicopters. Twitter crowdsourced
| analysis of ISIS propaganda lead to at least one
| airstrike. Facebook can't say that.
| diggan wrote:
| > Twitter popularity is illusory. Its a broadcast system
| that the majority of its users, whether people or bots,
| solely sought to exploit for offsite metrics.
|
| Regardless of what you think people used Twitter for,
| there are real-world consequences from people using
| Twitter to communicate with each other. The Arab Spring
| is probably the biggest example for that, where people
| used it for activism, while the governments tried to ban
| it and survive the uprisings happening all around the
| Arab world.
|
| The use of social media (and Twitter specifically) is
| well studied as well, in case you're open to learning
| more:
| https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=arab+spring
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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.
| thom wrote:
| Hashtags became links around 2009, but I think it was just
| critical mass. Instead of yelling into the void, it became
| very easy to stumble upon a community or discussion around a
| hobby or event, and follows didn't require approval like
| friending on Facebook. Because Twitter lacked structure, you
| didn't have to find the right place to be or the right people
| to speak to, you'd just overlap due to retweets and hashtags.
| So it inverted in some ways the traditional structure of
| social networks, allowing for emergent and ephemeral events
| and places (and thereby main characters) to bubble up and
| recede. You could be part of something without ever having to
| be admitted. This was somewhat true of the blogosphere but
| the currency of trackbacks and comments there wasn't quite as
| freewheeling and expansive.
| chvid wrote:
| It got to a critical mass for political banter and quick
| news. Became the go to place for that and probably still is.
| hajhatten wrote:
| Twitter reached critical mass way before politics infected
| every post
| barrenko wrote:
| I think it's pretty simple, the world just evolved from the
| overly complicated tags and tagging in general.
| sim7c00 wrote:
| i think it got popular by people who noticed they can earn a
| lot of money by tricking others they have interesting things
| to say. (advertisement via influencers / trends / bots etc.).
| making it more popular would increase $$ on these things.
|
| i wasn't in the super earlybirds users, but this is what i
| get from having used it. like any other social media really.
| trick people that its cool somehow and start shoving crap
| down all their senses you can reach.
|
| platforms which don't do this, dont get big because they are
| kept small.
|
| (maybe a bit cynical post, but i don't think its wrong.)
| petra wrote:
| It doesn't have to have a use. It's an addictive form of
| enterntainment.
|
| Some like Twitter better, others like facebook better. It's
| just different ambience.
| dominicrose wrote:
| He's right about the fact that it's a company, owned by an
| individual. It's an impactfull company even if personaly as a
| non-user I've never seen any interest in it.
| anshulbhide wrote:
| I wouldn't say he was completely wrong. He was right about
| "Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been
| slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an
| advantage."
|
| Twitter / X punches above its weight (in terms of regular
| metrics like MAUs and revenue) in terms of cultural impact. One
| can argue that it was responsible for delivering the 2024
| election to Trump. This may have never happened if its original
| founders had tried to control and monetize it too soon.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Twitter And Reddit.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Of course, but that contained the seeds of its own
| destruction. In so doing, Twitter got mangled beyond
| usefulness or recognition. Bluesky would have done about as
| well as running your own Mastodon instance, even though
| Bluesky's another centralized network, except that Twitter
| destroyed itself to accomplish that goal.
| libertine wrote:
| Out of curiosity, do you consider Twitter and X the same
| thing? I'm asking because you are placing them side by side.
| maiar wrote:
| Twitter was a social accomplishment, not a technical one. It
| created its own new word (to tweet) and it did really feel,
| misleadingly, like a public utility rather than a private
| platform.
|
| It's also completely unreplicable today. There was a fun factor
| to it that justified starting out at zero followers--it was a
| game, so it was OK to start out at level 1-that isn't there on
| any of the replacements. "Platform" has become some new kind of
| social credit score and no one enjoys it anymore. We either
| become "content creators" and get into that grind or remain
| obscure and hope our employers never bother to deanonymize us.
| adampk wrote:
| You introduce a point I have not seen discussed before which
| is that these type of content distribution platforms go
| through a process to find their global minima.
|
| Twitter at the beginning you didn't know what it was going to
| be or what worked. Same with facebook and instagram. As time
| goes on these sites small features bring out their emergent
| properties of what 'works' there.
|
| And once it has been 'figured out', it is not as fun. You
| know what you can expect there and people go there but it is
| no longer a dynamic feeling. Like watching the NBA today, it
| has been 'figured out'.
|
| I think that may be what is the factor in the longevity of
| these platforms, once it is 'figured out', if what it is,
| appeals to enough of a large base.
|
| Tik tok may have gone further because it never really was
| 'figured out' in that larger way. The algorithm really could
| give you wildly different content and different 'trends'
| would show up so it never reached that static boring point.
|
| For these 'on the decline' sites you can almost predict
| exactly what you will see there and exactly what the
| discussions are. It is not longer an exciting TV show.
| integricho wrote:
| It never felt like a public utility, and it most definitely
| always felt like a corporate company-controlled private
| platform.
| diggan wrote:
| 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.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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.
| markisus wrote:
| I remember in the beginning twitter was supportive of third
| party developers using it for all sorts of different things
| using its free API. I guess they decided they didn't just want
| to be the protocol and closed off access.
| alt227 wrote:
| IMO that was the day that twitter died, when they pulled the
| access to the public API which was originally the USP of the
| service.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| > Twitter was supposed to be the new SMS, or text message
| protocol,
|
| I think you've missed his point. He doesn't mean a technical
| protocol, he means a conceptual one.
| diggan wrote:
| > and almost exclusively used only by people who were already
| heavy Facebook users.
|
| Not at all true, not just for myself (never was a heavy
| Facebook user, was a heavy Twitter user in the beginning), but
| for lots of people around me, especially fellow developers.
|
| > Some people just had to broadcast absolutely everything they
| did, often irrationally.
|
| Maybe we followed way different people, but I didn't see any of
| that stuff. Most of my feed was people launching projects, and
| technical discussions about various news/ideas.
|
| > Most everyone else tried to find a use for Twitter but
| couldn't. I know many early users that either abandoned or
| deleted their accounts before 2010.
|
| Lots of governments found use for it seemingly, and the
| citizens. Various levels of government in Spain still sends out
| more information via Twitter+RSS than they do on their own
| websites, for some weird reason. And it's been like that for
| years now.
|
| Fitting as well to use 2010 as an example, as that's right
| around when the Arab Spring was in full action, largely because
| of social media in general but particularly Twitter, which saw
| huge increases in user activity in the countries starting their
| revolts, where governments were scrambling to censor people yet
| Twitter remained available.
|
| > Eventually it just became a text broadcast interface via
| their client. That is good for people who want to build a
| following, but nobody else found a use for it.
|
| Yes, eventually Twitter became a pipe to push data through, but
| they didn't like that so they slowly killed the API by making a
| bunch of weird moves about it and shutting down 3rd party
| clients. Eventually, the only people left on the platform were
| people chasing followers, rather than people chasing
| stimulating conversations, which is what I got out of Twitter
| when I used it more.
| fourside wrote:
| I feel like you ignored the many qualifiers in the parent
| comment. I read it as painting broad generalizations rather
| than stating universal facts about all twitter users.
|
| It wasn't just the OP who noticed people posting fluff. It
| was a meme for a while that some people would recite their
| day to day via tweets. I remember conversations from everyday
| people on not knowing what to post on the app.
|
| Niche communities formed but its utility was limited beyond
| that as evidenced by the growth of FB, YouTube and Instagram
| while Twitter plateaued. U
| diggan wrote:
| > 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.
| egypturnash wrote:
| https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/04/23/le-twittre
|
| "I'm a twitter shitter!" - Penny Arcade, 2008
| 5040 wrote:
| 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.
| mrkramer wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazette
| fredgrott wrote:
| and it failed for that wrong SMS assumption....
| iambateman wrote:
| Your first paragraph disagrees with the article and the second
| paragraph essentially restates it.
|
| Just because it didn't become SMS or reach Facebook scale
| doesn't mean he was wrong.
|
| The way nearly all sizable organizations think about public
| communication includes Twitter and it's the de facto support
| channel for several industries.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I agree with this.
|
| Perception around Twitter in the late 2000s and early 2010s was
| completely different to what it was today or 5 years ago.
|
| I remember the tech buzz around Twitter where every VC
| considered it the next big thing because everyone they knew was
| on Twitter. It was a really classic case of "bubble think" (to
| me).
|
| Twitter has never gone mainstream. It's used as a system for
| press releases, journalists and a few other niches. I really
| wonder if the journalism niche will dry up given the security
| concerns of who can read their DMs but that hasn't happened
| yet.
| bumchaks wrote:
| According to a discussion I had in person with Rabble, this is
| the correct answer. It was an evolution of TXT2MOB which was
| intended for flash protests. X is such a far far cry from the
| original intent.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > Twitter was supposed to be the new SMS, or text message
| protocol, but that never happened. RSS is an example of a
| protocol in that space.
|
| Did you mean RCS instead of RSS? I can see it going either way.
| redmajor12 wrote:
| Twitter was never slim or lightweight. At the time, I remember
| checking its page weight only to find the website loaded over
| 100k of scripts and other cargo. With a 140 character limit,
| one can only conclude that the other 99.9% was malware and anti
| user algorithms, probably in an attempt to replicate Facebook.
| Smithalicious wrote:
| What kind of character limit would justify 100k of scripts?
| camgunz wrote:
| I think there's no sense of the word where Twitter is a new
| protocol. Nevermind the technical HTTP stuff (Twitter is no
| analog to TCP/IP, SMTP, or HTTP), it's just a microblogging
| website?
|
| > The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you
| don't specify the recipients
|
| This describes all websites everywhere. It also describes NNTP.
| afro88 wrote:
| > This describes all websites everywhere
|
| You can't "follow" websites and get a uniform chronological
| feed of updates. That's partly why RSS exists, though it also
| doesn't give you a uniform feed of updates. That has to be
| constructed client side by downloading all updates for all
| subscribed feeds.
|
| > It also describes NNTP
|
| Which also doesn't provide a uniform feed of updates.
| camgunz wrote:
| > 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.
| nailer wrote:
| Twitter almost maps to finger (the protocol) perfectly.
| ribadeo wrote:
| This Paul Graham fella seems to be a trumpet of bad ideas. His
| hype-takes on tech influence laypeoples notions of the world. His
| failure to clarify how tech functions is misleading.
|
| Techne is the Greek word for hand. Xitter is a megaphone owned by
| and fully utilized by a misanthropic bully. In no way shape or
| form is it a voice of the people. It is weighted multicast media
| with owners and nobility and a feed and an algorithm for
| prioritizing the owner and the nobility in the feed.
|
| A protocol? Ha! We knew it wasn't a protocol or layer for
| anything before the so-called Arab Spring.
|
| How many bad ideas has Paul Graham defended?
|
| Despite the continuing proliferation of crypto-currency pyramid
| schemes, and their continuing ability to fool investors, they are
| a net negative for a planet in the throes of a climate meltdown.
|
| Despite the reverent tones of baffled journalists speaking of
| LLMs as AI, despite the tech CEOs claiming that developers will
| be replaced tomorrow, anyone who knows anything about LLMs rolls
| their eyes, amd yet Paul will reliably write apologies for yet
| another destructive wave of investments in lousy scamware
| companies.
|
| The king of bad ideas, chewed into bite size pieces for the
| masses.
|
| What do i know, I'm obviously very unhip in this sort of
| fabricated false world.
| simianparrot wrote:
| My impression is Paul, and many like him, have lived in a world
| of abstractions for so long their brain believes it's real. And
| since they wield influence on a lot of people, their brains
| spouting such nonsense can _make_ it <<real>> in the markets.
| Markets which are themselves an abstraction entirely separated
| from the reality they are meant to represent.
|
| But at some point reality catches up with everyone, but it will
| be at the cost of people hidden by the abstractions before it
| hits people like PG.
| rsolva wrote:
| ActivityPub is today what Paul thought he saw in Twitter in 2009.
| Except AP it is not owned by a private company, which in
| hindsight, seems like a critical factor if a protocol should be
| able to survive and thrive for decades.
| graypegg wrote:
| 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.
| secretsatan wrote:
| Twitter indirectly kicked off a love of programming in me again
| after an aquantance said he was a programmer for writing a script
| to unknowingly aid with gold pump and dump campaigns
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Twitter was such a big deal because it digitised the social
| networks of analogue media. Pretty much anybody on TV did well on
| Twitter whether they made their name in politics, sports, news or
| reality TV.
|
| Nobody else will ever be able to do this because those analogue
| social networks don't exist anymore in a way that's separate from
| Twitter.
| Havoc wrote:
| Bizarre definition of a "protocol" as it stands today
|
| Did twitter have some sort of open API back then or what was he
| talking about?
| Clubber wrote:
| Before computer science, it was defined as a way of speaking or
| acting between people in certain situations:
|
| >the official procedure or system of rules governing affairs of
| state or diplomatic occasions.
|
| _" protocol forbids the prince from making any public
| statement in his defense"_
|
| >the accepted or established code of procedure or behavior in
| any group, organization, or situation.
|
| _" what is the protocol at a conference if one's neighbor
| dozes off during the speeches?"_
| Havoc wrote:
| Given that he's talking about TCP I don't think he meant
| diplomatic protocols here
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| Twitter is popular for the same reason Tiktok is, most people
| can't read without great effort.
|
| Fifty-four percent of Americans read below the sixth grade level.
| The character limit and resulting lack of nuance made it an ideal
| platform for the modern semi-literate user.
|
| Tiktok is obviously even better, as it requires no literacy.
| liontwist wrote:
| I think Paul wrote a genuine post here, but let's remember that
| he explicitly uses his media and readership to promote his
| investments. This is PR.
| d--b wrote:
| Remember that this was back in the day when Twitter had a failry
| large number of users, but anyone that wasn't on it just shrugged
| and said stuff like "I don't want to know what people eat for
| breakfast".
|
| It wasn't obvious at all that Twitter would become something of a
| news platform.
|
| PG sort of made something up talking about protocols. But it was
| probably because of that protocol that Twitter, and news feeds in
| general took off.
|
| So I think PG was not too far off on that one.
| recursive wrote:
| I remember getting notified that bike race results were posted by
| twitter. My phone didn't support apps. This seemed like such a
| cool use case. I understood that better than any of the
| subsequent iterations of twitter. I never learned the syntax of
| the messages or how to navigate the app. It all felt foreign.
|
| But pushing a message to a group of people that manage their own
| subscription via SMS was golden for a minute.
| gist wrote:
| > 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.
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