In early 2000-2007 I felt technology optimism (things like Digg, slashdot) about new websites and there was a hopefulness about new technology (file sharing) The spirit of new technology that "there is something new" and the "this is how things work from now on" (WAP websites, floppy disks, guest books, simple 1megabyte web hosting, geocities, fan sites, myspace, WhatsApp on cheap phones).
In other words, every new thing was something that may have been before but it was "this is how things work from now on". The platform defines and upholds the character of interaction. Twitter and Reddit do that and as pg highlights how twitter recipients is by algorithm. (From OP: "where you don't specify the recipients.")
I have fond memories of writing HTML from magazines and in the eras before me it was handwriting text games into BASIC interpreters.
The optimism and hopefulness got crushed under the boot of money. The spirit of sharing got crushed under the boot of copyright. The joy and excitement got crushed under the boot of metrics and engagement. In an alternate timeline, things could have gone a different way, but because the same old money and same old power structures controlled the direction of progress, we got the timeline where the Internet turned into Addictive Pay-per-view Disney.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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.
> say I’m in traffic on the highway. Searching 401
Takes a lot of good faith to not think the above implies they’re searching twitter while sitting in traffic in a car they’re driving. They never said “I can ask a passenger to search…” or anything of the sort.
English is not my first language and I clearly understand that it implies that that-person wants to know why the cars are not moving (traffic) while sitting in a car as a driver or passenger.
Maybe he's interested in realtime offers for cryptocurrencies or 1/10 of a thread with videos you wouldn't believe! Premise was good, execution terrible, and ever since Musk took over it's suffocated in spam with a spice of right wingery to it.
Paul Graham has always been the poster child for the highly competent leader who has no idea what the people in his industry actually do or how things actually work. We all probably have experience with a boss (or perhaps your boss's boss) who runs the show with complete ignorance of what the people below them actually do.
He only ever got SSL working on his personal website in 2023. Got a valid cert installed just in time to avoid his site breaking entirely on chrome-based browsers (without the explicit http://).
And he thought that Twitter, a fairly barebones Ruby webapp at the time, was a protocol in and of itself and could be compared to HTTP and SMTP, or even TCP/IP!?
Twitter was just HTTP over TCP/IP. It was never a protocol. It was a website. Did this guy thing PHPBB was a protocol? Does he think Wikimedia is a protocol?
It's honestly astounding that the man has a Doctorate in Computer Science and co-developed the programming language that runs HN.
> 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.
(...plus came up with Bayesian spam filtering, plus wrote the book on Lisp macros, plus revolutionized startup investing).
It's only astounding because your assumptions are false. pg is nothing like a pointy-haired boss. What he is is a highly curious and lazy (in the good sense of the word) hacker who is bored by busywork. How you managed to arrive at the inverse image of that is such a feat of pathfinding that I'd be interested in the steps by which you got there.
Dang, I really respect your work here and in general you do a great job, but I think you overstepped here in auto-collapsing this comment thread and replying (edit: To clarify for anyone coming to this later, the GP comment was collapsed by moderator action at the time of writing. It is now flagged by user flags, which I think is entirely appropriate.)
PG gets a lot of flack on HN, some comments better-considered than others. Most of us are able to tell the difference and file the mindless attacks appropriately. We don't need you to rush to his defense, and in fact you doing so is likely counterproductive.
You've often said that you take a policy of moderating less, not more, when YC is involved. This interaction and moderation action breaks that pattern, which is harmful.
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.
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.
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.
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 many times 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.
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.
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?
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.
As a relative "youngin" (I'm 27), at what point did we make the shift from protocols to corporate-owned ecosystems? What caused it? The rise of the VC funding model? The Silicon Valley ethos of "build an MVP, grow quickly without making money," and users adopting corporate owned solutions because they're easy?
If so, how do we dismantle this? Not from a technical perspective -- atproto for example seems powerful enough -- but from a social/economic/mindshare perspective.
I'm a generation older. To me, there were three big shifts.
One was that Facebook/Twitter/etc. proved that web publishing could be made more convenient by making it more centralized, and that access to an audience was, in some way, more important than access to publishing tools. No matter how good open web publishing tools got, they couldn't compete with Facebook et. al. at providing some access to an audience, even if that audience was as small as your friends and family.
The second was a shift in who developed "internet infrastructure." In the 80s and 90s (and before), it was mainly academics working in the public interest, and hobbyist hackers. (Think Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, IETF for web/internet standards, or Dave Winer with RSS.) In the 00s onward, it was well-funded corporations and the engineers who worked for them. (Think Google.) So from the IETF, you have the email protocol standards, with the assumption everyone will run their own servers. But from Google, you get Gmail.
The third -- and perhaps most important shift -- was the move from desktop software to web + mobile software as the primary computing platform for most people. Such that even if you were a desktop user, you did most of your computing in the browser. This created a whole new mechanism for user comfort with proprietary fully-hosted software, e.g. Google Docs. This also sidelined many of the efforts to keep user-facing software open source. Such that even among the users who would be most receptive to a push for open protocols and open source software, you have strange compromises like GitHub: a platform that is built atop an open source piece of desktop software (git) and an open source storage format meant to be decentralized (git repo), but which is nonetheless 100% proprietary and centralized (e.g. GitHub.com repo hosting and GitHub Issues).
You ask how to "dismantle" this. I've long pondered the same question. I am not sure it can be dismantled. It doesn't seem like these shifts can be undone. Where I've personally ended up is that small communities of enthusiast programmers and power users can embrace open source, open protocols, and decentralization for its obvious benefits, but that it won't ever be a mass market again.
It's worth keeping in mind a few bright points: email, RSS/podcasts, the web
Email: One of the oldest parts of the Internet. Very open standard. Federated. Largely ad-free. Little lock-in (Though @gmail.com addresses are a potential serious risk). Lots of attempts (by Slack, etc.) to "kill" email because no corporation controls it.
RSS/podcasts: RSS (or Atom or whatever) should be way more popular, but it still lives on through podcasts where anyone can publish anywhere and subscribe to anything. hough Spotify and Apple are trying hard to lock things down, they haven't succeeded yet.
The web: Exists and is still largely open. Efforts to turn everything into a closed app haven't succeeded yet and attempts to lock down the web (e.g. web attestation) have failed so far.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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:
Our age gap is less then 10 years but here's my two cents: laziness/convenience. Back in the 90's and 2000's, you had to be ready to spend a lot of time fiddling with setups and maintenance as well as some MAJOR early days security flaws(think the IRC days). Corporate-owned ecosystems solved that problem: you log in and forget about it. They won with what some people call user experience. The lower the entry barrier, the quicker something picks up. Back when I was in school I was the biggest Nokia fanboi and even then I acknowledged that downloading a shady jar file and installing it on my phone was iffy. At a later stage when I was a bit older and could afford it, I got my first Android phone and the existence of a marketplace was a breath of fresh air. The problem is that few people(annoyingly even now) fail to realize or admit that those types of centralizations put handcuffs on your wrists the moment you say "OK, that works for me". Whether that's social logins, cloud providers, services or anything else - it's all the same. For example, if today, OpenAI decided to close off their API's for good, I recon tens if not hundreds of thousands of "AI" startups will collapse immediately since they fully rely on OpenAI's API's. Same with AWS, GCP, Azure or any other provider. And as we see with the current fiasco with twitter, tiktok and bambu labs just to name a few from the past two days, it is abundantly clear that people are in dire need of backups. As much as I used to find google drive and docs convenient, I've personally moved away and self-host everything now. The only thing I rely on(and only as a backup plan to access my home network) is a VPN I host over at Hetzner. But again - this is my backup.
Whether the corporations saw that as an opportunity at an early stage or they were at the right place, at the right time, I can't say. I'm more leaning towards the latter since I've worked at corporations and success in those environments is most commonly a moderately-educated gamble.
Yeah, I think it's clear that laziness/convenience is the answer.
You're absolutely right about people needing backups -- but ofc selfhosting is too huge a hurdle to expect most folks to embark on.
I wonder what can be done to make the "better" options easier. Can this even be done by the private sector alone given the incentives of capitalism? I'm unsure.
Given how many things we've seen happen in the social media space back-to-back (Elon taking over Twitter, Meta pandering to the new US governing party, TikTok's ban), I can't imagine these events will slow down. That at least fills me with hope that more people will wonder "does it have to be this way?" ...obviously that won't be enough for true mass adoption, but it's a start
* 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.
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.
Also, around ~2000 or so, most of the "big" movies ran their own websites. There's the infamous Space Jam site [1], but there was even websites made for relatively obscure movies like Pretty Persuasion (whose URL I cannot seem to find but I remember looking at it when it was relevant).
I remember when MySpace came along, I started to see movie studios started creating dedicated MySpace pages for their films instead of dedicated sites.
It makes sense; MySpace was free and had built-in marketing via their "friends" system. You're not messing with hosting, or domain names, or even programmers, and unlike other free hosting systems, it wasn't considered lame to have `Check Us Out On MySpace` (whereas it would have been considered lame to have `geocities.com/myMovie`).
Apply this to most other industries, and you have what we have now.
It'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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Books on the impact of media and society are also worth considering. Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eisenstein#The_Print...>, as well as earlier works by McLuhan, Harold Innis, and Walter J. Ong. I'm increasingly convinced that changes to information technology and systems, from the advent of speech, writing, and maths to the present, have absolutely profound impacts on the societies in which they emerge (and those proximate to them). They act as power-multipliers on other technological advances, notably in agriculture, metallurgy, fuels, mechanics, electromagnetism, etc., but even on their own are highly underappreciated.
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."
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).
I hate to be blandly negative, but this deserves (deserved?) it. This is dumb. Message boards had this property, as did blogs. There is nothing meaningful in this short essay.
Edit: if you think message boards and blogs were too specific, here are a couple of other media with this property: radio and television.
i hate to be blandly negative on your comment, but jesus christ. pg made this call in april 2009, and twitter turned out to be a $40b company that may have potentially swung multiple elections. and you are here in 2025 taking the face value argument that "Message boards had this property, as did blogs.", and ignoring the fact that when you post things on twitter both important people AND the unwashed masses actually read it, and they are all hooked on a unique form factor only twitter owns. threads and mastodon and truth social can tout bullshit MAUs all they like but only twitter is twitter.
sure, pg didnt communicate with the hindsight specificity i just did, but he was directionally correct for the approximately correct reason (without explicitly saying that "any new protocol must have critical adoption to be meaningful" but that is implied in pgland).
comparing twitter to TCP/IP, SMTP and HTTP is dumb beyond belief, regardless of how much money the person made betting on the right horse for the wrong reasons
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).
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.
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.
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.
If I remember correctly early on there was both the firehose of all tweets you could access and easy to call apis to post tweets. So there were a set of programmatic standards to control how you could communicate, which sounds close enough to me for a blog post.
But only if memory serves correctly, I do not know the timelines off the top of my head.
The Twitter of 2009 was a rather different beast to the Twitter of the 2020s. Open APIs were a big part of it, and the idea that people would upload all sorts of random data into their feeds which others could tap into.
(In practice, it never went much further than running apps, book reviews or calorie counters).
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
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.
reply