> Most everyone else tried to find a use for Twitter but couldn’t. I know many early users that either abandoned or deleted their accounts before 2010.
So what changed? Why did twitter eventually become so popular?
Twitter was almost immediately popular and it stayed popular, it's a revision of history to claim that it wasn't or that most people abandoned it in 2010. Twitter famously had scaling issues that resulted from demand for its use, and when the server was overloaded, they would print an image of a whale being carried by birds, the infamous "Twitter fail whale" (https://business.time.com/2013/11/06/how-twitter-slayed-the-...).
You can see in the article above that even in 2013 they were talking about Twitter's rise to prominence beginning in 2008.
Twitter was/is a fantastic resource for one-to-many social media communication. Celebrities flocked to it. Media publications analyzed it and ran stories on the platform. The API used to be quite open and basically free so it plugged into countless apps and was often used in hackathon projects. Hash tags became signal for trending topics. Even the public '@' tag (don't 'at' me bro) basically came from Twitter (or was at least, popularized by it). It was a phenomenon. Reaching 10% of Facebook's reach is hardly anything to scoff at (who had hit 1 billion users around the same time), and dwarfed the population of nearly every nation on earth. Twitter had outsized influence on the public conversation because you could get a message out to millions from a single account, which wasn't possible with Facebook due to friend requests (at the time, Facebook was more purely a friend-to-friend network and pretty sure you were restricted to at most 5K friends).
Twitter didn't even require a login to view Tweets. Embedded views in other apps helped to cement its virality.
There's "popular", then there's "every conference talk has @name in it instead of an email" and then there's "heads of state publish stuff there first instead of POSSE".
I'm not saying it wasn't popular, but it was not ubiquitous.
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.
This is what I call a failure to measure, or what smart people call bias. To ascend your opinion from silly to valid you only have to qualify two things:
How much more ubiquitous in this regard is Twitter than Facebook (as a percentage) and what real world impact does that number have?
People, in general, tend to invent their own reality. There are smart terms to describe that behavior from a variety of causes but dummies like me just tend to call it bullshit.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I'm talking about popularity, not profitability. These are two vastly different things. That Twitter failed to convert its platform to become the advertising behemoths that Google and Facebook are is a failure of its business strategy and execution. The social network itself remained extremely popular and from your article:
> Twitter has 421 million monthly active users, adding 20 million in 2023
It's as popular is its ever been, however, there's been some rotation in demographics I suspect.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
It's a stretch to call YouTube a social network along with the messaging apps. Facebook & Instagram are two products by the same company where social identity is literally shared across them. If your top tier is Meta + Chinese apps then we're just going to have to disagree.
"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.
So what changed? Why did twitter eventually become so popular?