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Twitter was a social accomplishment, not a technical one. It created its own new word (to tweet) and it did really feel, misleadingly, like a public utility rather than a private platform.

It’s also completely unreplicable today. There was a fun factor to it that justified starting out at zero followers—it was a game, so it was OK to start out at level 1–that isn’t there on any of the replacements. “Platform” has become some new kind of social credit score and no one enjoys it anymore. We either become “content creators” and get into that grind or remain obscure and hope our employers never bother to deanonymize us.






It never felt like a public utility, and it most definitely always felt like a corporate company-controlled private platform.

What time frame are we talking about here?

There was definitely a period in time where you could use Twitter as public infrastructure, you could push data from anywhere with HTTP to it, and read it the same way. The firehouse was free to use too at one point, with a large ecosystem of (some even FOSS) 3rd party clients.

But then they killed that, and the ecosystem basically evaporated over night. I could understand if you started using Twitter after that, you'd get that feeling you described.


> There was definitely a period in time where you could use Twitter as public infrastructure, you could push data from anywhere with HTTP to it, and read it the same way.

Even at that time Twitter was not public infrastructure, but corporate-owned infrastructure that was temporarily a little bit more open than others regarding unofficial clients.

I thus know not one single person who at that time considered Twitter to be public infrastructure, since it simply never was.


It felt like public infrastructure. I don’t think anyone mistook it as such but its openness probably made many of us forget, at times, that it was private and things could change in an instant.

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.




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