> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.