My take on it is Twitter just isn't, as a company, very good at making software. This is from external observation and a couple of reports from friends who used to work there.

Yeah it really feels like IBM in the sense that it had some really amazing engineers that built the company up, and after they left, they have just been resting on those laurels ever sense. What have they truly innovated recently?

The division they have helped foment in the US is pretty impressive.

People have been this divided for a long time. Social Media just helps exhume it better. Started in the 50s.

My sense is that lots of divided people (mainly fringe) have basically been silenced for years. Twitter has made it possible for those people to have a voice and more problematic made it super easy for malicious actors to mimic those people's ideas to make the situation worse than it really is.

My (probably unpopular) opinion is that they simply shouldn't have a voice. Twitter is bad for society period.

I feel similarly. Liberal ideals would say that everyone having a global voice is a good thing, but we haven't really seen things play out that way since social media became so dominant. At least not in the US.

Though it doesn't help, of course, that TwitFaceTube are designed to maximize engagement at the expense of everything else, which encourages inflammatory content. Maybe if they didn't, we wouldn't have this problem.

Idk, the particular flavor of outrage varies greatly depending on the platform. 4chan, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, all of the them are drastically different platforms with cultures that emergently form from early design decisions like anonymity, One-to-many vs many-to-many communication paradigms, thread layouts, and moderation decisions.

How do you figure the '50s? Times we've been more united than we are right now seem more the exception than the norm, to me, since the founding of the country. Hell we haven't even had an elected member of the Federal government kill or attempt to kill someone over a political dispute in a while.

If division can be fomented by giving everyone a megaphone, then the people were already divided, they just didn't know it. I don't agree with all of Twitter's moderation, but this is a symptom, not the disease.

If your system of government is not robust to 280-character text messages ... perhaps the problem is not the messages.

I think this misses the point. The division isn't within the government; it's between individuals.

And I don't think the power of short messages is specific to the United States

Where did I talk about the government?

When I worked at Twitter, we just had a lot of competent engineers fixing the scaling problems left by the amazing engineers.

Is it "really amazing engineers" or good management / culture that matters? You can get a "really amazing engineers" and put them in an environment where they can't exploit their talents.

They’ve made some pretty impressive inroads on user profile security, specifically on company best practices to blow it off entirely

This is of course anecdotal, but a friend of mine worked as an engineer at Twitter, and she said there was more focus on appearing as though they were industry leading engineers than there was focus on actual engineering quality.

After Twitter got hacked by a 17 year old who obtained admin access to accounts...I don't think it's anecdotal anymore.

Twitter didn't get hacked by a 17 year old lol, the 17 year old bought access to the 0day

I think people might find it interesting on how Twitter was formed:

> Scandal and Betrayal: The Story of How Twitter Started

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8N0xN0ihMA

As an avid user of the product, I agree.

> Once a social platform is around long enough, it becomes the thing that old people use (since its original users grow older with it)

I think this is true, but it's worth also considering the factor of how well a platform is able to keep its users segregated into their own echo chambers wherein they feel as though the platform as a whole meets their standard of what is hip and cool

Take Instagram for example. Ten years on from its inception, it's still very, very popular with 18-24 year olds isn't it? Simultaneously though, as I'm sure many Americans with a ~45 year old mother will be able to attest to, it somehow maintains very strong popularity with middle aged women too.

My idea as to how it maintains its general appeal while catering to these two disparate audiences is that its software mechanisms are carefully designed to keep both audiences separated from each other. Consequently both feel as though it's 'their' platform.

It seems that when a social media platform fails to build an intergenerational iron curtain like this, you end up with something like Facebook, where both generations gravitate away from the platform.

I admit I could be completely off the mark here though, and applying my personal experience more broadly than I should.

I wonder if they use IG because there isn't any alternative.

Let's say that someday there is a new "teenstagram" launched, and they paid some teenager influencers to drop content there and some cool kids to use and promote it.

In my experience as teens, "it's uncool to use a same platform as the one your grandma use".

Ever heard of redesign? Vine needed it. TikTok didn't win against Vine because of it was new. It had better UI, UX, better features better strategy overall.

Somebody could make new Facebook but people wound't move to it cause Facebook has 15 years head start and gigantic social graph.

Tiktok didn’t really exists at the same timeline as Vine so I wouldn’t say Tiktok won against it.

Vine had over 200 million active users and Twitter didn't see any potential?! TikTok has over 800 monthly active users in 3 years. I don't know what Twitter was thinking but Vine had a lot of potential. TikTok wouldn't be so big if Vine was kept alive and managed well.

Twitter was thinking: “a free video sharing app is crazy expensive.. we’re burning all our capital on an app that will be near impossible to profit from.”

TikTok is as far as I can tell not profitable either, and they’ve been burning hundreds of millions on ads as well. I’m guessing the CCP will gladly spend a few billions to have a social media platform that’s used all over the world.

Is the CCP funding ByteDance? Anyway a quick google suggests they made a tidy 3 billion profit (ByteDance as a whole) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/tiktok-bytedance-profit.html

Key point is ByteDance as a whole (I haven’t been able to find anything to indicate that TikTok itself is profitable), which happens to be a privately held company. ByteDance’s CEO have also gone on record saying they had a “weak” implementation of Xi Jinping Thought, and promised that ByteDance would “further deepen cooperation” with the Chinese Communist Party to better promote its policies.

>there may be a human-oriented life cycle to these sorts of social apps. Once a social platform is around long enough, it becomes the thing that old people use

Precisely, although I think it's 50/50 between "what old people use" and "where the corporations live". IG is being used less and less because it's turned into the Home Shopping Network, places like TikTok are popular because corporate interests haven't shown up yet (basically no ads and very few sponsored posts / product placement).

> IG is being used less and less because it's turned into the Home Shopping Network

I'm not so sure about this. 80% of my communication happens through Instagram DMs, and I haven't heard a single complaint about advertisements, or Instagram at all.

Rather, I see friends browsing content on TikTok (rather than on IG), then re-sharing it through DMs. They browse on TikTok because its For You Page curation makes finding interesting and entertaining content easier than on any other platform I've seen.

I'm sure it depends a lot on region and social circles. I work in tech, and IG is basically dead other than interacting with businesses with my peers. I also have two sisters in high school who confirm IG isn't really a thing anymore for the younger crowd.

> Under this theory, there's nothing Twitter could have done with Vine to make it beat Tik Tok, since a crucial feature of Tik Tok is simply that it's new.

Periodically launch a new instance of the site, on a different URL, with a different colour scheme and an independent userbase?

Everyone calls me stupid every time I bring up the fact that Twitter had a better TikTok before TikTok in Vine. The blinding fact is that Twitter has never once made a shrewd business movie in ~15 years and is piloted by nimrods.

Even now, they could bring Vine back and compete with TikTok toe-to-toe but they’re evidently allergic to making sound business decisions.

"Everyone calls me stupid every time I bring up the fact that Twitter had a better TikTok before TikTok in Vine"

The view that "Vine was tiktok before tiktok" is extremely common. Vine was very popular, was a trend beachhead, but it just wasn't something Twitter was really interested in so they shanked it.

Speaking of which, I didn't realize that musical.ly morphed into TikTok. I knew musical.ly only from Paymoneywubby - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmphkNDosg

IMHO, this course of events also paints a likely outcome had Twitter acquired Instagram instead of Facebook.

Instagram became dominant because it had Facebook's engineering and infrastructure resources. Had they fallen into Twitter's hands, it would be little more than a camera app and a way to embed photos into tweets and or been shut down.

TikTok is as far as I know not profitable. There’s a limit how much investor money you can burn on an app that isn’t making money. But I would say it’s safe to assume the CCP will gladly burn billions to ensure they have a social media platform that’s used worldwide.

American VCs have lived and died on the “customer count first, profitability later” mantra for the better part of a decade.

A crucial feature of new things is that they are often better. Not all new things beat incumbents. Only the good ones win.

It's easier when the incumbent shuts down before the competition even begins...

How much money was Vine losing or making? I honestly am not aware of their unit economics prior to the shutdown.

If I had a guess why Facebook has stayed around as long as it has.

It started with college students. That quickly became adults that continued to use it into their careers. Skipping the myspace teen generation fad cycle.

History maps to that theory but I would like to think it's coincidental and has more to do with the acumen and aggressiveness of the founders than of any natural generational churn.

just as a note, tiktok was not an entirely new service. they bought and then transformed musical.ly.

Technically, the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, is what the US Tiktok was based off of, and Douyin was launched in 2016 prior to the 2017 musical.ly acquisition.

But yes, US TikTok is absolutely built off of musical.ly services. A lot of the TikTok API URLs still have musical.ly domains.

Couldn’t they just rebranded it? Like venmo:paypal?

You cannot believe that Twitter did something terribly stupid?

“Twitter is such as mess — it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.” - Mark Zuckerberg

facebook was a social network. now it's just a phonebook. Instagram has replaced the social network portion of it for most people. People that want to stay connected but don't want to be social use facebook only. Tiktok is a viral video app. Just like Vine was. Vine failed and left a hole. Tiktok went in and filled that hole. That's it.