I wanna know who supplanted PM with DM.

It's PM god damnit!

Most likely a project manager.

PMs imply privacy.

They're also known as "Personal" Messages

Never heard this before, but personal seems like another word for private in this case.

From Wikipedia:

"A private message, personal message, or direct message (abbreviated as PM or DM) is a private communication channel between users on any given platform. "

They are all private in terms of intended recipients. They're not cryptographically protected.

"Slid into their DMs"... Arrrgh!

On and Off I try with Twitter, but it just doesn't work for me. I would delete my account, but there's so many companies and services who are only accessible via their Twitter accounts, that without an ability to message them, you can't raise an issue.

As an interesting (well, to me) side note, a few months ago I migrated away from being 'Jaruzel' on many sites to 'MattOwen_UK'. Within 24 hours of switching my account name on Twitter, someone else had grabbed @jaruzel. I was surprised at the speed that happened.

Dungeon Master sounds pretty cool in my books!

It’s too bad the system isn’t collectively owned by the users.

Also retweets. And quote tweets.

And they made nearly every one of those things worse somehow. It's almost impressive.

Threads, too. And Favorites was a feature for bookmarking but users turned it into a Like button. Also I believe their bird logo was bought at iStock.

Even the blue bird apparently

The same goes for all social medias. They're all-user generated content.

I don't think the GP was talking about content so much as how Twitter's features were shaped in the early years, by formalizing how users were creatively adapting the site. Twitter stood out that way.

Not true at all - stories ala Snapchat were not invented by users.

Twitter was (but no longer) awesome by allowing folks to consume plain text with socially agreed upon meaning rather than features of the client. It's my feeling that instead of piling on more metadata into the posts, they could have done something more similar to RES on reddit, and expanded the text limit.