How to Blow Up a Timeline
<i>Twitter hit upon some narrow product-market fit despite itself. It has never seemed to understand why it worked for some people or what it wanted to be, and how those two were related, if at all. But in a twist of fate that is often more of a factor in finding product-market fit than most like to admit</i><p>Hear, hear!<p>Most internet companies have no deep or useful understanding of how they pioneered their early successes, or how to tackle the widespread growth decline that they are now encountering. Reddit is another fine example of this effect.<p>I think the one thing Musk achieved in his <i>folie a un</i> is putting Twitter on the observation deck for long enough that this fact became painfully obvious to many.<p>I think what we&#x27;re learning - in fact, what we already knew in the days of newsgroups, and IRC - is &quot;if you build it, they will come&quot;. And &#x27;it&#x27; can be pretty much any medium that removes the potential inconveniences of connecting with other human beings and voicing opinions to them.<p>There really is no product beyond the people and the content. Google did well to realise this and turn itself into a huge parasite pretty much from day one: search aggregated the product, analytics kept tabs on what it was up to, and ads exploited both of the former.<p>That&#x27;s why we will continue to see VC money and modern social media companies throw themselves at the wall like spaghetti and, eventually for most, off the cliff like lemmings.<p>The current fracture in social media may be the best thing that&#x27;s ever happened to the internet (<i>a few pennies in the hyperbole jar, sure</i>). Look how much competition we have now in the &#x27;let humans get their opinions and memes to other humans&#x27; space: Mastodon, BlueSky, Lemmy, Squabbles, and so on.<p>Sadly capitalism will once again inevitably demand a winner and we&#x27;ll be back at whatever Twitter&#x2F;Reddit 2.0 is but at least there&#x27;s always hope for the cycle to begin again.