Twitter is basically a broadcast platform for people who matter "in the real world". It gives them an easy way to reach their audience on their own terms without any middlemen.
As a centralized platform, Twitter creates more value for those who follow than those who broadcast. Because the broadcasters are primarily known for something other than the "content" they create on the platform, they would find their audience anywhere. Followers, on the other hand, can conveniently follow many people on the same platform. Regardless of whether they are interested in global celebrities, local politicians, or professionals in a specific subfield, they can often find those people on Twitter.
Blogs used to be popular among many of the groups you can now find on Twitter. I guess Twitter replaced them, because the short message format forces you to focus on the essentials. Creating a new post is much faster, and you will reach many more people, because reading the post is not a significant time investment.
Twitter replaced blogs because blogs were not discoverable or aggregated. Twitter accounts are.
Twitter was born out of the short "status updates" fad at the time, on both Myspace and eventually Facebook.
Those were born out of MSN Messenger and other IM programs at the time that had customizable social profiles of sorts - including an updatable Status that was shown as a subtitle in your contacts' respective friends lists.
I remember the general sentiment of Twitter when it started was that the short character count (120 characters or whatever it started with) was a fun novelty, nothing more. It wasn't seen as a "social network".
Twitter gets its name in part from the saying "A little birdie told me ..." intersected with the fact that your phone twitches (vibrates) when you receive an update. It mimicked the other popular app names at the time that often omitted a vowel, such as 'flickr'. The original site was thus called twttr.com. The whole point was to be short, concise, non-serious communication. "Yo" tried to take this to the extreme several years later and ultimately failed (or pivoted, not sure which).
When Twitter started gaining traction, it was clear that more involved discourse was nearly impossible with the shorter character count, thus the limit was bumped up to what it is now (240 or 280 or something). The initial response was, understandably, negative. People predicted at the time that this would devolve the platform into another battlegrounds for shouting matches and arguing just as Facebook had. In hindsight, they were mostly correct.
Threads were also added to improve cohesion within lengthy conversations, and those features alone are now what form the core of Twitter's major feature set.
It's worth noting that Twitter hasn't changed much, which is pretty widely regarded as a feature in itself and can earn long term retention even with on-the-fence users (see: Steam).
However, this is mostly just my recollection of events.
Technically true, but I think the comment you're replying to was thinking of the era when celebrities had to go on late night shows in order for people to hear what they had to say. Like literally, the middle man had limited airtime and got to pick and choose who was allowed to be broadcast.
If you had some opinions on the latest whatever, if no television station felt like interviewing you, you just told it to your friends or whatever like everybody else. No matter how famous you were.
> Twitter is basically a broadcast platform for people who matter "in the real world".
Absolutely true, but it doesn't PRESENT itself that way. It PURPORTS to be an egalitarian platform. The truth is that the specific way Twitter's network effects work, you simply don't matter unless you're a celeb (either in Hollywood, or in some particular niche) or a journo. Celebrities I can understand. I don't know why Twitter is so bent around journalists, but it is, and it's obvious. To me, it goes back to the insinuation that the platform has been specifically engineered to influence national public opinion, but I suppose it might be just a "lucky" side effect. In any case, just being a random person on the platform can sometimes be pretty frustrating, because all the engagement is eaten up by people with hundreds of thousands of followers.
I looked the top 50 in that list and maybe ~5 of them are what you describe. The rest are big music labels, TV channels, artists and other such independently popular figures, not very different from Twitter.
Unclear why this is getting downvoted, it is accurate statement. Only 20 of the top 50 channels are not brands. Of those 20 if you exclude music channels like BTS, Blackpink, Justin Bieber, etc. you're only left with 10 channels.
BTS was popular in SK way before they got big on YouTube. But their massive explosion of popularity in the west (and outside of SK in general) happened perfectly in sync with them getting big on YouTube.
I think the point still stands. 6 of the top 10 on Youtube got their large followings being making content for Youtube. 0% of the top 50 on Twitter are primarily known for their tweets.
> 0% of the top 50 on Twitter are primarily known for their tweets.
Why limit yourself to the top 50? 0% of all Twitter users are primarily known for their tweets. Tweets are, by design, unsuitable for publishing content. They're useful for advertising content you publish somewhere else.
I know for (indie) games, twitter is a lagging indicator. That means you don't get famous through twitter, but twitter is a lagging indicator of the success on Steam. I can look up the source of this statement if you're interested.
Marketing wise the difference is huge. Say you release a new game, and want to know which marketing channels to focus on. As it turns out, Twitter will not give you much new customers that haven't come into contact with your game before.
I agree with you that once you have those followers, you can leverage that with other content. But building up your audience mainly needs to happen through other channels.
Anecdotal but Lil Nas X was very well known on twitter before he got popular. I recognized his handle from screenshots and made the connection only after Old Town Road came out.
Yeah, the only analog bouncing around my brain are accounts like that one, and, say, SwiftOnSecurity. There are people who are really big within a particular niche, and become a "sun" within a solar system. I'm blocked from both of those accounts, but I don't know why. (It's odd, because I usually avoid strong comments of ANY kind). The net effect on this sort of behavior on traffic patterns at Twitter works out quite a bit differently than on YouTube. You probably wouldn't block people on YouTube for the same comment you see on Twitter, and when you do it on Twitter, you're hard-limiting your audience.
Well yeah. If you exclude people like him who got famous on YouTube, then it, indeed, will turn out that nobody becomes famous on YouTube. I have zero idea what your point is trying to illustrate.
What's so special about Justin Bieber that disqualifies him from being counted as someone who became famous on YouTube?
It's VERY different in the way that Twitter is dominated by the US. YouTube, while heavily favoring India and to some extend the US, is much more mix in regards to country of origin.
I agree with the observation that Twitter is for people who are already famous, especially those made famous by US media. YouTube seems to at least allow for creators to build their own following and more importantly: Make money off their work.
If you're famous, you'll almost certainly have a twitter account, although there are obviously exceptions. The same just doesn't seem to go for YouTube. Creating content on YT is a lot more time-consuming than creating it on Twitter, of course.
That's silly. While you can't directly monetize your Twitter account, it can expand or straight up create your reach which you can use as a funnel to whatever monetizable content you have. That probably makes it less valuable for Twitter Inc., but it sure is valuable for Twitter users.
As a recent example, think of Pieter Levels (@levelsio). You think he would've gotten $10k first day sales on his avatar AI project without his Twitter account's reach?
Yeah, but that did a hasty negotiation that resulted in a no-due-diligence contract at that figure, tried very hard to escape the deal, including openly repudiating it and being sued to be forced to consummate it, and only relented and agreed to close on it in the face of court action to force him to which might have imposed additional costs as well.
So, while it is probably worth something, we can say that it is pretty clearly not worth $44B in the clear light of day, even to Musk.
There's not enough "room" to produce interesting content solely on Twitter vs YouTube — you have to hiccup out your value in segmented tweet threads. Thus if Twitter does provide value to followers it is in referencing outside material. Elon is supposedly directing Twitter engineers to go full-steam on reviving Vine so we'll see if that can turn things around.
The vine crowd has long moved to Tiktok; even IG and YT couldn’t steal mindshare from them. Vine has no chance, given that they’re starting with a 6yr old product
I don't know much about Vine, but anecdotally I have ended up spending way too much time on YouTube reels, and have also now been drawn into the equivalent on Facebook, whatever that's called, and I barely use FB. So I don't think the super short form video market is a winner takes all one by any means.
On the contrary there's plenty of room for genuine innovation in this space. For example FB short form videos don't have a dislike button, so I have no way to guide the algorithm, and YouTube reels seems to zero in on some local maximum (in my case, game of thrones and golf videos). There's so much room for improvement in this space.
> There’s not enough “room” to produce interesting content solely on Twitter
While I think that Musk’s plan is going to backfire, it is worth noting that he tries to address this in a narrow respect, in that paid users under the new plan would be able to distribute longer video/audio content with tweets.
The idea that what matters most is having the most followers is very arbitrary and not relevant to many strategies for enjoying Twitter. In my experience, Twitter is best as a place to have conversations, and this is optimal at some number of followers below 10k. There are many accounts out there having an amazing time at small numbers, having curated a medium-sized following of people who are interested in talking with them about the things they want to talk about.
> Twitter has no real "content creators", YouTube does.
I don’t understand the logic. They can be both well known outside of Twitter and create content. Sure, that is not their source of income, but it is harder to monetise a Twitter account, so that’s more or less by design. From the point of view of random people there is not really any functional difference.
In a way Twitter fills the space of being a proliferator of existing content, in a more concise form. In this way people don’t have to choose “do I create on platform X or Y” and instead they create on platform X and feel empowered to share on platform Y because it fills a different use case.
Nice observation. It's more like a direct marketing channel than an actual consumable. The most successful users are directing users to YouTube, e-commerce, voting booths or news sites to actually convert.
If I were YouTube right now, I'd be evaluating the opportunity to eat Twitter's lunch as it'll get distracted by a randomizing new owner. The YouTube posts product really isn't relevant in the current YouTube app, but as a separate experience focused on posts, it might have some value for non-creators on the platform. Bad as it is, YouTube has more of its act together than Twitter when it comes to designing and enforcing content moderation policies at scale.
Today while selecting a handle I was wondering why YT is doing this. There is no real added value except for using a standardized symbol used in social networks.
In my eyes YT is no social network, even though many claim it is.
The comment section, where the discussion and interaction takes place, is like SMS is to WhatsApp, in the sense that it has no surface to enrich dialogue. For example, you can't add images in replies to a comment, comments can't be embedded in websites.
I don't see how they can expand to a multimedia platform, which is what Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are. They're just a video platform and lack everything else which could move it towards a multimedia platform.
Sure he's successful in the real world but having money doesn't make you a celebrity. I wouldn't recognize most of the Forbes list if I passed them in the street. He's actual famous, instead of Wikipedia famous, because of how he's engaged his supporters through Twitter. The chance to interact with him or have him like your meme is the content.
There is a very big difference between Twitter and YouTube, and it's obvious once you know it.
Look at the most popular people on twitter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitte...
All celebrities outside of twitter.
Then look at YouTube: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouT...
Almost all made famous by YouTube.
Twitter has no real "content creators", YouTube does.