Twitter Blizzard - 21 December 2022

There has been a blizzard of commentary about the Musk takeover of Twitter and the consequences thereof.  My personal experience is that Twitter took a massive nosedive in the quality of the content and I have migrated to a Mastodon instance.  There remains a tumultuous debate about alternatives that replace Twitter, but there remains a singular problem that Twitter has solved and that is a barrier to entry for all alternatives.  Scale.

The "magic" of Twitter is not who owns it, who moderates it, or who subscribes.  These are all interesting and important factors, but they are not the key differentiator that made Twitter successful.  The key differentiator is that Twitter exchanges messages among millions of users in fractions of a second and creates a storehouse of comments that can be served up in seconds.  I could write code that collected short comments, microblog entries, and redistributes them, but it would handle a few hundred users, tops.  Much  more than that, and my little empire would fall over.  The good folks at Twitter have spent the last decade learning how to collect new entries, sort out subscribers, and redistribute those messages - and how to be efficient about it.  The blockchain/bitcoinage people designed a system that was intentionally inefficient while Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and the others were seeking ultraefficiency at the scale of millions.  Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon.com) used to say his strategy was "get big fast", but I think it would be more accurate to say "get big AND fast".  If you want a counter example, insurance companies and banks are big but hardly fast.

'Tis snowy outside.  Happy Hanukkah, everyone!