Simon Willison’s Weblog

I remember that they [Ev and Biz at Twitter in 2008] very firmly believed spam was a concern, but, “we don’t think it’s ever going to be a real problem because you can choose who you follow.” And this was one of my first moments thinking, “Oh, you sweet summer child.” Because once you have a big enough user base, once you have enough people on a platform, once the likelihood of profit becomes high enough, you’re going to have spammers.

— Del Harvey # 22nd November 2023, 4:59 am

When Musk introduced creator payments in July, he splashed rocket fuel over the darkest elements of the platform. These kinds of posts always existed, in no small number, but are now the despicable main event. There’s money to be made. X’s new incentive structure has turned the site into a hive of so-called engagement farming — posts designed with the sole intent to elicit literally any kind of response: laughter, sadness, fear. Or the best one: hate. Hate is what truly juices the numbers.

— Dave Lee # 7th October 2023, 3:42 pm

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience.

— Nilay Patel # 28th October 2022, 3:45 pm

How about if, instead of ditching Twitter for Mastodon, we all start blogging and subscribing to each other’s Atom feeds again instead? The original distributed social network could still work pretty well if we actually start using it

— @simonw # 18th August 2018, 8:59 pm

If I tweeted a throwaway comment in appreciation for McDonald’s apple pies and some other randos on Twitter happened to also tweet similar thoughts over the last few months, it doesn’t mean by extrapolation that ‘Millennials Can’t Get Enough Of McDonald’s Apple Pies’. 
The Twitter search box is not a polling agency and Twitter doesn’t include everybody’s thoughts on everything. Just some people’s thoughts on some things.

— Nick Walker # 28th January 2018, 4:18 pm

Early this year, the U.S. intelligence community named RT and Sputnik as implementing state-sponsored Russian efforts to interfere with and disrupt the 2016 Presidential election, which is not something we want on Twitter.

— Twitter PublicPolicy # 26th October 2017, 2:38 pm

While I don’t expect Twitter to master its own destiny as far as the decentralization of the medium goes, I do support the idea, and I hope that Twitter as a business can coexist with the need for the world to have a free, open, reliable, and verifiable way for humans to instantly communicate in a one-to-many fashion.

— Alex Payne # 16th September 2010, 11:07 am

A little deeper investigation showed that nothing I had posted on Buzz had gone public since August 6. Nothing. [...] No one noticed. Not even me. It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.

— Leo Laporte # 22nd August 2010, 6:43 pm

Twitter is an open, real-time introduction and information service. On a daily basis we introduce millions to interesting people, trends, content, URLs, organizations, lists, companies, products and services. These introductions result in the formation of a dynamic real-time interest graph. At any given moment, the vast network of connections on Twitter paints a picture of a universe of interests. We follow those people, organizations, services, and other users that interest us, and in turn, others follow us.

— Dick Costolo # 25th May 2010, 4:54 pm

Twitter is turning itself from a social network into a gigantic tuple-space pubsub platform that just happens to have a big social network implemented on top of it.

— Daniel Lucraft # 17th April 2010, 5:23 pm

When we get the tools to do distributed Twitter, etc., we get the tools to communicate in stanzas richer than those allowed by our decades-old email clients. Never mind Apple being anti-competitive, social networks are the peak of monopolistic behaviour today.

— Blaine Cook # 13th August 2009, 1:06 pm

I used to think Twitter would never catch on in the mainstream because it’s somewhat stupid. Now I realize I was exactly wrong. Twitter will catch on in the mainstream because it’s somewhat stupid. It’s blogging dumbed down for the masses, and if there’s one surefire way to build something popular, it’s to take something else that is already popular and simplify.

— Matt Maroon # 20th April 2009, 8:50 pm

The Internet Archive should actively partner with bit.ly / tinyurl.com / icanhaz.com etc. and maintain a mirror database of their redirects

— Me, on Twitter # 8th March 2009, 2:59 pm

As more details become available, it seems what happened is that a Twitter administrator (i.e., employee) gave their password to a 3rd party site because their API requires it, which was then used to compromise Twitter’s admin interface.

— Blaine Cook # 6th January 2009, 9:37 am

The username/password key’s major disadvantage is that it open all the doors to the house. The OAuth key only opens a couple doors; the scope of the credentials is limited. That’s a benefit, to be sure, but in Twitter’s case, a malicious application that registered for OAuth with both read and write privileges can do most evil things a user might be worried about.

— Alex Payne # 5th January 2009, 10:47 am

Responders will tell you that broadcasters are condescending talking heads who think they’re too good for the community. Broadcasters wish responders would take their nonsensical patter to a chat room, where they could natter on in privacy. Everyone agrees that members of the other group are total jackasses who don’t know how to use Twitter.

— Margaret Mason # 9th December 2008, 6:06 pm

It’s funny, when I sit down to write something for Phoenix I feel like I have to get into my “Phoenix character.” [...] I try to be the eternal optimist because people are getting so upset about the mission coming to an end, and I’m trying to lessen that grief.

— Veronica McGregor # 11th November 2008, 12:21 pm

OAuth came out of my worry that if the Twitter API became popular, we’d be spreading passwords all around the web. OAuth took longer to finish than it took for the Twitter API to become popular, and as a result many Twitter users’ passwords are scattered pretty carelessly around the web. This is a terrible situation, and one we as responsible web developers should work to prevent.

— Blaine Cook # 14th August 2008, 10:01 am

The statement that the password anti-pattern “teaches users to be phished” should be rephrased “has taught users to be phished”

— Me, on Twitter # 13th August 2008, 12:52 pm

If we want people to have the same degree of user autonomy as we’ve come to expect from the world, we may have to sit down and code alternatives to Google Docs, Twitter, and EC2 that can live with us on the edge, not be run by third parties.

— Danny O'Brien # 20th July 2008, 9 am

It looks like the first ever Django conference will take place in early September in the San Francisco bay area.

— Me, on Twitter # 7th July 2008, 5:14 pm

Scoble writes something—6,800 writes are kicked off, 1 for each follower. Michael Arrington replies—another 6,600 writes. Jason Calacanis jumps in—another 6,500 writes. Beyond the 19,900 writes, there’s a lot of additional overhead too. You have to hit a DB to figure out who the 19,900 followers are. [...] And here’s the kicker: that giant processing and delivery effort—possibly a combined 100K disk IOs—was caused by 3 users, each just sending one, tiny, 140 char message. How innocent it all seemed.

— Isreal L'Heureux # 23rd May 2008, 7:28 pm

Hey Google: any chance we can all build the social web together without requiring JavaScript?

— Me # 13th May 2008, 1:49 pm

Boxing Day toy discovery: Mega Bloks not compatible with Duplo! See, Alex Russell? THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU INNOVATE AHEAD OF STANDARDS

— Yoz Grahame # 26th December 2007, 5:58 pm

In the big picture, Twitter did exactly the right thing. They had a good idea and they buckled down and focused on delivering something as cool as possible as fast as possible, and it’s really hard, in early 2007, to beat Rails for that. When all of a sudden there were a few tens of thousands of people using it, then they went to work on the scaling.

— Tim Bray # 14th April 2007, 9:13 am

None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.

— Alex Payne, Twitter # 12th April 2007, 2:51 pm