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, Twitter's indecisiveness protected it from itself (View Highlight)

When you’re uncertain which knot is securing your body to the face of a mountain, it’s best not to start undoing any of them willy-nilly (View Highlight)

When the game is man versus nature, he’s an obvious choice. When it comes to man versus human nature, on the other hand… (View Highlight)

Twitter will persist in a deteriorated state, perhaps indefinitely. However, it's already a pale shadow of what it was at its peak. The cool kids are no longer sitting over in bottle service knocking out banger tweets. Instead, the timeline is filled with more and more strangers the bouncer let in to shill their tweetstorms, many of them Twitter Verified accounts who paid the grand fee of $8 a month for the privilege. (View Highlight)

momentous to see a social network of some scale and lifespan suddenly lose its vitality (View Highlight)

Usually, social networks are killed off by something exogenous, usually another, newer social network. Twitter went out and bought Chekhov’s gun in the first act and use it to shoot itself in the foot in the third act. Zuckerberg can now extend his quip about Twitter being a clown car that fell into a gold mine. (View Highlight)

In The Rise and Decline of Nations, Mancur Olson builds on his previous book The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups to discuss how and why groups form. What are the incentives that guide their behavior?

One of his key insights is what I think of as his theory of group inertia. Groups are hard to form in the first place. Think of how many random Discord communities you were invited into the past few years and how many are still active. “Organization for collective action takes a good deal of time to emerge” observes Olson. (View Highlight)

However, inertia works both before and after product-market fit. Once a group has formed, it tends to persist even after the collective good it came together to provide is no longer needed. (View Highlight)

Social networks are path dependent. This is especially true in the West where social networks are largely ad-subsidized and where they’re almost all built around a singular dominant architecture of an infinite scrolling feed optimized for serving ads on a mobile phone. The path each network took to product-market fit selected for a specific user base (View Highlight)

One of the trickiest things about projecting off of early growth rates for startups in tech is that even fads can generate massive absolute numbers early on if marketed broadly to a global audience. Without looking at early retention and churn rates, you may extrapolate a much larger terminal user base size than will actually stick around. Think about eBay or Groupon, for example. This same caution needs to be applied to Threads; one of the central questions is whether Twitter reached all the people who enjoy microblogging or whether Meta has some magic formula that will allow it to scale to a much larger population (View Highlight)