Asakiyume mita

When I first read your tweet about this, my too-long-for-Twitter thought was that you are, I think, getting at what has actually been the value of Twitter: what is golden about it is its role as a public service, strictly defined-- and public goods and services notoriously are not provided optimally by privately owned or for-profit entities.

What has been golden about Twitter has been its role as an easy-access conversation-and-listening place, where isolated people with common interests have been able to meet and create together, and others have been able to learn from them. Black Twitter is, in my view, its shining star. (It has of course and similarly been a toxic recruiting space for Nazis and white supremacists and such. Swings come with roundabouts.)

What characterizes a public good/service is that it's difficult, expensive, or impossible to exclude people from using/enjoying it (whether they pay or not).* Another characteristic of public goods and services is that increasing the number of users doesn't significantly lessen the quality of use for others. Consider highways (most of the time most places). The principle is, congestion isn't much of a thing.**

Those characteristics make it difficult to profit from providing goods or services that inherently possess them. They can be provided (usually at sub-optimal levels) by for-profit firms that are regulated by government or some other all-society-interest organization. Or they can be provided directly by government or some other all-society-interest non-profit entity.

People who have thought of Twitter as software are failing to understand its value, which is mostly crested moment-to-moment by the vast cloud of users.


* You can of course exclude people from Twitter (though sock puppets), but strong exclusionary fences would change the nature of the space and remove a lot of its public service power.
** Increasing numbers of Twitter users changed the nature of the space, and early adopters sometimes mourn knowing everyone. Toxic users of course damage the experience-- but that's not *numbers*, it's *nature*.