It's even worse than it appears..
Why did Twitter win? Because the RSS developers wouldn't work with each other. Thus subscribing to a feed was complicated. In Twitter, it was one click to subscribe, and another to unsub. You could see who your friends subscribed to, again -- one click to subscribe. And eventually that grew into a list of suggestions of people to follow. RSS had none of that because the RSS devs refused to work with each other. The development of RSS-based news products stopped, and pretty soon Twitter's stopped too. And thus news technology on the web remained frozen for two decades. We are getting another chance. The social media space is a highly disappointing wreck. Users are interested in new ideas, as long as they're fun and new, esp in relation to using AI tools. But it won't be open if we can't get it together any better than we could the first time around. You have to do things that help the web, and thus help your competitors. If you don't, if we don't, there will just be another Twitter, owning the users, and they'll probably sell out to a billionaire a lot sooner than Twitter did. At some point we'll realize if we want something new we have to work with each other. Otherwise you get Elon II, III etc. #

© copyright 1994-2026 Dave Winer.

Last update: Thursday May 7, 2026; 9:44 AM EDT.

You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)