David Curtis

I've written before on this very topic - not building your house / business on other people's platform.

That said, I think there's a real opportunity for Twitter to grow via third party apps by being more open, they just haven't straddled the line of being both a consumer app and infrastructure company well previously.

I agree massively with lots of what Dustin Curtis has previously written about his vision for the platform:

"Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it. Nothing great is Built On Twitter, even though it should be the most powerful realtime communications platform on Earth. There are simply no developer integration features for building stuff on top of Twitter as a platform, and that is absurd and disappointing. The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the biggest failings of Twitter’s product team–Twitter should be the place for apps to broadcast realtime information about someone. And yet the culture around the Twitter community has effectively banned such behavior because the product doesn’t have features to filter/organize such notifications."

http://dcurt.is/twitter

They want the (hobbyist? / fun) apps yet, when something sizable comes along, the don't want someone else to run away with the ball. Coming out and saying to smaller indie developers now "If you build something decent, we'll take some revenue" I don't think would placate many. It may have been a decent…

Here's the gist of the original piece (from 2014):

> Apple is going to realize very soon that it has made a grave mistake by positioning itself as a bastion of privacy against Google, the evil invader of everyone’s secrets. The truth is that collecting information about people allows you to make significantly better products, and the more information you collect, the better products you can build. ...

https://dcurt.is/privacy-vs-user-experience

How the times change. Not a whiff of Facebook. Snowden who? Google was still mostly not evil.

From the more recent article:

> I argued in my essay that Tim Cook had conflated privacy with security. He may have. But in the five years since 2014, the following fact has become absurdly clear to me: there is no difference between privacy and security. Security is an illusion, just like the lock on your front door. ...

In time we'll all come to realize that privacy is merely a special case of security. What can't be seen can't be attacked.

Until then, a lot of damage will have been wrought on people too distracted or naive to care.

OP said something similar about writing blog posts when he found himself doing twitter a lot, back in 2013. So whatever he did to cope with tweeting, he can do the same with LLMs, since it seems like he's been writing a lot of blog posts since.

> I’ve been thinking about this damn essay for about a year, but I haven’t written it because Twitter is so much easier than writing, and I have been enormously tempted to just tweet it, so instead of not writing anything, I’m just going to write about what I would have written if Twitter didn’t destroy my desire to write by making things so easy to share.

and

> But here’s the worst thing about Twitter, and the thing that may have permanently destroyed my mind: I find myself walking down the street, and every fucking thing I think about, I also think, “How could I fit that into a tweet that lots of people would favorite or retweet?”

https://dcurt.is/what-i-would-have-written

EDIT
I'll leave my post as two people were kind enough to point out that I was just flat out wrong.

I had originally thought that the below post was a parody. I'm told it wasn't, though in my defense it definitely reads like a parody... I mean the perfect cutlery... the most meaningless item in anyone's house??

This reminds me of another parody post here a while ago about someone who said they'd bought the perfect cutlery.

They went a bit further and beat the joke to death talking about the difference between several cutlery sets. It was bit better because it started out with some good points bout optimizing your life and buying the best and then it jumped into how to buy what is probably the least important thing in anyone life...cutlery

I think this hacking your life is starting to jump the shark:)

Here is the other parody post:

http://dcurt.is/the-best

>Apple’s products are opinionated. They say, “We know what’s best for you. Here it is. Oh, that thing you want to do? We won’t let you do that because it would suck. Trust us. If you don’t like it, there’s the door.”

Problem is, Apple's acolytes won't leave you alone to go through the door - they'll follow you and keep telling you you're a wrong for wanting something different or thinking different (the irony is always lost). Some of them will even write long and detailed blog posts about how 3.5" is the perfect screen size, and and if you think differently, you're wrong. (http://dcurt.is/3-point-5-inches), or maintain popular blogs which a little more than a large collection of stupid, snide remarks (Gruber).

Apple and Microsoft worked on arbitrary resolution independence for years. It's nearly impossible to make it work right because things look blurry unless you redo everything as vector graphics and even that isn't perfect. [1] (Appropriate hardware wasn't available, so their failure kinda didn't matter.) Then Apple decided to just double everything in iOS, which made things tractable enough. OS X is mostly following the same approach, although there is a compromise mode where the screen is rendered at 2x resolution and then scaled down to fit the LCD.

[1] See http://dcurt.is/pixel-fitting