Partnered With:

The History of the Demise of Social Networking “Decentralization”

Read this article in 35 Minutes

If the Internet had been reinvented, it would never be what it is today.

Original Source: Hang News Agency

Original Author: Shuhang

Modern social networking sites are under tremendous pressure and need to respond in a timely manner Adverse content appearing on the control platform. Recently, Twitter launched a series of new features in response to the US election.

However, if it was two or three years ago, Twitter could not be so easily revised, because at that time there were still many third-party clients that could not receive at the same time Changes to these functions.

At present, social networks such as Twitter and domestic Weibo have blocked the access of third-party clients, which marks a period of "decentralization" since the 2010s the end of the past.

Twitter’s new function "batch launch"

On the eve of the US election, various social media The Internet has carried out related rectifications on issues such as hate speech and fake news that appear on the platform. Of course, the method of rectification is not just "simple and rude" like deleting posts and titles. Among them, the "embroidery kung fu" done by Twitter (Twitter) is particularly worth mentioning.

On October 9th, Twitter officially announced that in preparation for the most controversial, uncertain and potentially high-risk election in modern American history, its platform There will be a number of major changes in how things work.

The first is a fundamental change in the "Retweet" function. Now the official will guide users to add their own comments before retweeting, which has changed Twitter's practice since it added the official retweeting function - just press a button to retweet unconditionally. (Interestingly, Sina Weibo has recently gone the other way. Its function of forwarding Weibo has always been forwarding with comments. Now you can use your mobile phone to "quickly forward Weibo" without leaving a comment.)

The second is the "read before transfer" function. Twitter said it was testing a prompt that asked users to take a moment to read the article linked to before retweeting the message with the link. They say the move to target "headline-baiting" articles has been a success. Now users are 40% more likely to open an article before reposting it than before. Sometimes, they will not repost after reading the entire article.

The most common is to put various labels on posts containing misleading information. Messages released by politicians, government agencies, and official news media in the United States and other countries will be tagged with reminders.

In the case of misleading posts by U.S. politicians, candidates, and campaign accounts, the policy is stricter: Tweets are collapsed and users must Check the warning message first, and click to open it to see the original text. Such tweets will have likes, official retweets and replies disabled.

At least such a policy is necessary for some of President Trump's messages. Recently, Trump tweeted that he was completely "immune" to the new crown pneumonia; the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that there is no evidence that patients with the new crown will not be re-infected after recovery. Twitter's warning label said the message "violated the rules governing the dissemination of misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19."

You may be thinking, who would take such rhetorical presidential tweets seriously; but at the Democratic National Convention in September, a woman Kristin Urquiza killed her father after accusing Trump and Republican officials of irresponsible statements she believed to be true. Since May, her state's Republican governor has lifted a stay-at-home order, and she has found it difficult to persuade her father to stay home. Her father fell ill in July and rapidly deteriorated, killing him.

Compared with the control measures of other platforms that mainly delete posts directly, these practices of Twitter are a compromise. "Freedom of speech" launched an attack, and reminded and alerted users as much as possible.

If a Twitter user traveled through time and space from a year ago, he might be surprised to find that many of his daily Twitter habits are present today significantly changed.

However, the reason why Twitter has the ability to make such a drastic revision and continuously add fuel to the security and audit system has gone through a process. These changes would not have been possible without one crucial step.

"Crossing the bridge" for third-party clients

< /p>

On August 16, 2018, after years of notice and several delays, Twitter finally fulfilled its promise and completely closed the functional interface necessary for the operation of third-party Twitter clients . Specifically, third-party clients can no longer access APIs required for push notifications and auto-refresh timelines.

At that time, although most of the third-party clients on the market had disappeared, the remaining ones such as Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Talon and Tweetings still had a large number of users . Twitter set a timetable in April 2018, with a target date of June 19 of that year, but faced a lot of opposition and had to postpone it for another two months.

Rob Johnson, Director of Product at Twitter, acknowledged and thanked third-party apps for their contributions to making Twitter what it is today. "Third-party customers have had a significant impact on the Twitter service and the products we build."

Independent of Twitter's official developers, contributed to Twitter The first Mac and iPhone native client, pioneered a series of popular product features, such as "muting" a user.

An action that is obviously borrowed from the user's "wild" usage habits is "Retweet". In the days when retweets were not officially supported, users manually copied and pasted the original text, adding the word RT in front of it to represent "retweet", and attaching their own comments at the top. Therefore, looking at a tweet that has been RT many times requires looking backwards.

After 2009, Twitter introduced the "one-click forwarding" function mentioned above, which does not include comments when reposting. It was not until April 2015 that Twitter released the function of "forwarding with comments", but it was only an option, and many third-party clients did not support it.

The most famous contribution made by an independent developer is an interactive method invented by the iOS client Tweetie. It is the famous "pull down to refresh". For this interactive effect, Tweetie won the 2009 Apple iOS App Store Design Award.

In 2010, Twitter acquired the Tweetie application and directly made it replace the official client at the time. Its founder and patent owner, Loren Brichter, became an engineer at Twitter. In 2013, after officially owning the "Pull-Down Refresh" patent, Twitter announced that it would open this interaction method to the entire Internet free of charge, and the acquisition of the patent was only preventive.

After a year, Twitter once again acquired a third-party client that was well received. It allows the timelines of many Twitter accounts to be aggregated and displayed side by side on the same screen, and allows simultaneous posting of messages to multiple accounts, which is today's "group control". TweetDeck was acquired and is still available today.

After completing the "pinching" acquisition of the best client, Twitter immediately warned developers not to build applications that "imitate Twitter's core experience". Since then, developers of third-party Twitter clients can clearly feel the official shift in attitude.

In mid-2011, Twitter ditched third-party image and video hosting services in favor of storing images and videos on its own servers. Because early Twitter was only a small business and could not afford the huge cost of image storage, it produced a variety of third-party galleries, the more famous one being Twitpic established in 2008. For videos, I've always used YouTube.

But after Twitter has the ability to set up its own picture bed, there is incompatibility between the third-party client and the official application. Third-party apps can only send pictures to Twitpic, but cannot read the pictures that come with Twitter; the official Twitter is the other way around. The address of Twitpic pictures that could be displayed normally is now shortened again and becomes a bunch of links, which can only be clicked open to see.

Twitpic decided to shut down permanently in 2014 as usage dwindled. This means that the memories of many users will no longer exist. At a critical moment, Twitter officially reached an agreement with Twitpic to acquire its website domain name and image library, and the site is currently in a read-only state.

In 2012, Twitter made the largest revision in the history of developer policies, limiting the maximum number of users allowed by third-party clients. This means that the user scale of the third-party client is artificially set an upper limit, and once exceeded, the entire service will be paralyzed. At this time, the third-party client has been sentenced to "death reprieve".

As Johnson puts it, "In the years following these announcements, we have repeatedly told developers that our API roadmap will not prioritize clients use cases, even though we continue to maintain some specific APIs that are heavily used by these clients, and "quietly" grant exceptions to clients who need them."

Most since then Newer Twitter features, including polls, bookmarks, and livestreaming service Periscope, have never licensed third-party app support because Twitter doesn't have its API at all.

Twitter has never maintained those old APIs that support third-party clients, they have been in "beta" state for more than 9 years, and built on a technology stack that Twitter no longer supports superior. Over time, these APIs are used by less than 1% of third-party developers, and investing in building an entirely new service to replace them is not realistic.

Today, if you search for the hashtag #BreakingMyTwitter on Twitter, you can also see the anger of many third-party client fans from April to August 2018 Roar's Historic Site. Ai Faner said at the time, "Crossing the river and tearing down the bridge to block the third party is because of the pressure of financial reports or the loss of morality?"

The attitude of Twitter is basically " Ten moves but refused." After all, it is not enough to see that Twitter users have contributed many of the best ideas in its history to the official side; this kind of tolerance for third parties has increased the company's operating costs and code complexity day by day, and it has to struggle to be able to Achieve basic financial reporting goals.

After 2018, Twitter's interface revision and function upgrade speed have been significantly accelerated. At this time, criticism of the social responsibility of large technology companies emerged, and Twitter had to speed up iterations to filter out hate speech; but at the same time, it was precisely because it no longer had to worry about compatibility with third parties that it made such a rapid upgrade become possible.

All of this is not taken for granted.

The story of China

In China, Sina Weibo, which is the benchmark for Twitter, also experienced a similar route. Even four or five years ago, there were still many different third-party clients on the market that could access Weibo. Their history can be traced back to around 2010, when Sina Weibo first developed.

At that time, Sina, Netease, Tencent, and Sohu all had their own microblogs, and it was generally believed that microblogs would be the main battlefield of social networks in the future. At this time, Tencent is also facing the problem of aging QQ products and not adapting to the mobile Internet. When the situation was uncertain, each company generously opened up their APIs to third-party developers, so a variety of client products created by fans appeared on the PC and mobile terminals.

In the Google browser on the computer, there is an extremely famous plug-in called "FaWave". Its function is very simple, you can log in your microblog account registered on all platforms at home and abroad, and other accounts with 140-character short dynamic function (such as Douban), and then sync what you want to say to the above in one go everywhere.

As long as anyone who came from that era ten years ago can now appreciate the huge lethality of this network-wide synchronization function. The public opinion environment at that time was completely different from what it is now. Who didn't say a few words that now seem to be "you have to blush and avoid when you see it"? At that time, it was a pleasure to post, but now... I will cry if I talk too much.

On the mobile side, another dazzling new star has risen, which is the third-party client Weico created by the web design company EICO. EICO worked with Sina to design the official Weibo client before, and kept many suggestions that were not adopted, which were added to Weico.

In the end, Weico had more than 30 million users at its peak, becoming the most popular client brand on the Sina Weibo open platform and incubating the third party with the highest Weibo traffic client.

Third-party Weibo clients once flourished, including Share Weibo clients, Welike, See, etc. on Android, and VVebo, Moke, Singularity, etc. on iOS.

As of mid-2016, Sina Weibo had 297 million monthly active users. The commercial nature of Weibo has also been continuously strengthened during this period. The opening screen advertisements of the official client, interspersed targeted promotions, various spam marketing accounts, and chaotic timelines are all annoying, even if you open a membership.

At this time, third-party clients generally provide the two major capabilities of removing official advertisements and providing normal timelines, which can be said to have seriously interfered with Weibo "Profit Model". One of the Weibo clients, "Mo Ke", which has a large number of users, was unable to operate normally because the API interface was withdrawn by the Weibo official. After a short negotiation, although Weibo allowed it to reopen the API call, Moac itself did not have enough development funds, and crowdfunding also failed, and subsequent development was stopped.

Weibo began to shut down the basic API permissions of third-party clients many times on the grounds that the key leakage caused security problems. Advanced interfaces such as topics and comments with pictures have long been unavailable, but at least third-party client users can continue to happily follow other people and browse Weibo.

By July 3, 2017, the author of Mo Ke confirmed that Sina closed the most basic interface of the Weibo open platform, "the third-party Weibo client has been die".

As for the most popular Weico client, it also stopped updating very early, and was replaced by the client "Weibo International Version" designed by EICO in cooperation with the Weibo official again .

We can notice that at the beginning of the emergence of social networks such as WeChat, Kuaishou, and Douyin, as well as other top applications such as Meituan and Toutiao, even Facing the pressure of competition, I never thought of opening it to a third party as a compatible client.

Sina Weibo was so open around 2010 that it can be said that there will be no one to follow. This is obviously influenced by Twitter from across the ocean, because my "master" does the same. Therefore, it sets restrictions on third-party clients, and it also follows the "master" Twitter.

At the beginning of 2011, Sina Weibo restricted the API output for the first time, targeting the Weibo mentioned above, as well as the same type of Weibotong, Weibo Butler, and mowriter , Weibo, Andscape, Maidou, Xiangpai, Martha and many other applications and plug-ins. What they have in common is that Sina Weibo messages can be synchronized to other Weibo.

At that time, the competition between Sina and several other companies was intensified, and it was natural for Sina to protect its Weibo content from being captured on other people’s platforms idea. A few years later, in the face of ByteDance's move to grab Weibo and post it on "Wei Toutiao", Weibo directly sued, and history repeated itself again.

“Decentralization” and its demise

Third-party clients who used to be dazzled by Twitter In fact, it is not just for aesthetics, it can play a variety of unexpected roles.

For example, there is Dabr, a web client generated based on PHP language, which can be set up on any private server. In this way, even if Twitter's main domain name is attacked and access fails, but your own website can still be accessed normally, you can use your own server as a bridge to indirectly access Twitter services.

Of course, none of them can be used anymore, everything is a thing of the past.

All third-party clients have one thing in common, which is to improve the so-called "disadvantages" of the official client. Some of them have been accumulated for a long time, which may be due to insufficient official development strength, or the official usage of the same function is inconsistent with the general understanding of the public; others are deliberately done by the official, such as inserting advertisements and disrupting the timeline.

Actually, displaying messages in undisrupted chronological order is the most basic function of a third-party client, and this is tantamount to canceling the official recommendation algorithm And the role of traffic distribution is becoming more and more unbearable.

When there were not so many moths at the beginning, social networks can be said to be very pure and simple. There are only a few core functions of Twitter - send messages, follow others, and watch squares. And all messages are 140 English characters, which is the length of a text message.

This simple approach made Twitter at the time less like a company's product and more like a general agreement. How to understand the "agreement"? Simply put, anyone can make their own similar products and be compatible with each other as long as they abide by the unified standards.

Before Twitter, Microsoft’s MSN Messenger, Google’s Google Talk, and Yu Wei’s AIM, ICQ, etc. Open protocol interconnection. Therefore, the chat tool that comes with the Apple Mac system, as well as third-party clients such as Trillian, can communicate with official users.

Earlier than them is the completely open chat room protocol IRC, and there is no so-called "official" developer in it. is launched by a third party. It was on the IRC platform that Internet etiquette, such as emojis, was born that is still used today. The article "WeChat "Pai Yi Pai": A Story from 1971" talked about the history of IRC in detail.

Another contemporaneous product that must be mentioned is RSS, which is a protocol that can freely display website article updates. It allows people to know what new trends these websites have without having to visit the homepages of the websites one by one. For each website, you can choose three different sharing methods, one is to share the full text, the other is to share the summary with a partition in the middle, and the other is to share only the title.

By the mid-2010s, more and more sites were only keeping titles or summaries if they still kept RSS output. Generous sharing of full text influences users from reaching their respective sites, which in turn impacts advertising revenue. Later, RSS and mailing lists, which actively obtain news, increasingly gave way to social media, which passively receives pushes and does not use their brains.

Like the early Twitter, RSS, etc., the service developed by the company is used as an open protocol, and shared with third parties for construction and use , is to follow the spirit of "Web 2.0" that began to emerge around 2003, a spirit of openness, sharing and allowing everyone to participate.

What China and the United States are doing now is to move towards the opposite of this spirit. platform", the purpose of which is to prevent the free flow of developers to rivals.

In China, WeChat official accounts and other "XX accounts" are trying to find ways to keep people in their own three-acre land, and at the same time continue to increase algorithm push and the intensity of advertising placement. Recently, Hang News Agency was asked to revise the "author's description" that had been maintained on Toutiao for more than two years, because they finally noticed that this description was reported to the agency's WeChat official account, which was considered "drainage". When platforms are small enough to pose no threat, they don't care about that.

In the early years, Internet services were feared that no one would use them, but now they are going to the opposite because of excessive usage, competition, and the prevention of "abuse". Therefore, the right to interpret this kind of "openness" belongs to the manufacturer. If it is withdrawn, it is also in line with the terms of service. Of course, users have nothing to say.

If manufacturers generally believe that the benefits of centralization far exceed decentralization, then in turn, the decentralization that has been insisted on in the past , is also causing more and more trouble. In recent years, when science and technology companies are required to fulfill their social responsibilities, the contradiction has become more prominent.

There is a technology that can permanently back up data on the blockchain called IPFS. Hang News Agency’s 2018 article "This website that allows you to save photos has persisted for 14 years, and now "landlords The family has no food left"" finally mentioned IPFS technology. Every time you store it on the chain, you need to pay a little fee, but it can guarantee that when the Internet is connected to the information such as articles, pictures, and keys, there will always be a copy and will not be completely deleted.

At present, there is a Chinese literature creation website, which uses IPFS technology to save the articles created on it. However, after two or three years of operation, the website discovered that the so-called "decentralized" storage of articles is just a technical means that is not perceived by users at all, and most people still concentrate on the website's fixed URL. This is because the comment area of the article cannot be stored with the same technology, and the interactive atmosphere between the author of the article and the readers is established by relying on the discussion on the official website.

Therefore, we cannot say that the demise of "decentralization" is the "Chinese characteristics" after the practice of Weibo, etc. s Choice.

If the internet was reinvented, it would never be what it is today. Not to mention socializing and chatting, even browsers can make you incompatible with each other. It's like the things you can access with 360 browser and QQ browser may be different.

This is the case with AOL (America Online), Ying Haiwei, etc. in the 1990s, and they can only access the content that is already on their site. At that time, these closed services gave way to the unified standard WWW (Internet), mainly because there were too few users to contribute rich and diverse content and form a scale effect. Now, an app has hundreds of millions to more than a billion users. Whether they must be open is really hard to say.

To a large extent, today's Internet infrastructure was set up by the pioneers with the open dream of world harmony. Destroyed. The open spirit of selflessness and mutual benefit in the past will only arouse the memory of future generations.