Nobody tells themselves they're burning the midnight oil for "engagement." They're doing it for freedom. Every argument I ever had with the admins at Reddit was about impinging on the users' "freedom." "Engagement" is this nasty thing your ad rep gets to talk about. You? You're here to strike a blow for John Galt. Always.
Yeah. Engagement needs a "governing philosophy" to keep the worker bees in line with minimal effort, and freedom is a great one. Propaganda used to build the propaganda machine. We're getting recursive here. The tough part for me that needs to be acknowledged is that some of these networks (well mostly Twitter) I find very useful for getting the best information from actual experts. If you are extremely proficient you can put a lot of effort into curating your follow list to build better news channels than our modern news platforms. Instead of NYT, CNN, Wall Street Journal, etc, you have a superior custom-made panel of experts who actually inform those other platforms (or write for them). But I feel like using it productively like that is akin to making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, and running into an Imperial blockade if you don't.
Epipens were created to deliver atropine through a chemical warfare suit while you're busy frying on nerve gas. That they keep my daughter alive in the face of accidental peanut ingestion is a nice outcome; that their containers work awesome for holding jeweler's files and hobby knives is a long damn way from the original intent. But hey you know what? I can't use an epipen without creating a $25k ambulance ride so fuckin' hell I will absolutely use their containers to keep my jeweler's files in. At least they're doing something. I would argue that Twitter was intended for news curation but it was designed for the bots. If you look at it, a million simple devices spewing a million simple thoughts to a million other simple devices is pretty much the fundamental use case of Twitter. Chrissy Tiegen's pithy witticisms? Afterthought. So yeah - a lot of us can carry around epipens in case we eat a peanut. A few of us can even find something to keep our riffler files in. But the vast ecosystem exists for chemical warfare. I follow plenty of humans but my favorite accounts by far are - Erowid Recruiter - normal cat pictures and
Twitter wanted to be broadcast SMS. It was for asking all your friends if they wanted to get beer at once. It got adopted for more because that same _why post that inspired tumblr got the Ruby community really excited about spewing whatever crossed their mind at the world.
Back when it was twttr you interacted with it by sending a text message to its shortcode and it relayed it. Also displaying the messages publicly on the web seemed like a privacy issue to techcrunch of all things. They really caught on by pushing it at sxsw for keeping up with other people there. As for the Ruby thing, I didn't follow it that closely. _why coined the term tumblelog for a blog consisting of really short posts, links and images. Microblogging was the term that stuck, but tumblelog gave tumblr its name. Because _why was excited about the format and he had his weird cult of personality going the Ruby community got excited about it too. Twitter started out as a Rails application, so a lot of its early users where Ruby guys, for the same reason there were a lot of lispers on reddit early on.