If Twitter had to start over without its graph, on the other hand, it would be dead (which speaks to why Twitter clones like BlueSky which are just Twitter minus the graph and with the same clunky onboarding process seem destined for failure). The new For You feed gives us a partial taste of what that might look like, and it's not pretty.

most Western social media apps must build a graph or die. This is because most of the most well-known Western social apps chose to interlace two things: the social graph and the content feed.

What is valuable is that social graph: while Facebook understands who you know, Twitter, more than any other company, understands what its users are interested in. That is, in theory, much more valuable; said value is diminished by the fact that Twitter just doesn’t have that many users, relatively speaking; the users it has, though, are extremely... See more