Hacker News Reader

I remember early twitter thinking RT was some guys initials and was so impressed at how popular and cool he was. Everyone was tweeting him and he seemed to be everywhere

Then I learned what it meant.

Never meet your heroes

I found that a really interesting development, and they embraced it. Probably the best example of "go with where your users are going" I can think of.

And it's silly as well, because anyone with a few weeks of software development knowledge could probably hack a Twitter-like together. Not that at that scale, admittedly, but still, prototype-twitter was nothing fancy.

There’s a term for this: “desire path”

Like when you see a worn path in the grass where hundreds of people took the same shortcuts instead of using the proper planned-out pathways.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path

The quote RT is another example. People used to take screenshots of tweets to quote RT.

They still do sometimes .. and it may become more common as the edit button is rolled out.