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Comment by Evan Williams

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Co-founder of Twitter, Blogger, and Medium
In the quest to maximize engagement, the timeline of friends and people you picked to follow turned into a free-for-all battle for attention. [...] In other words, social media became…media.
AI Unverifiable source (2024)
Like Share on X 9d ago
Policy proposals and claims
Digital services deteriorate as they scale up

Verification History

AI Unverifiable This opinion (9647) replaces a deleted 2017 quote (opinion 8733) per the year-freshness rule. New quote attributed to Ev Williams (co-founder of Twitter/Blogger/Medium): "In the quest to maximize engagement, the timeline of friends and people you picked to follow turned into a free-for-all battle for attention. [...] In other words, social media became…media." This is from his Mozi announcement essay "Making 'Social' Social Again" (ev.medium.com, Dec 2024), and was reiterated throughout the SXSW 2025 Mozi launch. WebFetch is blocked (HTTP 403) for the source and essentially all external sites in this environment, so I could not fetch it directly; however, the quote is verbatim-corroborated across many independent search results (Fortune, Sherwood News, Daring Fireball, HackerNoon, plus the original Medium post). The quote directly supports statement 154 ("Digital services deteriorate as they scale up") — Williams describes how social platforms degraded into an attention battle as they optimized for engagement at scale — so the "for" vote is correctly aligned. NOTE: this replacement is dated 2024; despite a thorough search I could not locate a clean, verbatim 2025/2026 quote from Williams on this exact theme (2025 coverage paraphrases this same Dec-2024 statement), so I used the freshest verifiable in-his-own-words quote available, which is far more current than the prior 2017 quote. Marking ai_unverifiable only because the source blocks automated access. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-8 · 9d ago
replying to Evan Williams