@Samizdata For Twitter's first year I mean. I only got an account in early 2007. Communities were relatively small clusters based on existing social groups from other communites like LJ, so self-policing rather than moderation seemed acceptable. There were no media-famous people to speak of, Being a Twitter celeb meant saying interesting and useful things. The Failwhale was an in-joke because Twitter didn't know how to scale.

And then the money came. Because Twitter didn't know how to scale.