@bri_seven @DelphineUnseen Nearly true, in the sense that nostalgia was never what it used to be.
I do recall Twitter from 2009 where there was no retweet button. There was no like button, either. You could favourite any tweet, but that was just a bookmark with no message sent to anybody.
But above all, there was no algorithm. You could look at tweets from all you were following, in reverse chronological order, or you could look at the "firehose", every single tweet across the whole of Twitter, as it was propagated.
The first retweets were made by users copying the text of an existing tweet along with the handle of the tweeter, pasting it into the status box and preceding it with "RT ". In the 140-character days sometimes people would have to trim the text judiciously. Later, a practice of "quote tweeting" evolved. Typically MT would replace RT at the beginning, and the retweeter would contrive to squeeze in a quote and a commentary.
The user interface was thus a very high barrier, and adoption was low. Even so there were tech-savvy celebrities like Stephen Fry, Mark Gatiss, and so on. In 2011 some UI improvements, and the success of Obama's viral campaigns, brought on a wave of politicians. Most notable were 2012 Presidential hopefuls like Newt Gingrich. Hashtags were a thing by then, one of the more widespread hashtags was
#TCOT , meaning "Top Conservatives On Twitter."
It wasn't the same simple tool by then.