A few more thoughts on how Twitter is currently evolving with Musk in the leadership role. I’ve been tracking this closely as it seems like the best near term chance for humanity to produce something like an algorithmic republic.
On the good side:
Community Notes, or Bird Watch, looks like it will provide some Internet Index type of capabilities and I am very excited to see that grow. I feel so overwhelmingly positive about this my major gripes sort of pale in comparison. My biggest gripe is the same on that I have with Prediction Markets which is that they don’t generate explanatory artifacts for the consensus view. Being able to see that argument assures people that no one is being ignored and produces an audit trail anyone can view. It’s not enough to show people the right answer. You have to convince them it’s the right answer. You need the explanation for basic trust reasons. I also want that, selfishly, so it can one day be used as a training set for a fact-check AI.
Twitter will probably want to do something to limit the scope of who gets fact-checked in the near term (Politicians and News Articles is my vote) but the notes I have seen so far have been pretty good. They just need a mechanism to ensure that it operates in a visibly bipartisan manner. That’s going to be the hardest sell since nobody really believes in fair play on Twitter. And hence my grip about audit trails. Moving people is so much harder than moving bits.
Paid Verification, Creator Monetization, and expansion of some of the basic options (why did they let Vine die?) are the first things I would have included on the product roadmap and Twitter is executing on them by all reports. Elon certainly knows what he is doing there and what needs to be prioritized and he’s attacking that with an engineer’s mindset.
Other than for those bits, I do think he’s thawed the conversation a bit already just by making the purchase. I wish lay-offs hadn’t had to be so steep, but it was probably necessary from both an ideological standpoint and cash flow standpoint. You have to be able to pay for the changes you want to make and from what I saw a lot of positions at Twitter were filled by people who had fully drunk the censorship Kool-Aid. But I can never smile at the idea of someone with a family being out of a job.
On a technical side, I think he’s doing almost all the right things.
On the bad side:
I’m wondering how much of the following problems Elon already knows, because he is smarter than I am (and not just in the way where someone says someone else is smarter than they are but what they really mean is that they are super humble and also secretly smarter than everybody) but just can’t be bothered to address right now. He’s the busiest person on the planet with way too much on his plate. I have a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach that these things could sink the company.
But first, a fun story to give this some ethos.
I had a project once where I had to work hundred hour weeks for something like three months. A little bit of that was my own fault in retrospect, but I had a lot of stakeholders whose job was basically to prevent me from getting any work done and I had more or less been set up to fail. Everyone except my direct management kind of wanted me to fail so they wouldn’t have to be stressed out over my updates anymore. However, I was getting married and needed the career development, so I just smiled and ate whatever turd someone put in my path. I had to redesign the entire system architecture about three times just as a for instance. This was also the first three times I had ever designed a system architecture and spent a lot of late terrifying nights googling and watching MIT OpenCourseWare.
During the worst of it, I had to fly to corporate headquarters and lead an eight hour meeting with a guy who at the time was about seven levels above me in the corporate structure and who really, really wanted me to fail. He was also notorious for being short-tempered. So I made a 36 page Power Point Presentation, knowing that as I made it he would attempt to dismantle every single slide and challenge me on every point. I shared this with him prior to the in-person meeting. It was like I could feel him from a thousand miles away prepping on every slide. I then secretly made 36 other individual Power Point Presentations for each individual slide of the main presentation. It was basically the War and Peace of Power Point Presentations. Anytime I was challenged on one slide, I would open up a whole other presentation without giving any sign of emotional distress, and just start talking in a deeper level of detail like it was no big deal. I had prepared myself for WWIII, but I only had to do that four times before he reached his breaking point and couldn’t find a reasonable way to challenge me. He relented that we really had taken into account all the things we needed to account for and were okay to proceed with the project the way I had originally wanted to. In fact, he ended up being one of the biggest supporters of the project. I also became the only person he liked in my entire department, which was both a blessing and a curse.
After that, we still had to build the damn thing.
About a year and a half later when all that was left do was really small stuff that mostly boiled down to style choices with almost no functional impact, I wanted to be fired and didn’t really care about winning or losing political battles anymore. Thankfully, I had already won all the major ones and had other people in my team that I could delegate tasks to. My burn out point had come at the right time to still be successful.
I kind of think Elon has been in that tired place for about ten years. Not burned out on everything, but not caring what people say, or winning political battles, because he’s too busy and exhausted to care. You can have a life working sixty hours a week, no problem. That leaves time for friends, family, and love. Anything over that and you really start to feel it being chipped away at an exponential rate. In rockets, it doesn’t matter what people think about whether or not the rocket will fly because you can point to it and see that it does. Same for cars, you can bitch and moan all you want but the car will still drive. You can measure all that stuff. By being actually excellent, Elon has always been able to win those battles.
With Twitter… bitching and moaning is Twitter.
Seeming to do a good job at Twitter is much more tightly tied to actually doing a good job than with any product Elon manages. With Twitter, you could 100% do everything technically correct and in two otherwise identical futures still have different outcomes. In the one where people didn’t emotionally feel like you were doing the right thing the company would die. In the one where people felt like Twitter was changing for the better, it could become the most profitable company ever. Even with identical platforms, the user engagement and understanding of the platform makes all the difference.
Twitter needs a mission and a vision (steal mine, please! It’s free! And not in the way where it’s too shitty to charge money for, but in the way that the Polio vaccine is free!) to bring people together.
In the bipartisan world in which we live, holding Twitter together is going to take immense amounts of political and emotional capital.
I felt he lost a lot of that capital with the recent ban on folks impersonating and making fun of him. That would have been a great chance to simply reply “$8” and show he was above the joke. Maybe even carve himself out of the rule around people being parodied and mocked just to show he really was totally and completely above the fray. I totally get why he flipped out and suspended a few of those accounts (yes, I know someone else technically did it) on a human level. I mean… the sheer ingratitude. He’s trying to colonize space! He probably can’t have a normal relationship because he’s working all the time! And all of the people he banned kind of suck. Especially Kathy Griffin who has literally posed with a fake decapitated head as if to say “Yeah, this is an acceptable outcome for politicians I don’t like” and then two minutes later will turn around and talk about other people being heartless and shame them for advocating for violence. It seemed like a category of people who say really stupid shit like “Oh, I could manage a rocket company and a car company at the same time. I’d just hire really great engineers.” People who have never even successfully led a team of themselves and one other person. On a human level, I get it.
But when you’re the dad of Twitter, you don’t get to be human. He later okay’ed the account that tracks his plane movements as a show of good faith, but I don’t think that’s the one that gets the attention. It’s like how you can be a great dad but if you beat your kid with a belt one time you don’t really get to just go back to making pancakes that look like Mickey Mouse. You have to be a great dad 100% of the time because 99.999% causes a lot of therapy bills.
To lead an entire polity, you have to be able to look at people you just can’t stand, like Laurie Penny or Neil Gaiman, and find something good inside of them that’s worth fighting for. You have to be able to love your enemies so much that even you believe it. I mean American Gods was pretty good, right? Her hair is… red?
Also, something something about power warping people with good intent. As long as you step into the same incentive structure as your predecessor (who in Elon’s case, was also a Free Speech bro at the beginning) you will inevitably begin to evolve into your predecessor. In Elon’s case, as long as he has a dependency on ad revenue AND has Twitter placed as the moderator over Twitter’s content he is going to be forced to either lose the company or become Jack. There’s no other way to survive as a company while playing that game.
People may think I’m really naive for thinking that people should be empowered to drive their own content moderation, but it’s also the only way that you as a company get to wash your hands clean of taking a side in literally every single divisive political issue that people care enough about to demand censorship. You can’t constantly piss off half your customer base over and over again and remain a viable company. You’ll Zeno’s paradox yourself into not having a user base. Giving this power by default to your users allows you to focus on the few heinous existential threats to the company like child porn and also say “You know what? I had the correct opinion on that. I’m not going to say what that opinion was. Just know that it was right. Probably the one you have. And also I wish I could have seen that have a different outcome but democracy. Don’t blame me, blame the people.”
It also creates, fresh out of the box, polities of people you can target advertisements to. There’s money in those hills.
Right now, Elon is in the fray as a user of Twitter and he needs to be working on the game overall as the dad of Twitter.
What I Would Do if I were Elon:
He already held a town hall with advertisers and that was a good first step. (Also if I were in charge I would not reveal to them my plan to let users self-moderate until I had a healthy subscription revenue stream in place and had some secret beta testing done with numbers to back it up.)
I’d hold a Town Hall with high profile twitter users, especially those who have been critical of him. Which would give me a chance to be disappointed in who Stephen King is as a person, because somehow I thought a guy who wrote about a child-killing clown in sewers would be more fun. Like the Santa Claus of Halloween instead of an old man who just doesn’t like the way the world is now. This would be to send the message that he is Twitter’s dad and cares about all the Tweeple who just simply want to destroy and maim their terrible political enemies to kill time while they are using the bathroom. Let water flow under the bridge. To be clear, by the way, I would preserve that angry mob Twitter use-case as well as create the one I would prefer to opt into which is more like a friendly Irish bar. You decide which one you want to be in.
I’d lay out a vision of Twitter as a republic but I would use the word Democracy a lot because people don’t know the difference but they know that Democracy is good. And most people who hear republic think Republican which is not at all the same. I’d even make a fun video of Elon with a giant evil fake goatee and then a video of a bunch of people being strangled and having a boot shoved on their head, only for the camera to pull back and reveal that they are doing it to themselves. Then cut to black with a title card that says “Self-Rule.” I would try to make all corporate communications legitimately funny.
I’d give the old check marks a golden check, to soothe hurt feelings, and let people select who they want to see first in their mentions and allow that as an option. It’s no more right for me to force them to see content from everyone than it is for them to be able to silence anyone. I’d make other statuses and swag types for people to add to their profile. Like winning an Academy Award, Grammy, or what have you. Which would make people happy and also back doors me into turning Twitter into a credentialing system people are tied to as a service. That also helps me charge them more money where they won’t care.
I’d lay out a vision that I want people on Twitter to have rights in general and to curate their own moderation rules. I’d lay out a dividing line between moderation and censorship (Scott Alexander did a great job of this recently, and it’s one of those things where I just assume people understand that they are different but when I read his piece I realized that they don’t) and say that while I don’t want anyone to be censored I would empower groups to moderate for themselves and to appoint representatives. Freedom of Speech doesn’t equal Freedom of Reach was a good motto I heard Elon use and it has to work because it rhymes.
I would even lay out a plan to compensate the representatives. I’d express how I was interested in using Twitter as a reputation system. Then I’d explain all the rules added on that to keep it from being Orwellian. I’d explain how Twitter is going to start soliciting votes from the user base for changes.
I’d let a bunch of people yell at me, and say things like “yes, I understand the N word is bad and probably if you are trying to post a picture of your kid’s birthday party it’s not a good thing for someone to just start posting that to you.” Then pivot to “and here is what I’m going to do to empower you to make sure you don’t see stuff like that anymore” and “we’ll have something we call normie settings that you default into where you can not pay attention to this kind of stuff and have the majority filter rules set to on.” Which I presume would just block out slurs and spam and things like that.
I would invite everyone back for periodic Town Halls and create transparent rules for who gets to participate and ask questions. I’d talk to people who hate me and that I hate in a civilized manner holding back all emotion.
I’d make sure people knew that I wanted to make journalism a livable profession and I’d work with outlets to accept micropayments on a per article basis with rules for removing paywalls after so much payout is received and I’d see if I could just outright buy substack.
Then all the other stuff I’ve talked about.
COMMENTING IN GENERAL
I probably seem like a real loser of a crazy person for writing all this, however:
Commenting is probably the most underrated super power given to us by the internet. Comment on something sincerely and put some degree of effort into it and odds are that it will have some degree of actual, real life impact. Maybe a tiny impact, but still real. And the only thing that holds it back from being more widely exploited it people’s internal sense of embarrassment.
I will explain.
For my day job, I “own” a couple of processes. This means that I am responsible for making updates to how these processes function and managing the teams that execute those changes. This was my reward for a lot of turd-eating in more junior roles. I create a product roadmap, work on securing funding, make sure our risk and control framework looks good, and although there are other groups that technically do this, I also end up creating a lot of the IT requirements. That last part is mostly because developers tend to be highly mobile, as do our requirements writers, and I have a longer eye on how changes in the past have caused problems in the present. I also have to do things like performance tracking, which includes customer satisfaction.
I know of what I speak.
Did you know when you provide feedback to some company that it doesn’t just disappear into the void? We look at all of those things, and you may want to sit down for this… on the unfortunately rare occasion that a sane person writes us a letter, with the understanding that they are not our only customer, asking for a very specific, small change… that it is almost a guarantee that change will be made. Anybody. Like a regular person. People who don’t even do that much business with us. Maybe not quickly, but it will certainly be something that gets put on a product backlog at a minimum. We’ll try to get it done.
That’s how much your voice, as a paying customer, matters.
I have a bi-weekly call dedicated to this on my calendar.
Also, reading comments is like masturbating. Everyone does it. It’s just that some people convincingly lie about it and don’t let it bother them too much.
Back in an older internet incarnation I summoned a Noble laureate. A Physics Nobel Prize. Not one of the crap ones. Countless minor celebrities. Everybody reads comments. Even when they’re written by a crazy guy on the internet who looks like Shrek.
Just be simple, clear, and honest. I don’t follow this ethos nearly as well as I should, mostly because I live in the middle of nowhere, talk to other people mostly on conference calls and to a baby, and have personal boundaries so poor that I may as well be Italian, so I write a lot of comments just for fun. Like that last little line about Italians. I wrote that for fun. I am sorry, presumably, Mike Solana.
Anyway, I’m going to keep risking embarrassment and I’ll probably sign up for a paid twitter account here in the near future and see if I can Reply Guy a good future into existence. I’m keeping an eye on twitter job postings although it would require me to move and I probably won’t do it unless I can get in a position where I’ll have some influence over the product itself. I don’t have a degree but I have the experience. There’s a baby to think of and I have already seen all the good episodes of MacGyver. So let’s all be a Servant of the Secret Fire.
More Notes on Twitter
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