My Twitter Product Roadmap
I don’t have social media so please share this to Tim Urban, because I think this should have a signal boost
Request: Folks, please respond to this tweet from Tim Urban with a specific link to this article. He asked for First Principles changes to social media. Best chance I can think of to actually get this read by someone who could do something about it.
I’m going to start with a description of an experience.
You open Twitter. Your timeline is fun, engaging, and makes you fundamentally happy to be alive. There are some things there that make you angry, yes, but nothing that makes you feel hopeless. No spam, no bots, nothing beyond your ability to tolerate. Twitter feels like an old Irish bar that has been frequented by your family for five-hundred years. It’s joyful and mirthful. You feel at home and lucky to be connected to the people on your timeline.
Off to the side is the Twitter News feed. It is the best News Feed that has ever existed in the history of human civilization. Even its critics acknowledge that before the Twitter News Feed, all other news models were garbage. They only complain about very specific particulars. All the stories in the News Feed are accurate, important, and relevant to you. You can click on any of them for more context and to see what is still an ongoing discussion. Even when there is disagreement among journalists they argue with a dedication to good faith and honorable conduct that is practically Bedouin. There is almost no such thing as a journalist who would willingly lie to you. It’s like the journalism world is full of Clark Kents and Lois Lanes.
People often say “It has to be true, I saw it on Twitter” and they are not joking.
Twitter has an even more powerful feature though called the Internet News Index. It’s part of the “X” series of features that is turning twitter into something quite a bit more powerful than a simple feed of people’s thoughts. It doesn’t just exist on twitter, but across the entire internet. Whether app driven on your mobile device or as a browser extension on your desktop, the Twitter Internet News Index is like a pair of magical glasses. With the press of a button, any news article you encounter is fact-checked, highlighted, annotated, and if it’s just plain not true you can click a link to be redirected to a better article. You have an immediate power to see through bullshit.
The Index isn’t propaganda, though. As good as the Internet News Index is, you still get a weekly communication from Twitter about what articles you read that later turned out to be inaccurate. You can see corrections at any time. The same is true of the tweets in your timeline. If someone posts something that just isn’t true you can tell, and if it later turns out that they were actually right you’ll know about it. Reputation matters to journalists in this world in a way that it simply does not in our own.
In a world of endless noise, the Internet News Index is almost pure signal. It’s included with your subscription and it’s already starting to expand into other areas.
But wait, there’s more! Other Indexes are springing up all the time with new product launches.
You can use these other Indexes to find out who is a good carpenter in your area when your door keeps getting stuck. It will point you to the best restaurants. You yourself can even use it to search for day work and part time jobs. It’s like google used to be, but much more personal and powerful. There are lots of people who make their entire living from the Jobs Index.
There’s even a city out there that’s integrated the Jobs Index with a Civic Digital Voice Assistant so you can yell out that there’s a pot hole at such and such an intersection and mere hours later someone comes by with a few traffic cones and fills it up. You get paid for making the notification and the person who fills it up gets paid for their work as well. That city has slashed its taxes every year for the last ten years.
This same kind of feature is also part of your timeline. If something really sad is happening in a tweet you saw you can click a button to donate a small amount of money to solve it and it gets posted on the Jobs Index. So if you see a lonely dog wandering around a train yard, if you and a couple hundred other people decide to click a button eventually someone will go down there and find it and post evidence that they completed the job. You can only look back on the times when you just had to sit there and think about someone suffering without being able to do anything about it and cry, because it was all so easy why didn’t we go out and do something about it back then? There is no such thing as a tragedy in this world that is not quickly ameliorated.
This was scary at first but one of the X features is political. It shook everyone so bad there were Congressional Hearings but it turned out to be pretty great. You don’t really have time to be aware of every single candidate in your area, or politics in general anymore, but you do know people who describe a world that you like and they have the time and expertise to do that for you. You pay additional money on top of your subscription into what is the world’s most nimble and powerful Super PAC. Your money is moved through the people you like to the candidates you’d prefer and then they send you a report based on your preferences who the best candidates will be in your area when it actually comes time to vote. Whenever you turn on the television now, the candidates are goddamn sharp. Some of the money from the Super PAC flows to them and it’s just way more lucrative to be a politician now than it was before. Some people would rather be Governor of a small state than the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. It’s also really easy to ask for changes if you have a reasonable idea. You’ve done it yourself a few times and you’re always happy every time you sit down at the park in the bench you crowdfunded. People still bicker about politics, but they spend their time arguing about things that will directly impact them and their community.
There are problems in this world, of course. There are always problems. What is different is that the News is focused on helping you to understand those problems in a factually accurate manner and the governance structure is set up to help you actually engage with and solve those problems. No more doom scrolling. No more anxiety about how awful people are to one another. You get to experience fun. When something isn’t fun you get to be reassured it is being addressed.
There’s more coming down the pipeline, you’re told. Investment Indexes that some economists say are going to blow up GDP into double digit growth. More integration with Civic Digital Voice Assistants where now if someone has a medical emergency all they have to do it shout it out and people who are trained can get a notification on their wearables to let them know they are closest to the incident and can beat an ambulance. There’s so many other changes coming, though. The future looks bright.
This is not the technological apocalypse you have always feared and seen in movies. You feel fundamentally in control of what is going to happen and you feel a genuine pride and ownership in how Twitter is improving the world. And that is because Twitter is a Digital Republic, the first of its kind, and even though it’s a company you have rights, you have a vote, and you never have to worry about being simply disappeared.
HOW IT WILL ACTUALLY WORK
The Twitter payments systems both for receiving payments and for sending payments will leverage existing KYC laws to verify the Twitter user base. Some redundancy is likely necessary here for auditing purposes and because when people start making money from Twitter names, SSN’s, addresses, etc will be needed for tax compliance. All that can be further down the roadmap, though. For now, payments equal personhood. This is also after all the low hanging fruit is picked, like limiting who can reply to you having some more flexible selections.
Once you are a paying twitter customer you have a right to vote and to designate a representative.
This would be the main selling point of Twitter that I would repeatedly drive home to the user base both to distinguish the brand and to give a sense of what the broader roadmap and mission is for the company. On a practical level, for a lot of people, free speech means that a combination of edge lords and neo Nazis show up at your timeline to shout racial slurs at you. That’s because free speech is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a functioning town square.
This is going to sound slightly Orwellian until all the steps are in place.
The very first thing you get to vote on is block lists and who will maintain those block lists for you. Block lists are now shareable among large groups of people, as this is the easiest way to leverage existing twitter infrastructure with the smallest amount of tech spend. The voting and delegation features are new. People get to run for office to maintain the borders of their own communities. Some part of subscription revenues are paid to these people.
If you say stuff that the majority of a certain demographic finds to be racist, you can become functionally invisible to that demographic based on how they choose to opt in to various block lists. This is to balance the Freedom of Speech with the Freedom of Association. A racist should be able to say whatever slurs they want, and have them left on their timeline for anyone to search, but they really ought not to be able to go right outside your doorstep and shout it at all hours of the night when you’re trying to post a picture of your favorite food.
In the same way that your sense of hearing involves more neurons going from your brain to your ear than your ear to your brain, in order to filter our random noises, Twitter block lists cut out noise and allow communities to have their own distinct identities.
Now, to remove the Orwellian nightmare of someone being able to call you a racist and basically disappear you from the internet. Of course, a single person should not be able to just point their finger at you and make you invisible and untouchable. That’s just a digital Salem. As a Twitter Citizen you get the right to an appeal. If you feel you have been wrongly labeled, three other Citizens, minimum and randomly drawn from the total jurist pool, review your case and your argument and decide whether or not you are guilty of whatever you have been labeled.
This obviously creates another problem which is that you can’t just have people performing litigation activities on Twitter all day. So, if a moderator is found to have multiple infractions where they falsely accuse someone who is later exonerated their moderation power is down regulated. They have to begin making micropayments to process blocks. The worse they are the more that costs. The same goes for defenders. The more often you are found guilty the more it costs to keep re-litigating. This creates incentive for honest action by all parties and also balances the need for justice with the way people split up their time. Also, this provides a path for lower earning Twitter users to pay for their subscription costs, by serving as jurists in these kinds of disputes. This can be written as a formula to find the market clearing price for the moderation queue and rules driven to make sure we neither overspend Twitter’s mod budget or let the moderation queue get too backed up.
Now apply the same moderation criteria to journalism, except now apply also reputation. Again, this gets a bit Orwellian before all the pieces are in place. So if steps one and two have you bracing for it all to become a nightmare please wait for the rest of the steps.
Back in ancient times, you would just know what a person was good at because you had known them all your life and you could directly see what it was they did and how well they did it. Now, people can just appear in your life for one second, shout off some random untrue thing and then disappear again and there are zero consequences for being wrong all the time as long as you can find another sucker willing to pay attention to you. The ancient feedback loop of knowing who is full of crap and who isn’t needs to come back and the only way to bring that back is with Digital Reputation. Yes, scary. Yes, social credit systems. BUT, what if we gave people rights within this framework and appeals the same as above and also used it to funnel money to people? And also what if the reputation was domain specific. So nobody can just point at you and say “this guy just sucks overall” but they can point at you and say “you know who doesn’t know anything about ancient Egypt? That guy.” And also your reputation is never ranked and doesn’t matter unless you are trying to do something commercial with it. Think of really high definition Amazon star reviews.
Now, we apply this to journalism. If someone publishes verifiable lies literally every time they push a story and only retracts it a few months later shouldn’t I know that when they write their next story? The same is true for if someone is always the subject of scorn and rancor when they generally are always found to be honest.
There’s a wiki like database that most users on twitter never see and it is maintained by jurists and an adversarial almost court system. The stories are argued for accuracy and as facts emerge it is later found to be more or less accurate. This allows any stories from that journalist to be ranked accordingly. Jurists rank stories on importance, interest, and accuracy and this all drives into the Twitter News feed. You could also provide profile swag based on the News Feed rankings for social clout and to keep that audience engaged. These journalists don’t have to be Twitter Digital Citizens to be ranked so long as their work can be accessed through a url. There are also rules where if you appear to be wrong at first but later turn out to be right your signal is boosted. You also get to admit to mistakes and reduce impact. All of which are adjudicated by jurists drawn from the Digital Citizens.
Eventually, you can use this Index feature anywhere on the internet. If something is popular enough for you to see it, it has probably been reviewed. With a click of a button you can overlay the findings of that wiki like database on top of almost any article, using word searches to highlight which portions are important/wrong/whatever and to annotate for additional context.
Once the reputation system is well worked out and the public has a basic idea of how it works, we expand it to other areas. The next up is the Jobs Index, where you can now click a button and someone whose livelihood depends upon them being provably honest can now be summoned by their reputation score to go give the homeless man you saw in a tweet who made you tear up at your office a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of tomato soup. This can be expanded for just about any job that people do, but I think you’d agree it’s a better world where people can do something other than just say “That’s sad” and then scroll on doing nothing. The same will apply for political lobbying. I don’t have time to keep track of everything going on in the world of Nuclear Energy, but I know when I hear Michael Shellenberger speak on that specific topic I would like for him to have a voice and a bag of money to change policy.
There’s a piece in here I can add about Ethereum blockchains and digital assistants that is probably five years down the roadmap but I think you can probably very easily see how those things can execute and why they would be helpful based on the experience piece above. Basically, you want to arrive at a state where even an AGI can’t break your economic system because it’s all cryptographically protected and where no one can dispute the accuracy of your records for the same reason. Also to reduce the internal friction of moving money between parties. I also think sooner rather than later we’d want representatives elected by Twitter Digital Citizens to vote on/suggest features in the product roadmap.
This is a dream and a mission, which I think is presently lacking at Twitter. Tesla is about energy. Space X is about the future of space flight. Why not have Twitter be about the future of government? I am happy to help drive these things to fruition in whatever way I can (I am presently a manager of managers/project manager/product owner/whatever you’d want to call it so I have experience leading dev and business teams) so long as it doesn’t make my wife freak out since she doesn’t know I work on this stuff when I’m alone in the garage. I believe executing on the above, and sharing and inviting the feedback from twitters user base, could eventually make Twitter the most profitable company to have ever existed.
How does this make twitter profitable? We collect subscriptions yes, but we also collect fees on the eventual billions of dollars of transactions executing across twitter every day.