The Thing That Fixes Things is Broken

More Twitter Updates

I feel more positive about Twitter’s destiny this week than last week. Most of that is gut intuition and a few things like offering a general ban amnesty (which is more fair than just unbanning people near to you on a social graph) and also Trump’s continued refusal to use the platform. While I support bringing Trump back on the principle, it’s hard to not to see him as radioactive waste. I have an inverse feeling about refusing to let Alex Jones back on the platform, where I do support free speech, but it’s better for the near term survival of Twitter if he stays gone and I think even most free speech supporters can grok keeping him gone.

I do continue to wonder if Elon’s focus on the tech is going to be enough to navigate all the human drama, but things are evolving so rapidly that it’s hard to know how this will propagate into future. If past performance is any indicator then I’m hoping what I have been feeling is just me being a total wuss and Elon having the courage to stick to a vision. For instance, if I’m being honest, I would have had a heart attack about trying to fight the entire dealership system while building an electric car company but it was obviously the right choice in retrospect.

Other positive indicators:

-Several members of SFWA (the science fiction writers of America) have vowed to leave the platform and I do look at this as an incredibly positive indicator since they have the most reliably poor judgment on Earth.

-Mastodon (a twitter alternative) seems to have been created by someone who had the same basic idea that I had about users moderating their own content, but instead of building that experience from the floor up on the idea that people have inalienable rights, and seeking principles and competing principles, they just made their back-end experience into a monarchy. It probably took tens of thousand of hours and it… kind of sucks in ways that would be difficult to fix without replacing the entire code-base. I’m going to try to write about this later but you can’t really implement the basic rules of free society one at a time since a lot of them work together to limit each other.

-Everyone else who might build an alternative seems so obsessed with crypto (I do think crypto is extremely useful but my primary test for it is usually “does this thing get updated infrequently and need to be tracked so well that even the CIA couldn’t hack it?” and not “this is a thing customers use all the time and will probably have a lot of user entry errors, so we definitely want to make a super slow ledger that doesn’t have a mechanism for charge-backs or reversing transactions.”) that I don’t think he’s going to have meaningful competition for a while.

-As of a few minutes ago, Sam Harris seems to have deleted his Twitter account. While I do like Sam Harris as a person (his wife is fantastic, much smarter than him in my opinion, and ironically it was an interview he did with her that forced me to think of him as a good person) I see a lot of his philosophy as representing a sort of intellectual contagion because it sounds smart if you don’t think about it too long but mostly it can be reduced to “If something makes you feel badly, it’s probably true.” Like how free will doesn’t exist if you define free and will and also identity to mean a bunch of things that are totally useless to anyone. I’m not trying to be mean but he routinely ignores external factors to arrive at the wrong conclusion in a way that he personally feels good about and then refuses to admit he did anything wrong. He’s one of those people that’s so sharp he repeatedly cuts himself and can talk himself into believing he’s right about anything. I also consider him to be a good counter indicator that Twitter will thrive.

I’m continuing to follow this closely (and check job postings) because I am deeply concerned that if Twitter fails, or even fails to be wildly successful, that it will be taken as social proof that Freedom of Speech cannot exist on the internet. That might have a more chilling effect on business and start-up investments than the censorious regime that was in place prior.

MORE THOUGHTS ON HOW TO MOVE TWITTER TO AN ALGORITHMIC REPUBLIC

I am now convinced the best way to dip the toes of the user base into the pool of self-moderation is by having them eliminate spam accounts by consensus. I keep scrolling through Elon’s tweets thinking “Man, if I had a nickel for every single one of these goddamn crypto scam posts I could probably make a dollar just weeding them out of the top replies.” Then that user generated data set could be used to train an AI model to automate those kinds of blocks so your spam filter would become stronger over time.

Think of it like a distributed Turing Test to maintain your access. Verified users get to start out the pool and then it can expand outward from there. You save all the data so you can start to automate the elimination and then it becomes better and better and cheaper and cheaper over time.

I also think a universal poll like the one used to bring back Trump would be a great feature for users to begin voting in a meaningful way. That could help shift the culture of the whole site and would be a great way to get buy-in on features before they arrive.

THE THING THAT FIXES THINGS IS BROKEN, AND ALSO IT RESISTS BEING FIXED

I’m fascinated by how people rate believability. In part because I spent a portion of my childhood as a precocious magician and that just sort of opens your eyes to how much of belief is dependent on perspective but also because I think building a great answer to this question at the social level is the only way humanity will survive. In a world where everyone is spouting off all the time, we need a good way to tell who actually knows what they’re talking about. We need consequences and a feedback mechanism for being correct. Otherwise, you get what we have now which is a bunch of institutions with no accountability and everyone gradually stops trusting the centers of power because they’re verifiably wrong all the time. For instance, I have been very fascinated to see several prominent twitter accounts advance the argument that Elon Musk is actually mentally handicapped.

One account in particular advanced a conspiracy theory that Elon Musk never actually graduated from college. To this poster’s mind, it therefore followed naturally that SpaceX and Tesla had to be fake. He put so much believability in the college credentialing system that he considered it to be impossible that someone could accomplish something without first being certified to do so. He later made an argument to the effect that if SpaceX and Tesla were real it was only because of engineers and scientists who Elon had exploited to make it appear that he knew what he was doing. The actual rockets and cars were of no consequence. The fact other people tried and failed mattered not at all.

The current reward mechanism for attention on Twitter, and really the entire internet, is spectacle. Being right doesn’t matter unless you can be right flamboyantly. Nobody has any dignity unless they have a sort of “look at me being dignified” kind of dignity, which is not real dignity at all. It’s why Ben Shapiro can’t reason things out with people based on first principles but rather he has to slit their throats and desecrate their corpses with logic and facts. It’s a great mechanism in a lot of ways because it’s how I find articles about things like “Goat On Roof Won’t Come Down for Police Because He Only Respects One Man” but also it’s a terrible mechanism by itself because… hurting other people’s feelings can be fun to a certain kind of person.

For that reason, attention shouldn’t be the only mechanism to promote content.

There should be a mechanism for rating believability and truth-telling over time that works so transparently and so well that if it served up a news article to you that aliens were attacking, you and all your neighbors would be immediately digging basement shelters to try to survive the attack without checking for secondary sources. If anyone asked what you were doing all you’d have to say is “It was on the Twitter News Index” and they’d call out from work and grab a pick axe.

I want to build this mechanism into the new believability credential where the guy who thinks “if he didn’t go to college, rockets can’t fly” now looks at “Well, this number is higher than that number by a lot so definitely the first guy is right. It’s not like they are close numbers because then I can’t tell.” That wouldn’t be the only thing that helps focus your attention on Twitter, but it would be one of them and it would be the one you could trust and rely upon. It would be a way of signing out awards and swag to people that actually means something in their profile. I think funneling money to journalists through that kind of system could save the entire news industry in America.

This mechanism is specifically what I want to help build at Twitter and here’s keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll get the chance. I don’t know how long the world can continue to function without someone building that. And I don’t think prediction markets are going to cut it unless someone tries to make them a lot stickier