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If I Was Jack Dorsey

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    • Twitter is so close. So close to being the perfect social media platform.
    • It's still the one I use the most. I personally also think it's still remains to be the best one.
    • It has connected me to all sort of people that I wouldn't have met otherwise. It is helping me grow a userbase for RoamJS. It fills my feed with ideas from people that I consider my mentors that don't even know I exist.
    • https://twitter.com/dvargas92495/status/1318874115667906560?s=20
    • However, when I see Twitter I see a company that is unsure of what their true value proposition is. They seem to misunderstand how valuable the network they've built is and how to continue strengthening that existing network.
    • The "If I Was Jack Dorsey" game is a fun fantasy I like to play because I love the app so much. Here are some ideas that would take Twitter closer to social media utopia.
    • Delete Fleets
    • This post was inspired by the horror on my face when I saw stories appear on the top of my Twitter mobile client.
    • The problem with fleets wasn't the bugs that have been found with the feature or the inability for the feature to handle the initial load. I'm empathetic to these road bumps as it's difficult to account for every edge case when rolling something brand new out to a user base of 330 monthly active users.
    • The problem has more to do with Twitter's identity crisis I alluded to earlier. Fleets lack the ability to have an ongoing public conversation, with each input contexted to the original idea. Fleets lack the ability to refer back to an impactful idea or link at some future point in time. With ephemeral messaging, you lose all of the features that made Twitter special to begin with.
    • Early surveys are already starting to demonstrate this:
    • Caught up in the rat race in trying to beat Instagram, Snapchat, and the rest of them, Twitter inches one step closer towards a game they can't win with Fleets.
    • Custom Feeds
    • Speaking of games they can't win, let's talk about advertising.
    • Advertising has pushed most social media companies to implement algorithmic feeds. This is because then the company could control what content surfaces to the user in an attempt to keep them coming back to the platform. Twitter is operating under the same model.
    • In 2019, Twitter made $3.46 billion in revenue with $2.99 billion coming from advertising. This is dwarfed by Facebook's $69.7 billion and Google's $41.8 billion.
    • With 330 million monthly active users on the platform, it's safe to say that advertising is not where Twitter's value proposition is. The ads themselves get buried in the sea of the algorithmic feed, barely distinguishable from the other users building their online presence. The math is also pretty unfavorable, as maintaining this algorithmic feed for the purpose of advertising amounts to less than $1/month per user.
    • The value proposition that Twitter offers is the network they've built. The world's most successful founders, investors, engineers, coaches, and so much more are all on the platform. For users to tap into that network more effectively, we need more control over our feeds.
    • Twitter started this way by having a chronological sort on the feed. A flexible custom feed would give users the power to filter and sort by various criteria. This is not implemented though because it would deviate from Twitter's algorithm that is responsible for 85% of their current revenue.
    • So if I was Jack Dorsey, I'd offer custom feeds as a premium feature to compensate for loss of revenue from advertising. We already know that the demand exists for this today given the wide range of existing Twitter clients:
    • Custom feeds would steer incentives to better align with their actual users. Given the small margins they're making on advertising today, any amount they do charge for it would seem to skyrocket past current revenue figures:
    • https://twitter.com/dvargas92495/status/1275787361637543938?s=20
    • Append-Only
    • One of my favorite features on Twitter is that you can't edit Tweets. One of my least favorite is the fact that this feature gets under minded by the ability to delete a Tweet and post the correction.
    • There are several benefits to immutability. The biggest would be having a public record of all conversation that have happened on the platform in the purest form when it was posted. Fake tweets are only possible because tweets could be deleted. Otherwise, the validity of a tweet could be publicly verifiable.
    • The reason why Twitter needs to allow the deletion of tweets today is related to the previous section. They control everyone's feed. Because they have that control, they need to be able to and allow their users to pull content from the platform in case the algorithm exhibits any undesirable behavior with a given Tweet. They are falling closer to becoming a publisher instead of a platform or public utility.
    • That's not a game Twitter could win with again, 330 million active monthly users. This is several orders of magnitude greater than most publications. Monitoring and being held responsible for conversation at that scale will be Twitter's downfall.
    • An append-only approach to Twitter steers the company back to being a platform. It absolves the company from the responsibility of the conversation on the platform, and instead focuses their efforts towards giving users the control of the conversations they experience. This would inevitably lead to a world with custom feeds exist which as I mentioned in the previous section, would make them a more profitable company as well.
    • I love Twitter and I love the network it has created for me there. These changes would take the company to the next level of capturing the value the platform actually generates.
If I Was Jack Dorsey