Community notes seem like a genuinely helpful improvement on the margin—but coming back to this post a year later, I would say that on net I am disappointed. (Disclaimer—I don’t use twitter much myself, so I can’t evaluate people’s claims of whether twitter’s culture has noticeably changed in a more free-speech direction or etc. From my point of view just occasionally reading others’ tweets, I don’t notice any change.)
During the lead-up to the purchase, people were speculating about all kinds of ways that Twitter could try to change its structure & business model, like this big idea that it could split apart the database from the user-interface, then allow multiple user-interfaces (vanilla Twitter plus third-party alternatives) to compete and use the database in different ways, including doing the federated censorship that Larks mentioned in his comment. The database would almost become the social version of what blockchains are for financial transactions—a kind of central repository of everything that everyone’s saying, which is then used and filtered and presented in many different ways.
But instead, the biggest change so far has been the introduction of a subscription model. Maybe this is just Step 1 of a larger process (gotta start by stabilizing the company and making it profitable)… but it seems like there is no larger vision for big changes/experiments like this. With a year of hindsight, it seems like Elon’s biggest concerns were just the sometimes aggressively left-wing moderation/norms of the site, and the way that the bluecheck system favored certain groups like journalists. It seems like now he’s fixed those perceived problems, but it hasn’t resulted in a transformative improvement to the platform, and there are simply no more steps in the plan.
So, that’s unfortunate. But I am still optimistic that Twitter is interested in experimenting and trying new things—even if there isn’t a concrete vision, I guess I am still optimistic that Twitter will eventually find its way to some of these interesting ideas via small-scale experimentation and iteration.
Community notes seem like a genuinely helpful improvement on the margin—but coming back to this post a year later, I would say that on net I am disappointed. (Disclaimer—I don’t use twitter much myself, so I can’t evaluate people’s claims of whether twitter’s culture has noticeably changed in a more free-speech direction or etc. From my point of view just occasionally reading others’ tweets, I don’t notice any change.)
During the lead-up to the purchase, people were speculating about all kinds of ways that Twitter could try to change its structure & business model, like this big idea that it could split apart the database from the user-interface, then allow multiple user-interfaces (vanilla Twitter plus third-party alternatives) to compete and use the database in different ways, including doing the federated censorship that Larks mentioned in his comment. The database would almost become the social version of what blockchains are for financial transactions—a kind of central repository of everything that everyone’s saying, which is then used and filtered and presented in many different ways.
But instead, the biggest change so far has been the introduction of a subscription model. Maybe this is just Step 1 of a larger process (gotta start by stabilizing the company and making it profitable)… but it seems like there is no larger vision for big changes/experiments like this. With a year of hindsight, it seems like Elon’s biggest concerns were just the sometimes aggressively left-wing moderation/norms of the site, and the way that the bluecheck system favored certain groups like journalists. It seems like now he’s fixed those perceived problems, but it hasn’t resulted in a transformative improvement to the platform, and there are simply no more steps in the plan.
So, that’s unfortunate. But I am still optimistic that Twitter is interested in experimenting and trying new things—even if there isn’t a concrete vision, I guess I am still optimistic that Twitter will eventually find its way to some of these interesting ideas via small-scale experimentation and iteration.