I have my doubts about Twitter being able to create an open and decentralized standard considering they still haven't even opened up polls to third-party clients. I imagine there's no technical reason for it, just business ones. If they want to make the big leap towards a decentralized standard, why not make the small leap and give features like polls to current app developers?
I think such issues (give developers features) are something that would require a centralized response. This in turn creates liability and the issues of large platforms; they are tweaked by an incredibly small % of users who develop the feature, who can't fully foresee the unintended consequences of any large action. Then the results are mostly expressed by another % of loud/angry/extreme users, amplified by the media and then the centralized developers have to answer.
In the article, the author mentions 'your policy is what you enforce'. But that's really overly simplistic. There's a gradient, with extreme moderation on one end and no moderation on the other (even those in favor of no moderation will generally agree that nuclear launch sites and codes should be moderated off).
And then there's how and where you implement systems to identify cases which require moderation and what systems you put in place to avoid abuse and what incentives you are creating. And all this probably changes with time as people try different things to game systems. Our government(s), economies, etc are getting more and more centralized, controlled by fewer and fewer hands. This skews incentives and positions of leverage, look at what's happened with youtube content creators as a tiny example, but it's way beyond that.
By making it decentralized, Jack's basically appealing to the wisdom of crows. I think the article is missing the long of it. Yes, there will be forks, but eventually consensus appears in the community. I feel his comparison to Mastadon is unfair, since it was new and looking for a niche. Twitter is such a big name, everyone will want to have input on such a decentralized system, so there should be strong input from all sides as they are represented, at least within the tech sphere (which is pretty large and diverse when you leave SV/CA).
Our current development climate is allowing something as dramatic of a change as P2P protocols in the early 2000s. P2P has mostly disappeared in favor of streaming services, at least in the first world. But it was the P2P that allowed the creation of big streaming services. Without that pressure, I have serious doubts the current IP holders would have allowed Netflix or Hulu to be.
Jack's level of vision is reaching way beyond mine, but I think he is on to something, and the payoff can be truly disruptive, not just to business which is a bit boring, but to how things can work.
Jack Dorsey references [1] Stephen Wolfram's testimony to the US Senate where he outlined a solution for algorithmic transparency and content curation. My startup, The Factual, coincidentally built something similar to what Stephen envisioned as a "final ranking provider". Blog post with details: https://blog.thefactual.com/delivering-on-stephen-wolframs-v...
I’m very interested in the area you’re working in so I checked out The Factual. Heads up that the “About OwlFactor” page gave me a 403.
From clicking around it seems like you’ve built a cool system for ingesting and scoring articles. I would say that you’re methodology and it’s bias against “highly opinionated” journalism seems to be committing the Argument to Moderation fallacy.
Thanks for checking out our site! We rebranded from OwlFactor and I forgot to update my HN profile! Doh. Fixed.
You're right that our methodology encourages moderation in news articles. But it doesn't penalize far right or far left outlets. Rather, if the style in which an article is written is inflammatory or opinionated then it is dinged. So it's not so much that viewpoints should be moderate but rather that the case for any viewpoint should be made without undue hyperbole and emotion.
The real test of our technology is if regular news readers like you and me like this selection bias. So I'd be grateful if you checked out the selections on www.thefactual.com/news and commented further.
To be honest, an unknown author with no history on a topic on a site that's also previously unknown will struggle to rate >50%. Lmk if I can answer any other questions.
> A third-party Twitter client might be prettier and more functional than Twitter’s own client — shout out to Tweetbot! — but it certainly would not be more profitable.
I never understood this, why can't the API/firehose serve ads that would be presented in the 3rd-party apps?
Additionally 90% of users would naturally gravitate to the default app regardless, leaving 3rd-parties for cool/interesting/advanced/innovative use-cases. I still feel this was a mistake - not as some hippy idealogue - but from a ruthless capitalist perspective. This was their like button.
Then why would I as a developer bother with it at all? I don't want to serve ads someone else is getting paid for from my app. And if my app was to be funded by ads, then what? Display twice the number of ads to the user?
Or Twitter could share the ad profits a la YouTube to incentivise all kinds of innovative niche ui's. 3rd parties are not the enemy to be managed. They are a blessing - free engineers who managed the impossible of building a product with customers and traction. UI is a cost for Twitter.
It's funny how things have turned. They had an open API with several 3rd party clients, and they killed them. Now they want to go even more open... Strange
> He argues that Twitter’s value lies in directing your attention toward valuable tweets — not hosting all the content.
If twitter can succeed in offloading their hosting costs onto this "decentralized network" and remain the authority over which tweets are relevant (and therefore remain the primary channel which can serve ads on this type of content) it could be a big win for them as far as the bottom line.
At the same time, it might take some of the heat off of them as far as accusations of bias on the platform. If Twitter is the only entity deciding what is and is not acceptable in the discourse, questions can be asked about whether or not they're doing that in a wise and fair manner. If they are just one of many curators, then "the market" can decide if their method of governance is best, and they can't be accused of having a monopoly over the discourse in the same way.
I understand what you’re saying, and I would venture to guess that Twitter has put a lot of time and money into determining whether this would be a good outcome for them before they would go through with it.
It is curious in a way, since Twitter does seem to hold a monopoly on a certain kind of online discourse. It’s not like FB -> Instagram -> Snapchat -> TicTok where there there seems to be a generational sunrise and sunset. In that case it seems like there would be more to gain going open with the hopes of having the opportunity to exert more control over the next up-and-comer
It's probably because he's going to launch a new crypto-"currency" - inherently structured as a Pyramid-Ponzi scheme - where he and perhaps Twitter will own the majority of the "coins" to then promote to the Twitter audience to help realize an unreasonable, unnecessary, irrational wealth transfer of the new value of the "coins." That way if anyone else plugs into "Twitter's network" then they'll be increasing the use of their "coin" and therefore inflating its artificial value further.
I'd say Twitter's stockholders should understand the indoctrination Jack Dorsey has with Bitcoin et al due to his close association with USV.
That's a broad question without one single answer.
In my experience, getting approved to use the API is substantially easier with Facebook than Twitter. Twitter will reject for bullshit reasons, and send you a "there can be no appeal" message. The only way around it is to kick up enough of a fuss with prominent people to get a manual reconsideration.
Once you're in, though, you can pretty much do anything a Twitter user can do. Facebook heavily limits what data you can get - you basically can't get any info about the user's personal profile/feed, or info about a user's friends. Twitter makes all that readily available.
On the other hand, analytics.twitter.com has no API (and hasn't for years), whereas Facebook makes all sorts of analytics info available on Pages.
One thing conspicuously missing is getting all of the replies to a given tweet. This makes it difficult to build anything resembling an alternative Twitter UI (such as existed the the hayday of more open Twitter APIs) using the official API.
