Twitter's future could look a lot like its past

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.

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.

Because there simply would be a 3th party app which would ignore the ads? If there was not I'd write one.

Simple as that. FB and Google closing their XMPP gateways is an example of a similar issue.

http://2fb.me is an actual Twitter Like button.

And btw a popular client integrating this protocol could be more profitable then Twitter.

https://github.com/egfx/ShareableTweets

"Here is some data you can use you can use to make your user experience worse"

It seems like the heart of it is this:

> 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.

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.