Twitter, Elliott Strike Truce That Leaves CEO Dorsey in Place
wsj.com
wsj.com
This looks like a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) for Jack Dorsey. Maybe they're trying to steer him the desired direction. Or maybe they're just trying to gather enough evidence to really oust him in 12 months.
He only owns 2% of the company, and at this point I’d imagine his only options were to strike this truce & have control over how he exits as opposed to be outed right now with a power vacuum causing Twitter to destabilize a bit.
I’d expect to see a succession plan where Jack is out within 12-18 months but getting to help pick the next CEO.
Cough cough Myspace.
I get real utility out of Facebook that affects the way I live my day to day life.
Twitter is entertaining but if it stopped existing today, my life wouldn't really change at all.
He's not turning to random people on Twitter because he's out of ideas... he's trying to understand more, and build a community of people who feel invested in the future of Twitter.
Jack seems to understand that. I hope it doesn't devolve into a narrow reveneue maximizing ad-filled trashfire, but thats probably what the hedge fund will push for. I think it would be better off as a non-profit so they can get the paperclip maximizers off their back. Heres hoping Jack wins this one.
Is that really true though? They've been a huge beneficiary of fake news, astroturfing and bots. They've only relatively recently started to do something resembling policing of these things.
Twitter is where you're meaningfully in control of who you follow and what you see. That means it's on you to curate that, and many won't want to do that. I was on Twitter for a while before I found the real niche and strategies that made it my favorite place. Once I got it, the curation became an activity that I enjoy, part of the loop, and it's rewarding when it's working well. If you're seeing fake news regularly it's because you want to see it.
One key thing to do is avoid the algorithmic timeline, Twitter does force bullshit down your throat to maximize engagement metrics, but where is that not the norm anymore? My Twitter experience might crumble if I lose access to the app that removes ads and suggested content from the timeline and keeps it fully chronological.
What Twitter does bring is the ability for one to say "this is a person I know or am familiar with; I can now trust what they say" - which Reddit eschews in favor of simple popularity. But since the "Hot" algorithm weights based on time-scaled popularity within each community, it's not quite as bad as one might think.
Any place is. The person you're replying to is convinced that Twitter is "the best" but any network where you invest can be really good.
On facebook, I've gotten rid of people I don't like and now it's only people I admire + interesting articles. My reddit front page is great for me - programming subreddits interpolated with cute animal gifs. I use Instagram maybe twice a year but I'm sure if I invested into finding people I admired, it'd be worthwhile too. Ditto with HN - most comments are self assured pronouncements made with absolute confidence and minimal expertise. But once you start to recognise certain usernames, you're able to sift the wheat from the chaff easily.
Twitter isn't "the best". Nor are any of the others. Each has it's niche.
This seems to be one of the last avenues FB has left for retaining younger users, who've rejected the friends & family part of it. Even FB knows this type of usage is their future as their Super Bowl ads concentrated on finding like-minded groups.
I feel the same with Twitter. Although it has very high quality content and more interesting people, I think the baseline is lower than on reddit. Reddit is topic instead of celebrity oriented which is far more enjoyable for me. But true, I wouldn't like to put in effort to curate anything.
Twitter is optimized for fake identities, and for virally spreading the most sensationalistic content.
Sure, mine are simply uninteresting and that's why Facebook isn't a viable place to get content.
> Twitter is optimized for fake identities, and for virally spreading the most sensationalistic content.
This is the common sentiment about Twitter spread by outsiders, but I don't understand it. As I said, it only has to be your Twitter experience if you situate yourself in those conditions. The difference with Twitter is that it's the best place to avoid that experience if you choose to put in effort. And if you don't put in effort, your experience anywhere is going to be chosen for you, and bad.
If I wanted to get on Twitter and complain about Hillary or Trump all day then sure, I'm either going to be preaching to a bubble or fighting with trolls. But that's just one way to use Twitter, not the one I'm interested in, and I don't understand why it's become synonymous with the Twitter experience.
I'm settling on a conclusion that some folks care more about what those close to them "in life" share, and others are more interested in what "outsiders" share. Those outsiders may be renowned global experts in their field, or athletes, or vapid influencers, or anything in between.
Regardless, I haven't been able to make it work.
On Reddit you can follow a community but then you’re bound by the quality of the community and it’s moderation. If on Twitter I want to follow an author I follow them. I engage with them. No additional noise or BS.
I'm unconvinced that this is even a good thing. It's really hard to police that without seeming biased. Take this new story about labeling a clip of Biden as "edited". Biden said those words, but the clip was cut short. This is essentially a sound bite without context. It makes Twitter look like they're defending Biden, but I doubt that this was Twitter's intent. I think that trying to police these things now will simply dig themselves deeper into a hole.
I can already see what such a mentality has done to many other sites, and In the end it drives away the core users of the platform. I can already see this in progress with Reddit for example.
How do you find good people on Twitter? My interests are esoteric and as far as I can tell not represented on Twitter. I've read people assert that most every interest is covered on Twitter, but that's not even close to true as far as I can tell.
https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2012/10/25/social-media-as-s...
> virtually every topic is covered. The connection between butterfly wings and sea snails? Check. The latest trends in space law? Check. In fact, every niche has its Tweeters because of the long tail effect. And if you’re researching something really rare and unique, well, congratulations—you get to be a pioneer as a first online news source on your topic!
I don't see a reason to be a "pioneer" on someone else's platform (with character limits, etc.) when I think publishing a website on my interests would better reach people with the same interests.
Twitter's #1 goal is to generate profit through advertising. You can pay for a slot on the "trending" list. They have custom "emojis" for paying customers' trends. They aren't putting free speech first - they actively suspend accounts for making jokes about their largest advertisers.
Remember the Starbucks / Steve King debacle where Steve King thought that a Starbucks store manager was firing people for saying "Merry Christmas"? Twitter banned the satirist who made the joke, saying he had "impersonated the Starbucks brand" by falsely claiming to be an employee. (https://www.newsweek.com/steve-king-starbucks-merry-christma...)
It isn't a "public utility". It's a privately-owned social media website that operates in whatever way it has to to produce profit for shareholders. The public doesn't own the platform and has zero governance of how it works.
Your ability to mute/block/unfollow accounts does not change this.
Twitter is already a "revenue-maximizing ad-filled trashfire" in every way that matters.
As a non-user, I'm affected negatively by all of the crazies that are radicalized on twitter.
Same with Google Search, someone could just create Classic Search, what Google used to be, a few simple ads and relevant search results.
I think there is an opportunity for new companies to get back to basics (minimal ads + privacy) with lots of sites/services we used to love but have turned in to screens full of ads and selling user data.
In many ways it's more important to society than FB & G (picking them as the 2 of the big 5 that are pure information plays), in that it hosts semi-public conversations and helps experts stay informed
Would be interesting for some small country to create public utility versions of twitter and linkedin and see what the effect is. Sucks for free speech but great for experimental economics and welfare programs.
At the other end of hyperlocal, I've always been surprised that Edinburgh has its own dominant property market website (ESPC).
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/jobseekers-required-to-us...
Out of all interactions on Twitter I've witnessed, conversations comes to mind the least to describe them. It's either people screaming at each other which barely makes it past a scripted dialogue of replies, or it's somebody saying ABC and all their fans saying "wow, so smart/brave/true". I don't see any value in those, and they make up the super majority on twitter.
The "helping experts stay informed" part is true though, there are some small communities where it's used to provide easy methods to contact others. That's a small benefit compared to the giant damage it does to actual dialogue.
Twitter's default mode is a school yard brawl where you have plenty of "followers" egging the fighters on. That's a utility if you want to destroy a society, but important to society?
Unfortunately, this positive side of Twitter is not the one we all hear about all the time. We hear about the noisy, angry, spiteful side.
It would be nice if we could have one without the other, but these problems are common to most of human history, not just digital forums.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101244
Twitter has the exact same problem, if not worse, than TV had since ever: In order to be heard, your statement must fit in a soundbite, but nothing except very simple statements can fit. This is why everything is either reinforcing the status quo or rejecting something outright without qualification, leading to apparent polarization and radicalization: The medium itself enforces it.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concision_(media_studies)
So you can.
For example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/29/paul-sing...
Yes, it is different. Dorsey is not Jobs nor Musk.
Although, maybe being in charge of multiple companies diluted the efforts of Jobs and Musk, but it was made up for by their brilliance and leadership skills. An hour of effort from Dorsey might be equal in gains to five minutes of effort by Musk. If that's the case, then maybe you're right.
In some ways, Jack is the perfect CEO for Twitter. Twitter is a network-effect business. People are on Twitter because people are on Twitter. The main thing to do with those is to not fuck them up. Jack's distraction, disengagement, and dithering are a perfect match for that. Every time something blows up into an actual PR problem, he promises to listen and think and do better, without every promising anything specific.
But for those of us who think Twitter could be something more, this is all just depressing. They could have spent $2 billion on something useful. Heck, they could have just given each active user $7. And they certainly could have got a CEO with vision and some managerial competence.
Another is the single model of discussion: tweets and replies in a single global space. There's no way for individuals or groups to create other contexts, so anybody attempting to have a sophisticated discussion needs to be prepared for 101-level people blundering in, reading a single tweet, and reacting ignorantly to it.
A third is its inability to handle longer blocks of text. The tweetstorm is as close as they come. It's a medium I enjoy, but it's not good for everything. In the same way one attaches images, one should be able to attach longer blocks of text, and perhaps richer things, like HTML. That would take it from being a micropublishing platform to an actual publishing platform.
They could also do massively better in terms of abuse prevention and conversation quality. I'd love to be able to pay for verification, so that they'd check my claimed identity and mark me as me. For anonymous accounts, I'd like ways for serious organizations to vouch for them. E.g., a human rights org should be able to say, "Yes, this is actually a person on the ground in Country X," so we can start telling real people from propaganda sock puppets.
Twitter wasn't intended for anything. It was an experiment that caught on. Almost everything that distinguishes Twitter today (retweets, likes, replies, posting links, even the at symbol) were all things users invented. Twitter just observed what people were doing and added support. Most of what I'm talking about is in that exact same tradition.
I certainly believe that's the case. In some ways, Trump saved Twitter. Their numbers improved greatly when he came along. Even ignoring the fact that banning Trump could be incredibly bad for Twitter in PR and regulatory aspects, kicking him off would cause a significant hit to key metrics.
In what way is Elliot "Trump-allied"? He seems like the kind of institutional conservative investor that would hate Trump's attempts at, essentially, implementing a Neo-merchantilist trade and financial policy.
When Elliot took the position there was some press that hinted that it was politically driven, but I couldn't find any reason to believe that over the obvious: that replacing an absentee CEO is an easy way to unlock value in a floundering company.
1. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/08/trump-megadonors-g...