Elliott gets a board seat as part of the deal. The people leading the charge to get rid of Jack Dorsey are more embedded on the inside now.
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.
Sorta. This feels more like Jack/activist investor coming to common ground on the direction of the company and also a proper succession plan for Dorsey to walk away from Twitter.
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.
I follow Indian and US news and politics on it - once you follow key journalists, politicians, intellectuals and critics - Twitter does a pretty job of surfacing the day to day concerns that show up in the country.
It suggests that he doesn't have a roadmap / vision. That kind of thing drives investors nuts. My guess is that Elliott was able to use that as leverage and it worked.
He's building a community, so it makes total sense for him to solicit feedback from that community, via that community. The value of Twitter _is_ the community, not the "product roadmap".
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.
Twitter is awesome because it doesn't operate under the growth for growths sake mentality plaguing many other companies. It really is an incredible public utility provided you liberally mute/block/unfollow all the petty fighting and find good people.
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.
> Twitter is awesome because it doesn't operate under the growth for growths sake mentality plaguing many other companies.
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.
On Facebook you're bound to your friends/family/co-workers/etc, on Reddit you're bound to the shallowest lowest common denominator content (front page) or else endless spam and self-promotion (sort by new.)
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.
For what it's worth, Reddit becomes equally curatable to Twitter once you unfollow the default subreddits and join niche ones. There are multiple lines of defense that lend themselves to curation: niche subreddits have moderators who can remove off-topic posts; users are further disincentivized from making off-topic posts as they would run the risk of losing karma; subreddits tend to fracture into X/XMemes/XMetaDiscussion/XGifs/XVideo/SeriousX etc. so you can fine-tune what part of a topic you want; Reddit's "Custom Feeds" feature allows you to further separate your subscriptions into topic-specific buckets, allowing you to focus on one set of interests at a time. And the suggestion algorithm is both more rudimentary and just a jumping-off point to spend time on a specific subreddit you like.
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.
> For what it's worth, Reddit becomes equally curatable
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.
For many people, myself included, Facebook content is no longer bound to whoever you have on your friends list. Honestly, it's probably been a long time since it was. Instead, it's all about groups and pages that you've selected to follow. The vast majority of the content I see on FB daily is from my groups. It's enough of a firehose that family postings are largely drowned out. This feed is as curated as my Twitter and Reddit feeds are.
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.
"Reddit you're bound to the shallowest lowest common denominator content"
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.
> Counterpoint: My friends/family/co-workers are not trolls.
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've tried to "curate" my experience many times over the years and it's never proven worth it.
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.
I fully agree. Twitter is a platform where I can truly curate what I see and interact with in a meaningful fashion.
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.
Also the regular cycle of "release an API, encourage companies to build on top of it, then pull it out", essentially resembling Reapers from Mass Effect.
Growth is the implied motivation for not cutting down on fake news, astroturfing, and bots. When you are selling yourself on engagement and user numbers, you have an incentive to continue allowing fake engagement and users.
Except for all those bots counting as users for growth, and the fake engagement by bots counting as growth, and the fake news driving real clicks from real people counting as growth........
>They've only relatively recently started to do something resembling policing of these things.
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.
That's my biggest concern with Twitters future right now. It already does what it does best, why should new and unnecessary features be added, and like you said Jack seems to understand that. The Investors however think otherwise, since unfortunately the tech industry has adopted the unnecessary change for changes sake for the last decade.
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.
> It really is an incredible public utility provided you liberally mute/bloctk/unfollow all the petty fighting and find good people.
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.
> 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 user, the people who's opinions I wanted to read posted about day to day matters. And the people who's day to day matters I wanted to read about posted opinions.
As a non-user, I'm affected negatively by all of the crazies that are radicalized on twitter.
If they saturate Twitter with ads I think we could see a new twitter, small team, simple basic ads to pay salaries and keep the app running smooth.
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.
It's always been confusing to me what twitter is as a company -- it feels more like a utility, or like the public service part of 20th century journalism without the profit model
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.
Network effects are pretty huge for these things. A country could e.g. spin up its own Mastodon instance, but good luck getting people to use it. The country-based LinkedIn might work, since that's inherently local, and lots of countries have some kind of state job advert service tied to their unemployment benefits. It would be a bit nasty to make "you have to be on BritLinkedIn to recieve unemployment benefit" a condition but I can absolutely see someone coming up with that idea.
At the other end of hyperlocal, I've always been surprised that Edinburgh has its own dominant property market website (ESPC).
Interestingly the "BritLinkedIn" kind of did exist in the UK. It was called Universal Jobmatch and was built by Monster. Universal Credit claimants were required to use it.
I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, it's nice to have many more localized or focused platforms, as it protects against some of the nastier side of the modern market economy. On the other hand, whenever I need to move between or interact with multiple such platforms, I badly wish for a unified interface merging them all.
> 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.
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?
I don't use Twitter, but I've talked about this with friends that do, about why they used Twitter. Their feedback was that they've had good conversations with people through there, and have followers who are clearly getting benefit from their messages.
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.
The length limitation makes proper discussions hard. I can't even discuss the Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz a German law on labeling meat, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderkennzeichnungs-_und_Ri...) in a tweet. Little space for more than a troll bit or a link.
> The length limitation makes proper discussions hard.
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.
Of course and I could say "that labeling law" or something. Point is: The short length is nice for consuming tweets, but you can't use it for discussion. Quoting that term was ment for emphasizing.
It's the same if you try to argue politics in a bar. It doesn't mean bars don't provide value in other ways.
And although it certainly is anathema to constructive political discussion and debate, I suspect the vast majority of the people tweeting/retweeting/arguing about politics all the time wouldn't sound much smarter or less sucked into the shitstorm if they were using something long-form.
I've seen good ideas bubble up from the population, through the blue checks, and to the right people in places of power multiple times. One recent example is to temporarily allow doctors to practice medicine across state lines using tele-medicine in order to help combat covid19. Another idea bubbling up is giving people a "right to try" experimental medications, again regarding covid19.
The regular populace has never had this kind of access to political leadership in the history of the planet. Not participating on Twitter is like not voting on the referendums section of your ballot.
Both of those ideas are the sort of bog standard think tank proposals that get trotted out any time somebody points out that one US party has no healthcare plan beyond a quixotic repeal campaign.
> The regular populace has never had this kind of access to political leadership in the history of the planet.
Am I to understand that your contention is twitter has been a positive development for politics in western democracies?
My contention is that twitter has not been only a negative development for politics in western democracies. I don't have a strong opinion about it being a net negative or positive, probably won't be confident about that for at least another decade or two to see how it all settles out.
That's just an opinion, and one far removed from reality at that. There's an entire world of content on there besides "American politics takes," one that you probably haven't interacted with.
Using outside investment to buy back shares seems more than a little silly. Seems like acknowledging that the investor made a mistake, since you have no use for additional capital.
Paul Singer is going to find that Twitter isn't as biased as he believed. If anything, it's a wild west situation with respect to TOS violations and gray areas wrt TOS. It's just pathetic that he doesn't want to accept that Twitter, like Google, is trying to Disneyfy their product (making it universally palatable). There's no real leftist bias beyond don't be a jerk (don't use the n word, don't harass lgbt folks, and don't dox). If he thinks there's an actual large scale bias against conservative then I got a bridge to sell him.
Paul Singer, the CEO of Elliot, is extremely partisan and is a top donor to the Republican Party. Seen in this light these moves have caused fear that they are an attack on Twitter to turn it into a right-wing propaganda channel.
Any "Twitter is a _ propaganda channel" seems a bit odd when you consider that users choose who to follow, who to block, what topics to follow, what keywords to mute, whether or not to see targeted ads, etc. Twitter might be able to do a better job of tackling outright misinformation that spreads on the platform and they aren't always perfect when it comes to banning or suspending accounts (or failing to do so), but in general it's hard to say that a platform is just a propaganda channel for a specific ideology when it is inhabited by a diverse range of incompatible ideologies. Users tend to sort themselves into bubbles of like-minded accounts, but that is on users rather than Twitter.
Sadly that ended with the fairness doctrine in the 80's. I don't ask for a lot - just no blatant lies or fake outrage designed to weaponise one side against the other.
I really thought Dorsey would use this opportunity to negotiate a nice exit package. I can't see him (or really anyone) wanting to be Twitter CEO at this point, especially since he also has that Square thing going on.
I don't agree, my guess is he probably wants to be Twitter CEO more than anything else, including even more than being the Square CEO. That's a very influential and potentially history-impacting position.
Certainly, very few people possess the brilliance of Jobs or Musk. But, I doubt Twitter and Square demand the same sort of brilliance from a leader as Tesla, Space X and Apple do/did. A quality that Musk and Jobs have that Dorsey might, is their work ethic, which is far more common than true brilliance, and probably more relevant to the challenge of being the CEO of multiple companies.
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.
Hah! This is funny in all sorts of ways. Supposed "activist" investors settling for a quick ransom. Twitter paying the ransom by taking money from possibly worse people. Twitter paying $2 bn in ransom for Jack, the guy who is at best a half-time CEO, and who has presided over a mix of stagnation and deck-chair rearrangement. And of course the online panic that this was going to be a Trump-allied guy's way of dominating Twitter when it was just another cash grab.
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.
That's not a dimension I care much about. As a product, it's stagnant. I think it could be a much better product. Better meaning serving a wider audience and serving different people in different ways.
As I said, it's a network effect business. There's no point to anybody without giant pockets trying to build a better Twitter or Facebook. People don't use those things because they are amazing products. They use them because that's where the other people are.
I don't think Jack is either woke or not woke enough. Twitter doesn't have a COO, but I do believe whomever is making day-to-day decisions at Twitter has a liberal bias. One need only look at the NY Post journalist that was recently suspended for tweeting a picture of the house Carlos Maza listed as an address while registering to vote, when nothing happened to Maza when he tweeted a picture of James Carville's home.
I think one of Twitter's big mistakes is to go for a one-size-fits-all product. For example, in shifting away from a time-based timeline to the algorithmic timeline they've made it worse for advanced users in an effort to juice user activity metrics among less engaged users. That could be fine if they let other people build successful Twitter clients, but the put the kibosh on that long ago. This makes them more ad dollars, but at the cost of treating users like foie gras geese.
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.
For the longest time, a one-size-fits all product was Twitter's strongest value proposition. I disagree about the single model of discussion, and its inability to handle longer blocks of text. To me, these are some of the most significant ways for Twitter to distinguish itself as a social media platform. I don't think Twitter will ever be a place you go to for a quality conversation. It was never intended for that. Almost everything they did to enhance their platform made it worse.
I think they can keep that value proposition for users who want it, while still serving other audiences. E.g., people already attach long blocks of text to tweets. They just publish it somewhere that has pages set up for Twitter Cards. Twitter could bring a lot of that in house without harming the core experience at all.
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 not sure that is the only thing we need to do. For instance, Trump regularly threatens violence on twitter and doesn't get banned. So perhaps they have a conservative bias. Using your sort of puerile logic, anyway.
Do you mean President Trump has threatened a specific individual with violence? Can you give me an example? What part of my reply do you consider childish?
I appreciate you taking the time to research and share that link, but the third paragraph in that article states, "But Twitter says the president’s tweets do not violate any of its rules...". And once more in the 8th, "But in this instance, Twitter has opted to leave Trump’s tweets alone, finding that they are allowed under its rules." This does not seem to be an example of President Trump violating Twitter policy.
Twitter has a history of great flexibility for famous accounts. E.g., in 2017, Twitter introduced the "newsworthiness" exception for tweets pretty much guaranteeing that anything he says is allowed under the rules. Many people feel that Trump gets much greater latitude compared with what some 20-follower anime-avatar account would get.
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.
>And of course the online panic that this was going to be a Trump-allied guy's way of dominating Twitter when it was just another cash grab.
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.
Singer has been a Republican party mega-donor for a long time, and the non-Trump Republican party is pretty much dead at this point. Singer was anti-Trump during the election but has come around since then, he bent the knee here for example https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/16/trump-says-billionaire-forme...
The founder Paul Singer was anti-Trump, but had since become a big donor[1]. It seems more opportunistic than an ideological shift, but I'm just speculating.
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.
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.