Text messages between Jack Dorsey and Musk about Twitter

frick, Dorsey carrying that whole convo

People who text in paragraphs are the worst

They might start a leftist platform of short texts that mean nothing

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frick, Dorsey carrying that whole convo

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As expected. Musk was still in the “fact finding phase” in regards to Twitter. The smartest people in the room speak the least.

Tldr version

Jack: Twitter should've never been a company the best platform needs to be decentralized Twitter should've never been a company the best platform needs to be decentralized Twitter should've never been a company the best platform needs to be decentralized Twitter should've never been a company the best platform needs to be decentralized Twitter should've never been a company the best platform needs to be decentralized Twitter should've never been a company the best platform needs to be decentralized Twitter should've never been a company the best platform needs to be decentralized

Elon: CSB

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The problem was always that without any company or group backing it, it's not going to attract users and take off. If they can make a real impact then this would be cool

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There’s also the question of whether any platform can truly be successful (as measured against the social media giants) without the invisible hand constantly maximizing screen time. The algorithms, the tedious attention to detail on the smallest GUI tweaks, the refinement of features to maximize overall engagement.. these things are incredibly difficult to replicate without a legit profit motive.

Not to mention the difficulty of developing a business model that makes sense for actually hosting all of that data without ad revenue. If the idea is to create an open source protocol that’s decentralized, then let companies build on that framework.. OK. But I’m not sure how that avoids any of the issues we see with Twitter and Facebook.

I just don’t see how any open source alternative competes. There’s a subset of people who are likely willing to go that route out of principle, but it’s a very small percentage of social media users.

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There’s also the question of whether any platform can truly be successful (as measured against the social media giants) without the invisible hand constantly maximizing screen time. The algorithms, the tedious attention to detail on the smallest GUI tweaks, the refinement of features to maximize overall engagement.. these things are incredibly difficult to replicate without a legit profit motive.

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So while these things do boost profits by boosting user engagement, I'm not sure that they boost user satisfaction. Or maybe engagement is satisfaction, I don't know.

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Not to mention the difficulty of developing a business model that makes sense for actually hosting all of that data without ad revenue. If the idea is to create an open source protocol that’s decentralized, then let companies build on that framework.. OK. But I’m not sure how that avoids any of the issues we see with Twitter and Facebook.

I just don’t see how any open source alternative competes. There’s a subset of people who are likely willing to go that route out of principle, but it’s a very small percentage of social media users.

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Many people, myself included, run public services using their own resources for no reward whatsoever aside from the satisfaction of doing it. But if some economics are required to really take on the likes of big tech, I imagine there are many methods involving crypto that could work. The foundational services of file hosting, compute, and database in p2p distributed form already exist, driven by various tokenomics. Also I don't know why a distributed network can't have ads, even if they are opt-in. Brave browser has optional ads that earn users crypto, which can be "tipped" to sites. Actually I think that gamifying ads and allowing users to earn and pay others for content/likes/whatever could be a driver for adoption and engagement.

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Google failed to launch a social network with all their billion

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That was a huge failure. They put out an honest effort, but it fell flat quick.

I always like the idea of a p2p version like Twister and something like smartphone ad hoc network like FireChat for messaging, but I am also still waiting pied piper’s pipernet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twister_(software)

I’m a fairly big fan of decentralized protocols for their censorship resistance, at a high level this may be a great thing for social media.

Jack is a big fan of Bitcoin but hasn’t really supported web3 initiatives in the past, but his vision sounds a lot like a web3 initiative in its own right.

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One early idea to address guerrilla marketing/bots is requiring some kind of buy-in by each of the users that makes it cost prohibitive to abuse the protocol.

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Wouldn't that also limit growth?

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You already mentioned crypto tokenomics; I think we could absolutely look to some of the crypto models for disincentivizing bad actors looking to abuse or defraud the network and encouraging people to support the protocol, or ideas in that same vein.

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Yeah, I'm not sure what that would look like though. I think we can all agree that at least some censorship is absolutely required. We might not all agree on what exactly should be censored or removed, but I think everyone has at least one thing whether it's the type of imagery that is pretty universally accepted as a no-no, or bot abuse, or whatever. But if that isn't centrally controlled, then it's in the hands of the users and I don't know how to prevent that from becoming a circle-jerk echo chamber.

Maybe there just can't be one platform to rule them all. Maybe it just has to be a loosely-federated protocol, and if it splits into multiple federations based on user or host self-moderation then so be it. We divide ourselves in the real social world, maybe it just can't be any other way. I don't know what that would mean for the token. Maybe each host or federation of hosts will settle on a layer 2.

I'm just thinking out loud.