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Technology|Twitter Wants to Reinvent Itself, by Merging the Old With the New

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/technology/twitter-platform-rethink.html
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Credit...Timo Lenzen



TWITTER WANTS TO REINVENT ITSELF, BY MERGING THE OLD WITH THE NEW

The company is undertaking a far-reaching effort to change how it works. For
some, it is an echo of their early idealism and a vision for what the internet
could have been.

Credit...Timo Lenzen

Supported by

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By Kate Conger

 * March 2, 2022

In 2008, the handful of employees working for Twitter reached an impasse. Some
were focused on preparing for a surge of new users to their social media
platform. But one developer argued for another approach: Their platform, he
said, shouldn’t be a platform at all.

Instead, Blaine Cook envisioned Twitter as a backbone for online chatter, one
that would allow its users to freely exchange messages with people on other
social media platforms instead of locking them into conversations among
themselves. He hacked together a prototype to demonstrate his idea.

But the other Twitter employees dismissed it, and Mr. Cook was eventually pushed
out of the start-up. Twitter remained a tightly controlled island on the
internet and eventually drew in hundreds of millions of users.

Now, over a decade later, Twitter is reversing course. The company is pursuing
the sort of decentralization Mr. Cook championed. It is funding an independent
effort to build a so-called open protocol for social media. It is also weaving
cryptocurrency into its app, and opening up to developers who want to build
custom features for Twitter.



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Its newly appointed chief executive, Parag Agrawal, has championed
decentralization inside the company, hiring cryptocurrency developers and
prioritizing related projects. Twitter executives now believe that
decentralizing the social media service will radically shift online power,
moving it into the hands of users, and pose a fundamental challenge to the
walled gardens of companies like Facebook.

A decentralized Twitter could take years to emerge and might look much the same
as it does today. But it could allow users to set moderation rules for their own
communities and ease the pressure Twitter faces from lawmakers over how it
moderates content. It might also open new revenue streams for the company.

“If Bitcoin existed before Twitter existed, I think we’d see very different
revenue models,” Jack Dorsey, a company co-founder who stepped down as its chief
executive in November, said in a recent Twitter audio chat. “We wouldn’t be so
dependent on ad revenue models.”

But the changes raise questions about how Twitter can reach its goal of doubling
revenue over the next two years, even as it cedes some control over the currency
by which social media companies are valued — users and their data. Twitter also
faces some doubts from the communities it hopes to unite: slighted developers,
web3 acolytes and enthusiasts for open-source software.


Image
Blaine Cook championed a different design for Twitter when he worked for the
company in its early days.Credit...Amanda Mary for The New York Times

The impulse to build decentralized systems is rooted in the foundation of the
internet, with open protocols like the one Mr. Cook envisioned for Twitter at
the heart of everyday technologies like email. Twitter is looking back at how
the company started and how it strayed, and it is trying to tap into that old
idealism for a new kind of business.



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Mr. Dorsey said he was drawn to decentralized technologies like Bitcoin because
they reminded him of the ethos of the early internet. “It had the same sort of
energy, it had the weirdness, it had the punk aspect of it,” Mr. Dorsey said in
the Twitter audio chat.

In a recent interview, Mr. Cook, who is now an engineer at Condé Nast, said, “It
was obvious that we could decentralize Twitter.”

Over the years, he watched as the company grappled with many of the problems he
thought could have been avoided through decentralization: regulatory challenges,
debates over acceptable speech, and fights over which features to develop.

In 2019, Mr. Dorsey decided to decentralize Twitter, after discussions with Mr.
Agrawal, then Twitter’s chief technology officer, about the challenges facing
the company.


Image

Mr. Dorsey at the Bitcoin Festival last June in Miami. He said that if Bitcoin
had been around when Twitter was started, it would look like a very different
company.Credit...Alfonso Duran for The New York Times

That December, Mr. Dorsey announced his plan to fund the Bluesky project.
“Twitter was so open early on that many saw its potential to be a decentralized
internet standard,” Mr. Dorsey tweeted. “For a variety of reasons, all
reasonable at the time, we took a different path and increasingly centralized
Twitter.”



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The Bluesky project would eventually allow for the creation of new curation
algorithms, which would show tweets at the top of users’ timelines that differed
from what Twitter’s own algorithm showed. It would give users more choice about
the kinds of content they saw, Mr. Dorsey said, and could allow Twitter to
interoperate with other social media services.

Bluesky grabbed the attention of many technologists who were already working on
decentralization. Soon small groups of them were meeting with Mr. Agrawal and
Mr. Dorsey on Sundays to discuss the project, according to two participants who
spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meetings, while
others traded ideas in an online chat room.

Some Bluesky participants proposed a single app that piped in all their social
media feeds. Others wanted custom algorithms that could, for instance, block
them from seeing spoilers about their favorite TV show. And some were focused on
making their online identities portable, so that an account could be moved
between social media companies the way a phone number can be moved from AT&T to
Verizon.

“One of the things that Bluesky would offer is curation and filtering
experiences that are independent of those offered by the social media
proprietorships,” said Tim Bray, an internet software pioneer and a former vice
president at Amazon who participated in some of the discussions.

Jay Graber, a cryptocurrency developer, was selected in August to lead the
Bluesky organization. And in February, Ms. Graber announced that the project had
officially registered as a public benefit corporation and was building a
prototype.

The project caught the attention of engineers at Reddit, who had preliminary
discussions with Twitter engineers about how their sites might someday
interoperate, two people familiar with the conversations said, but the companies
have not formally agreed to any plans to work together.

Some skeptics believe Twitter is jumping on the web3 bandwagon, joining a trendy
movement in tech to shift many services, including social media, to so-called
blockchain technology. But executives say Twitter is catering to what an
overwhelming number of users want, while following the decentralization mandate
that Mr. Dorsey laid out before he departed as chief executive in November.



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“The crypto community lives on Twitter,” said Esther Crawford, a staff product
manager who oversees Twitter’s web3 efforts. “To ignore that community or
disregard it is a missed opportunity.”

In September, Ms. Crawford led Twitter’s expansion of its tipping feature,
allowing users to pay one another in cash or Bitcoin. And in January, the
company began allowing paying users to display NFTs — cryptographic collectibles
that represent pieces of digital art — as their profile pictures. (Lest anyone
mistake a regular profile picture for an NFT, Twitter displays NFT profile
pictures with a unique hexagonal border.)


A GUIDE TO CRYPTOCURRENCY

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Card 1 of 7

A glossary. Cryptocurrencies have gone from a curiosity to a viable investment,
making them almost impossible to ignore. If you are struggling with the
terminology, let us help:

Bitcoin. A Bitcoin is a digital token that can be sent electronically from one
user to another, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin is also the name of the payment
network on which this form of digital currency is stored and moved.

Blockchain. A blockchain is a database maintained communally, that reliably
stores digital information. The original blockchain was the database on which
all Bitcoin transactions were stored, but non-currency-based companies and
governments are also trying to use blockchain technology to store their data.

Cryptocurrencies. Since Bitcoin was first conceived in 2008, thousands of other
virtual currencies, known as cryptocurrencies, have been developed. Among them
are Ether, Dogecoin and Tether.

Coinbase. The first major cryptocurrency company to list its shares on a U.S.
stock exchange, Coinbase is a platform that allows people and companies to buy
and sell various digital currencies, including Bitcoin, for a transaction fee.

Crypto finance. The development of cryptocurrencies spawned a parallel universe
of alternative financial services, known as Decentralized Finance, or DeFi,
allowing crypto businesses to move into traditional banking territory, including
lending and borrowing.

NFTs. A “nonfungible token,” or NFT, is an asset verified using blockchain
technology, in which a network of computers records transactions and gives
buyers proof of authenticity and ownership. NFTs make digital artworks unique,
and therefore sellable.

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In December, conversations about NFTs made up 1.2 percent of the entire
conversation on Twitter, a company spokeswoman said. Users sent more than 220
million tweets about NFTs in 2021, making them a larger conversation topic than
movies, which generated about 207 million tweets.


Image

In January, the company began allowing users to display NFTs — cryptographic
collectibles that represent pieces of digital art — as their profile
pictures.Credit...Twitter

Ms. Crawford added that Twitter’s embrace of cryptocurrencies had a practical
explanation. For years, the company has been growing more rapidly outside the
United States than within it, and allowing users to exchange money across
borders will help facilitate that growth.

In November, Twitter expanded unpaid access to its fire hose of data, inviting
developers to create new ways for users to interact with the platform. Tracy
Chou, the chief executive of the anti-harassment tool Block Party, uses access
to Twitter’s data to build features that filter abusive messages out of a user’s
Twitter notifications. Her work represents the kind of custom experience that
Twitter might not build in-house but still wants for its users.

“If we just look at where the platforms are now in terms of addressing online
harms, they are not doing a very good job,” Ms. Chou said. “An algorithm that is
the best overall, an average best experience, definitely is still going to leave
out a lot of people who don’t like that experience.”



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But while Twitter has given developers like Ms. Chou the data they need to build
custom experiences, the company has also yanked it away. It has locked down the
kinds of data that developers use several times, most recently in 2018, when it
limited access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., effectively
breaking a number of smaller companies’ apps.

Anil Dash, who helped found ThinkUp, a company that relied on data from Twitter,
Facebook and Instagram, recalled telling Twitter executives that they had
effectively killed his company by cutting off data access.

“Developers do not trust them,” Mr. Dash said. “You are Lucy with the football
and we are Charlie Brown, and you have pulled the football away 100 times.”

Mr. Dash, who is now the chief executive of Glitch, said Twitter’s
decentralization strategy hinged on its ability to woo developers back. “It’s
not insurmountable, but it’s the fundamental condition of this entire strategy
succeeding: Convince the most skeptical audience to trust them again.”

Amir Shevat, Twitter’s head of product for developers, got the job by offering
similar criticism to Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Agrawal. At the time, he was a top
executive at Reshuffle, a developer platform. But after discussions about
developer access, the Twitter executives agreed to acquire Reshuffle last March.

“Talking to Jack and Parag, they recognized that Twitter before was a lot more
open,” Mr. Shevat said in an interview. He added, “I think what you’re seeing is
a move back into that.”

“If you decentralize your platform and you give developers more powers to make
richer experiences and better, safer timelines, then everybody benefits from
this,” he also said.








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