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.
اضافة اعلان
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 Cook was
eventually pushed out of the startup. Twitter remained a tightly controlled
island on the internet and eventually drew in hundreds of millions of users.
Now, more than a decade later, Twitter is reversing course. The
company is pursuing the sort of decentralization that 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.
Its newly appointed CEO, 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 that 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 CEO 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.
The impulse to build decentralized systems is rooted in the
foundation of the internet, with open protocols like the one that 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.
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,” Dorsey said in the Twitter audio chat.
In a recent interview, 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, Dorsey decided to decentralize Twitter, after
discussions with Agrawal, then Twitter’s chief technology officer, about the
challenges facing the company.
That December, 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,” Dorsey tweeted. “For a variety of reasons,
all reasonable at the time, we took a different path and increasingly
centralized Twitter.”
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, 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 Agrawal and 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.
Jay Graber, a cryptocurrency developer, was selected in August
to lead the Bluesky organization. And in February, 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 that 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 that
Twitter is catering to what an overwhelming number of users want, while
following the decentralization mandate laid out by Dorsey before he departed as
CEO in November.
“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, 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.)
In December, conversations about NFTs made up 1.2% of the entire
conversation on Twitter, a company spokesperson 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.
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 CEO 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 users to
access.
“If we just look at where the platforms are now in terms of
addressing online harms, they are not doing a very good job,” 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.”
But while Twitter has given developers like Chou the data they
need to build custom experiences, the company has also yanked it away. It has
locked down the kinds of data developers can access several times, most
recently in 2018, when it limited access to its application programming
interface, or API, effectively breaking a number of smaller companies’ apps.
Amir Shevat, Twitter’s head of product for developers, got the
job by offering similar criticism to Dorsey and 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 in March
2021.
“Talking to Jack and Parag, they recognized that Twitter before
was a lot more open,” Shevat said. 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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