My selfish take on Twitter: the Discourse could stand to care a lot less, on the margin, about “free speech” and “bias in the algorithm” and a lot more about discovering all the amazing ways a public water cooler could be improved for more joy, more discovery, more connection etc
Conversation
The design space is so unexplored! Just as an intuition pump: the most meaningful IRL relationships I've made in the last few years started on Twitter. AFAICT that's an accidental consequence of its primitives. What might you create if you took this seriously as a job-to-be-done?
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Twitter radically improved the quality of the creative and intellectual conversations in my life—not online, but in person. I have more and better ideas! I feel a much greater sense of belonging! It's amazing. What happens if you pivot Twitter along this axis?
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But also: there are many interesting axes to pivot around! e.g. Twitter is part of my thinking workflow. WIP ideas go out; reactions come back; my ideas are refined—elsewhere, off Twitter, through awkward workflows. What happens if you take Twitter seriously for creative work?
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Probably part of a good story here would involve creating an ecosystem of lots of weird third-party Twitter, as in the early days. But novel user interfaces are a public good, so I worry this only goes so far.
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Another way to put this: if Twitter (as it exists today) is the town square, what might it mean to build a public library for that "town"? A coffee house? A dance hall? A university campus?
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The Cambrian explosion of the Twitter ecosystem circa 2010-2012 was such an incredible moment. I think its end in some ways heralded the present zeitgeist of tech disillusionment.
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