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
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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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I feel like these “locations” may already exist on Reddit - but I suppose, this is the more “public” and less anonymous was to engage? Hence why Elon wants to verify all humans and destroy the bots :).
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Doesn't the Audience feature give a lot of this? I suspect adoption is pretty low. Everyone wants to broadcast without the side-effects of quote-tweets and other swarmed mean-ness.
vouch this tag, this is so much his vibe
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I like how you articulated this. I’m experimenting with the town library at TrackMagical.com where the proof of concept is organizing the tweet expertise on baseball players.
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I like this metaphor. The “speaker’s corner”= your tweets get a temporary boost in the ranking algorithm. The “tavern” = a smaller semi private group you can discuss more deeply with. The “pillory stocks” = publicly display banned accounts. Maybe we don’t need the last one…
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Love this thread. Adding on: what would a digital augmentation of our Third Places look like? What if phones enhance (rather than detract) from human IRL interactions in Third Places?
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With decent enough APIs and ability to customise your experience both content and client-wise, maybe Twitter can be the substrate for all of it?