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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You know I love you, but Twitter (and social media in general) is waaaaay more Times Square than town square. Police, mobs, scams, rampant advertising. There is nothing neutral and "towny" about this space.
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This is true if you don't choose your followees well, which is, alas, probably the overwhelming norm. But it's not true IME and in my Twitter friends' experience! The product is partly to blame (e.g. suggesting new users follow big accounts, media entities, etc).
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Curation is defs a key component. I think some platforms more than others leave you alone to do this. I can't think of any offhand, but if it feels like the alg isn't always trying to push you somewhere, I'd say that's a good indicator. Otherwise not ideal.
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That's interesting: I have the opposite instinct! I think "the algorithm" could be doing a lot more to help small Twitter accounts find community in each other.
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