
Twitter's future could look a lot like its past - razin
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/caseynewton/issues/twitter-s-future-could-look-a-lot-like-its-past-215420
======
Hamuko
I have my doubts about Twitter being able to create an open and decentralized
standard considering they still haven't even opened up polls to third-party
clients. I imagine there's no technical reason for it, just business ones. If
they want to make the big leap towards a decentralized standard, why not make
the small leap and give features like polls to current app developers?

~~~
4ntonius8lock
I think such issues (give developers features) are something that would
require a centralized response. This in turn creates liability and the issues
of large platforms; they are tweaked by an incredibly small % of users who
develop the feature, who can't fully foresee the unintended consequences of
any large action. Then the results are mostly expressed by another % of
loud/angry/extreme users, amplified by the media and then the centralized
developers have to answer.

In the article, the author mentions 'your policy is what you enforce'. But
that's really overly simplistic. There's a gradient, with extreme moderation
on one end and no moderation on the other (even those in favor of no
moderation will generally agree that nuclear launch sites and codes should be
moderated off).

And then there's how and where you implement systems to identify cases which
require moderation and what systems you put in place to avoid abuse and what
incentives you are creating. And all this probably changes with time as people
try different things to game systems. Our government(s), economies, etc are
getting more and more centralized, controlled by fewer and fewer hands. This
skews incentives and positions of leverage, look at what's happened with
youtube content creators as a tiny example, but it's way beyond that.

By making it decentralized, Jack's basically appealing to the wisdom of crows.
I think the article is missing the long of it. Yes, there will be forks, but
eventually consensus appears in the community. I feel his comparison to
Mastadon is unfair, since it was new and looking for a niche. Twitter is such
a big name, everyone will want to have input on such a decentralized system,
so there should be strong input from all sides as they are represented, at
least within the tech sphere (which is pretty large and diverse when you leave
SV/CA).

Our current development climate is allowing something as dramatic of a change
as P2P protocols in the early 2000s. P2P has mostly disappeared in favor of
streaming services, at least in the first world. But it was the P2P that
allowed the creation of big streaming services. Without that pressure, I have
serious doubts the current IP holders would have allowed Netflix or Hulu to
be.

Jack's level of vision is reaching way beyond mine, but I think he is on to
something, and the payoff can be truly disruptive, not just to business which
is a bit boring, but to how things can work.

------
amoorthy
Jack Dorsey references [1] Stephen Wolfram's testimony to the US Senate where
he outlined a solution for algorithmic transparency and content curation. My
startup, The Factual, coincidentally built something similar to what Stephen
envisioned as a "final ranking provider". Blog post with details:
[https://blog.thefactual.com/delivering-on-stephen-
wolframs-v...](https://blog.thefactual.com/delivering-on-stephen-wolframs-
vision-for-addressing-algorithmic-transparency)

[1]
[https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766086320680961?s=20](https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766086320680961?s=20)

~~~
thundergolfer
I’m very interested in the area you’re working in so I checked out The
Factual. Heads up that the “About OwlFactor” page gave me a 403.

From clicking around it seems like you’ve built a cool system for ingesting
and scoring articles. I would say that you’re methodology and it’s bias
against “highly opinionated” journalism seems to be committing the Argument to
Moderation fallacy.

~~~
amoorthy
Thanks for checking out our site! We rebranded from OwlFactor and I forgot to
update my HN profile! Doh. Fixed.

You're right that our methodology encourages moderation in news articles. But
it doesn't penalize far right or far left outlets. Rather, if the style in
which an article is written is inflammatory or opinionated then it is dinged.
So it's not so much that viewpoints should be moderate but rather that the
case for any viewpoint should be made without undue hyperbole and emotion.

The real test of our technology is if regular news readers like you and me
like this selection bias. So I'd be grateful if you checked out the selections
on www.thefactual.com/news and commented further.

~~~
thanatropism
Can I test your algorithm in some of my writing?

~~~
amoorthy
Hi there - our Chrome extension rates any news article:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/civikowl/clbbiejji...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/civikowl/clbbiejjicefdjlblgnojolgbideklkp?hl=en)
but it won't rate an arbitrary piece of writing (yet).

To be honest, an unknown author with no history on a topic on a site that's
also previously unknown will struggle to rate >50%. Lmk if I can answer any
other questions.

------
thinkloop
> A third-party Twitter client might be prettier and more functional than
> Twitter’s own client — shout out to Tweetbot! — but it certainly would not
> be more profitable.

I never understood this, why can't the API/firehose serve ads that would be
presented in the 3rd-party apps?

Additionally 90% of users would naturally gravitate to the default app
regardless, leaving 3rd-parties for cool/interesting/advanced/innovative use-
cases. I still feel this was a mistake - not as some hippy idealogue - but
from a ruthless capitalist perspective. This was their like button.

~~~
vojta_letal
Because there simply would be a 3th party app which would ignore the ads? If
there was not I'd write one.

Simple as that. FB and Google closing their XMPP gateways is an example of a
similar issue.

~~~
busymom0
They could state in their terms of services that the API key will only be
valid if the developer doesn't hide the ads.

~~~
iamatworknow
Then why would I as a developer bother with it at all? I don't want to serve
ads someone else is getting paid for from my app. And if my app was to be
funded by ads, then what? Display twice the number of ads to the user?

~~~
ceejayoz
Tweetbot is a paid app. Its revenue model wouldn't be fundamentally affected
by Twitter putting ads in the feeds it displays.

I'd rather see ads in my feed than Twitter continue to make third-party
clients less useful.

~~~
thinkloop
Or Twitter could share the ad profits a la YouTube to incentivise all kinds of
innovative niche ui's. 3rd parties are not the enemy to be managed. They are a
blessing - free engineers who managed the impossible of building a product
with customers and traction. UI is a cost for Twitter.

------
kuu
It's funny how things have turned. They had an open API with several 3rd party
clients, and they killed them. Now they want to go even more open... Strange

~~~
skohan
It seems like the heart of it is this:

> He argues that Twitter’s value lies in directing your attention toward
> valuable tweets — not hosting all the content.

If twitter can succeed in offloading their hosting costs onto this
"decentralized network" and remain the authority over which tweets are
relevant (and therefore remain the primary channel which can serve ads on this
type of content) it could be a big win for them as far as the bottom line.

At the same time, it might take some of the heat off of them as far as
accusations of bias on the platform. If Twitter is the _only_ entity deciding
what is and is not acceptable in the discourse, questions can be asked about
whether or not they're doing that in a wise and fair manner. If they are just
one of many curators, then "the market" can decide if their method of
governance is best, and they can't be accused of having a monopoly over the
discourse in the same way.

~~~
kuu
I get your point, but I wonder if exactly this will happen, that they will
lose the monopoly (and therefore a lot of money).

I'm not saying that losing it is bad or good per se. I'm just talking
financially.

~~~
skohan
I understand what you’re saying, and I would venture to guess that Twitter has
put a lot of time and money into determining whether this would be a good
outcome for them before they would go through with it.

It is curious in a way, since Twitter does seem to hold a monopoly on a
certain kind of online discourse. It’s not like FB -> Instagram -> Snapchat ->
TicTok where there there seems to be a generational sunrise and sunset. In
that case it seems like there would be more to gain going open with the hopes
of having the opportunity to exert more control over the next up-and-comer

------
roimor
How "open" is the Twitter API compared to other social networks such as
Facebook, LinkedIn, etc... What is the lay of the land in this regard?

~~~
ceejayoz
That's a broad question without one single answer.

In my experience, getting approved to _use_ the API is substantially easier
with Facebook than Twitter. Twitter will reject for bullshit reasons, and send
you a "there can be no appeal" message. The only way around it is to kick up
enough of a fuss with prominent people to get a manual reconsideration.

Once you're in, though, you can pretty much do anything a Twitter user can do.
Facebook heavily limits what data you can get - you basically can't get _any_
info about the user's personal profile/feed, or info about a user's friends.
Twitter makes all that readily available.

On the other hand, analytics.twitter.com has no API (and hasn't for years),
whereas Facebook makes all sorts of analytics info available on Pages.

~~~
paulgb
One thing conspicuously missing is getting all of the replies to a given
tweet. This makes it difficult to build anything resembling an alternative
Twitter UI (such as existed the the hayday of more open Twitter APIs) using
the official API.

------
olah_1
Twitter gets free bandwidth but still gets to profit off of the centralized
social index? We call that the "bitchute effect".

