Twitter

“I feel like Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter between them sort of killed mainstream blogging. In the 2000 and the early teens.”

“Clubhouse has quite a lot of that vibe of, like, you can have these dynamic new freeform conversations. There's no pressure. You can jump in. You can jump out. It doesn't have to be structured. You don't have to write 10 paragraphs and run it through past PR.”

“Clubhouse needs to build a network, otherwise they can't sustain 10%, and of course Twitter has just bought a newsletter company to try and do that for you. And charge five percent instead of 10%.”

“But yeah, they will have waves of abuse. They will have waves of mechanics that you haven't occurred to you just as Twitter did and never did anything about which is what killed that, that use of Twitter.”

“A podcast, publishing a podcast of itself, there's no network. You will only get an audience if you have it from someone else on Twitter, on the web, or something. Or if Apple or Spotify choose to put you on the front page and choose everyone and pay everyone,…”

“The public discourse is very different from the private discourse, and most of the interesting discourse isn't on Twitter anymore.”

“And if you had built Twitter on a blockchain, then Russians couldn't turn it off. And equally, Jack Dorsey or whoever is the CEO now couldn't decide who's going to demonetize it. There wouldn't be somebody who could just press that button.”

“Clubhouse, while you were driving people to Clubhouse from your Twitter account. To begin with, because it didn't really have a network, and it was, you know, that was one of the things they had to try and build, was to build a network. And the same thing with…”

“There's no real difference between all the different third party Twitter apps, because it's actually all a function of what the streaming date, what the underlying fees look like.”

“Obviously Twitter tried to do it, but because Twitter is a clown show, it didn't work, but, you know, other people can make this stuff work.”

“I think you'd be out of your mind to trust your livelihood to Twitter's newsletter system.”

“Twitter sort of, you know, blog posts, I think a lot of blogging kind of got subsumed by Instagram and Twitter.”

“Obviously if I moved from Instagram to some new tool, none of the people who followed me in Instagram will see me in this new place. And that's part of that is that the Instagram app or, you know, the Twitter app or whatever is based on creation and consumptio…”

“Everything that you've just described there, the sort of the daily active users, the fact that it's not making that much money, all of that is feeding into why we've been having this conversation about, you know, wanting to buy Twitter, because if it was in a …”

“I would, if anyone asked me about starting a newsletter, and I would say, well, you could do this, you could do that, do not, under any circumstances, use the Twitter one, because I just don't have any faith that they won't fuck it up, or they won't get bored …”

“Whether, you know, Elon with zero experience of building consumer software, or, and zero experience of a social network is the right person to do that is a slightly different question.”

“Substack comes along and builds an email newsletter platform, and the joke was always, has been Substack is Twitter's Playwall, because you build your user base on Twitter, and then you monetize it on, on Substack. So if I've got 300,000 Twitter followers, I c…”

“And so this idea, which is also a web three idea, which is that you could sort of have a decentralized social network and have lots of different clients all plugging onto the same database is kind of an illusion because what's going into the database is what t…”

“The challenge, of course, is YouTube and Instagram have forms of media that are much easier to monetize, and much easier to think, how would you create something rich and engaging that you could monetize, whether it's e-commerce, or advertising, or something e…”

“Disconnect between the kind of cultural significance of the company and the fact that it's only did like five billion dollars last year. You know, it's a tiny company in the scale of tech. It did five billion dollars. It's got two hundred and seventeen million…”

“Because if you're trying to solve the blank canvas thing, that, I don't think you could do that at the protocol level. I think you need to do that at the UI level. So you need everyone using the same UI.”

“So and Twiktok is the same, it's like it has this huge cultural significance, but like it's a shitty business and doesn't, it doesn't make any money you have five billion dollars of revenue and no net income”

“And when you have hundreds of millions or billions of people using your product, Like, you need content moderation because otherwise just group dynamics means it turned into a chat. It just turns into a world of shit. And people, anybody who's really worked in…”

“Twitter, kind of the other extreme, like, it's a five billion dollar business, and the sort of some combination of the ad product itself isn't built very well, but also more generally, Twitter doesn't really know, what Twitter knows about me is not what an adv…”

“Everyone uses YouTube, and everyone sort of knows that TikTok is this big thing, but the sort of tech conversation in general doesn't talk about what's happening on TikTok. I don't think in the way that it talks about Instagram or YouTube or Twitter. And that'…”

“I don't, Check TikTok, I consume it, and I watch it. I don't check TikTok the way you would check Instagram or Twitter, where you open up the app, you have a look, you check if anything's changed, and then you leave. Whereas I think what's happening on TikTok …”

“Images are in this seem, you know, like a much easier thing to do than conversation. Like I'm going to share some cool pictures. That's a lot easier than getting discussion and insight and stuff going.”

“And meanwhile, Twitter fired 80% of the staff and an awful lot of them have said it's failing to pay them their contractual severance payments.”

“It's an amazing success. Like, no, it fucking isn't. It's got two hundred fifty million users. Each has, like, Meta's got three or even four products that have each got three billion users. It's a failure.”

“Like the general point here is you cannot build a business there because you can't trust that they won't do something stupid or shut it down tomorrow. And that's probably the biggest long-term positive for threats. Is Elon is going to keep doing this. He's goi…”

“Like on past form, you know, Elon is just going to keep doing this because he clearly just hasn't, doesn't have any understanding or any kind of intuitive sense of how social networks work. And he doesn't understand that he, every time he does these things, he…”

“For Twitter it's because it's just massively dysfunctional and badly managed for sort of 15 years. And it was kind of a byword in Silicon Valley as a place where good people would go and be unable to get anything done. And so the product sort of stagnated sinc…”

“When Quora first started, there was this moment when you'd have, like, really important, influential people chatting on it all the time. So you'd have, like, Steve Case telling stories about shipping DVDs and CDs for AOL in the nineties. And then, but then as …”

“But since then, we've just had like one massive self-infected wound after another. Like he doesn't have, he's shot himself in the feed so many times, whether that's banning external links, like banning people, blocking people. And like, yes, the content modera…”

“When you do that, you just, that, that, that, that tweet cost you half a billion dollars. Every time you do that, that's another half billion dollars gone. Like, why do you do that? It's worse than a crime. It's a mistake.”

“And, but the point is like, I've got like almost 400,000 followers. And I think I've got like 10 or 12,000 followers on, on threads. I get more likes on threads than I do.”

“And the same thing here, Meta is not building for people who've got 35 alphabetized lists. Meta is not building for people who use RayX to do searches on Twitter. Meta is not building for people who follow 20,000 people and use TweetDeck. It's not building for…”

“There's a whole bunch of stuff you would like that is the reason why Twitter never broke out at two fifty million people.”

“And so it needed, like, a total cultural reset, and you needed to, like, fire 80 or 90% of the people and then hire back. So that instead of having, it had well over 10,000 people plus, plus contractors. And it's gone down to a thousand or something, and maybe…”

“Well, so I was looking at, I looked at Metaverse, sorry, at Fediverse, and saw, this looks like an open source claim of Twitter, and open source claims of commercial products never work. It's the only people who use them are people who care that it's open sour…”

“I mean, the kind of the case study here is when social networks decided to block anybody Suggesting that masks weren't very useful during COVID or block anybody suggesting that maybe COVID had leaked from a Chinese biology research lab. And I think now, I don'…”