Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Trenda: The driver of Twitter's success is what makes it awful

Ben Trenda · #80 Can This App Silence The Trolls? · Mar 3, 2025 · at 21:38

Ben Trenda, founder of Good Talk, reflects on user experiments testing open comment sections to solve platform retention.

0:00 / 0:08exact quote · 8.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And it led me to the conclusion that the thing that makes Twitter successful is the very thing that makes it awful.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Ben Trenda

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Trenda: Good Talk is first since Instagram or Snap with celebrity PMF
“So we're the first company since Instagram or Snap to create product market fit with that segment of users.”
Ben Trenda Mar 3, 2025 ▶ 11:43 #80 Can This App Silence The Trolls?
Opinion
Trenda: Overture basically invented Google's business model
“Early in my career, that was a company called Overture. So we invented Google's business model basically.”
Ben Trenda Mar 3, 2025 ▶ 7:41 #80 Can This App Silence The Trolls?
Opinion
Trenda: Major platforms cannot solve toxicity due to open participation model
“This is antithetical to those platforms. On those platforms, and you even hear these CEOs when they talk about, like, Jack Dorsey talks about the power of Twitter, it's that every user can participate in every conversation. And so you can't solve a problem tha…”
Ben Trenda Mar 3, 2025 ▶ 8:53 #80 Can This App Silence The Trolls?
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Trenda: Good Talk SMS notifications achieve a 51% open rate
“The next time Brad Feld goes live, you're going to get a text, and you're going to open that at a rate of 51%.”
Ben Trenda Mar 3, 2025 ▶ 5:22 #80 Can This App Silence The Trolls?
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Trenda: 90% of Good Talk users eventually download the mobile app
“We're an SMS first product, although 90% of the users do eventually download the app, but we just believe you have to show them the value before you get them to download an app.”
Ben Trenda Mar 3, 2025 ▶ 11:14 #80 Can This App Silence The Trolls?
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Trenda: Good Talk beta reached 500 high-profile users and 20M followers
“Since we launched our beta five months ago, we've had over 500 high profile people like that broadcasting to over twenty million followers.”
Ben Trenda Mar 3, 2025 ▶ 3:24 #80 Can This App Silence The Trolls?
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 100 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.