balajis.com | Substack

It was a mistake to let Twitter set up the incentives for our society. It's not good for the world when the one thing every prominent person knows how to do is fight each other on Twitter for likes and followers. It has converted society into a zero-sum status game played by elites with real consequences.

I may be wrong about this, but I don't think a "better Twitter" starts with a service which is simply a clone of Twitter except with a different community. I think it starts with a community of independent (and independently monetizable) domains that we network together in novel ways, to build decentralized media.

It was a mistake to use our real names everywhere online, particularly on Twitter. It made us vulnerable to personal and physical attacks.

step three is to get off Twitter all together, and start building a decentralized media ecosystem that combines the sovereignty of individual domain names with the community of social networking. The v1 of that is a simple joint RSS feed that aggregates multiple independent newsletters, but we can get much more sophisticated with tech for the decen... See more