Jack Dorsey on Twitter’s Mistakes (Published 2020)

In the process, though, Mr. Dorsey said he now believes that he made a critical mistake: not hiring experts to help him understand the potentially far-reaching importance of apparently small design choices.

“We need to open up and be transparent around how our algorithms work and how they’re used, and maybe even enable people to choose their own algorithms to rank the content or to create their own algorithms, to rank it. To be that open, I think, would be pretty incredible.”

“The disciplines that we were lacking in the company in the early days, that I wish we would have understood and hired for,” he said, were “a game theorist to just really understand the ramifications of tiny decisions that we make, such as what happens with retweet versus retweet with comment and what happens when you put a count next to a like but... See more

Without this expertise, he said he thought that the company had built incentives into the app that encouraged users and media outlets to write tweets and headlines that appealed to sensationalism instead of accuracy.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s C.E.O., was quick to deflect. “No,” he laughed. “Everything that has made Twitter powerful has come from the people using it.”

“Do you believe that you are one of the most powerful people on Earth right now?”