Solving For Twitter

As everybody knows, Elon Musk wants to buy the company, and one of the ideas he’s pushing is to open-source the algorithm that decides how tweets are ranked in all of our timelines. Whether or not the sale goes through (seems unlikely), I actually think this is a great idea. In fact I would go further and argue Twitter should not only open-source t... See more

It was striking how many of Elon’s early tweets about Twitter’s issues seemed to pin Twitter’s underperformance on engineering problems. Response times, things of that nature. But Twitter’s appeal was never a pure feat of engineering, nor were its problems solely the fault of engineering malpractice. They were human in nature. Twitter isn’t, as man... See more

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.