A Letter to Jeff Bezos
Dear Mr Bezos,
You seem a little unenthusiastic about the proposed buy out of Twitter. Elon Musk is a person I have deeply mixed feelings about: he has made incredible things happen in space and in electric vehicles but having keenly observed his governance practices and numerous attacks against whistle blowers and journalists as well as deep cultural issues at Tesla I do not think he is the guy to run a very influential platform heavily trafficked by journalists including those at the Washington Post. While he has somehow threaded the needle between saying nothing about Shanghai lock downs but saying a great deal about lock downs in the US without a peep from the GOP I am not sure that this indicates he can be expected to act well or in the United States interests, perhaps the exact opposite. He is highly commercial and media aware but probably not a good outcome here. If push comes to shove - and it likely will with the CCP given they have their agendas and know how important the Shanghai factory is to Tesla - he will compromise twitter to avoid being margin called on his Tesla holding which is being used to fund this deal, perhaps around an election. If I was a CCP intelligence officer and saw such an easy target with so much sway it would be too good to miss.
As of last filing Amazon has ~151 million verified humans on its platform known as Prime. Amazon would on balance like to ingest large amounts of text from their users to better target them for shopping, media and the like. The problem is moderation and the overhead of politics but to a large extent the political cost is sunk for someone who owns a media organization. For moderation I have a number of suggestions below which despite years of engineering spend twitter has simply not tried.
Allow people to show their tweets only to verified humans. Does this create a class divide in the app? Yes it does - but it also makes the anonymous death threats, attacks and crimes a lot less fun when your target never sees it. This does not mean people have to use their real names just that there has to be a living breathing human to serve or identify to law enforcement. This could and would reduce a lot of the extremes of the site.
Talk to Tracy Chou, hire her perhaps to create tools so people can decide how to run their own blocking and filtering. Blockpartyapp has made twitter semi-usable again but allowing me to filter a lot of incoming stuff mostly from anonymous abusive accounts. It could go further still - I have never had a reply from someone with hammer and sickle emoji in their profile that was worth the time, there are broad swathes of discourse I want nothing to do with and I imagine many feel same. Endless JK Rowling vs trans activist wars? Sometimes a guys just wants to see what his professor friends are retweeting in energy, finance and climate literature.
Remember google plus? They had some sensible stuff like being able to define your own groups to send messages to and coherent list functionality. Twitter is awful for this. Why, I could not tell you but the ~$600mm odd in stock based compensation has not been well spent.
Twitter interests and topics are also a mess - you cannot look stuff up and subscribe to it nor unsubscribe that easily. Its just a useless poorly optimized feed.
There should be an Uber like reputation system for people’s style of engagement. Some people will use the site to scream and abuse one another, others will not. People should have a choice as to how aggressive their feed is. They currently do not. I’m not going to miss anything by not having Labor or Liberal-National staffers scream past each other and occasionally at me on their anonymous alts.
More and more tools for “creators”. Twitter never really got this: people don’t produce content equally and there is a big divide between people producing the media and consuming it.
Location based targeting. Suppose you want to - gasp - do some political organizing outside of the online “clown world” of social media networks. You cannot set a tweet to be available within a certain radius. This keeps people glued to screens unable to organize but I am not convinced that is a good thing and as far as I can tell nor does anyone from anarchists to the trad neo right types.
There no doubt is a great deal more but the starting line at prime - a lot of real deal humans - seems an advantage that could be used to build something with good incremental margins to Amazon and Wapo without all the bizarre overhang of poor design choices at twitter.
This fits in well with the ethos of “your margin, my opportunity”: a competitor even if marginally profitable would provide a lot of incremental returns to Amazon in data and as an AWS customer. It might also get some of the more prickly Dems off your back given that Twitter is going to become some kind of crypto-pumps-gonad-sunning-with-Tucker-Carlson disinformation zone with occasional sponsored content from the CCP’s relevant organs until Tesla has a smaller footprint in China. It may not be what Elizabeth Warren wants, but it represents the best alternative available.
Exactly