Twitter CEO on How Hashtags Have Changed Discussions | Joe Rogan

You started a company when you started Twitter when you guys first started Did you have any I there's no way you could have added any idea what it would be now. No, but One of the things I always try to emphasize the people when they're people like oh Twitter's crazy like how could it not be crazy? There's never been anything like it before like imagine trying to predict The kind of the president United States uses threat Twitter to threaten other countries. Yeah, I mean Who the fuck saw that coming nobody's not Not as you think it was gonna be when you first did it well, you know, we were building this thing for ourselves and that's how That's how everything starts. We wanted to use it. We wanted to We wanted to you know, stay connected with each other we group text like a group text we loved our phones we loved Technology we actually started this as a Hack week project out of a failed company called audio is podcasting. I remember that super early on we were We're really creative folks, but we weren't that passionate about where podcasting was going in our particular Domain and we just got a lot of competition early on iTunes just released their podcast directory, but we knew we wanted to work together we knew We love this idea of one-button publishing we love this idea of collaboration we love this idea of Being anywhere and being able to Share what was happening that was that was the idea. I mean that that was it and that's what we wanted it to be and I think the most beautiful and also sometimes uncomfortable aspect of Twitter is it We really learned what it wanted to be and the people helped create it like everything that we Hold sacred now the at symbol the hashtag the retweet those were not invented By me or the company. Those were things that we discovered things that we discovered people using and we just Observed it and we we noticed what they were trying to do. They're trying to talk with one another they were trying to Collect tweets around topics with a hashtag has anybody figured out when the first use of hashtag something was created Yeah, it was um it was actually our lead designer Robert Anderson who leads our design of the cash app Hired him for square later on but he was the first one he was actually communicating with his brother and He put at buzz his brother's name is buzz and It just kind of spread it wasn't in mass but people were doing it But what was most interesting is not what they were doing but what they wanted to do with it They wanted to address each other and that's that changed the company completely that changed the service because I went from just broadcasting what's happening to Conversation and to being being able to address anyone publicly out in the open Which came with it a lot of power and also a lot of issues as well Yeah, the the use of hashtags like looking up hashtag, you know Fryfest or hashtag, you know anytime there's something weird that's in the news That's that's such a unique way to find things but to go on Twitter and to utilize that it's uh, I mean It's it's interesting that you're that this guy just did it just to contact his brother Well that would that was the at symbol the hashtag was this guy Christmas, you know, and he was trying to he was trying to tag he was trying to tag around topics that he was tweeting about and Again that spread all we did was made it easier. We made it more accessible. We we enabled everyone to do it With the at symbol we made a page that collected all mentions of your name with the hashtag We allowed people to search Immediately so you could tap on the keyword and you would see everyone talking about that or tweeting about that specific hashtag So these things were just emergent behaviors that we didn't predict and they became the lifeblood of the service What's fascinating to me about something like Twitter or even something like YouTube is that there's not a lot of other ones like it There's just this one thing like how does that happen? Yeah Where this one thing sort of gets adopted by everybody and takes over and then just becomes this Overwhelmingly massive platform. I mean there's really there's Vimeo and there's a few other video services But nothing on the scale of YouTube and that's the same thing with Twitter There's nothing on the scale of distributing information in a quick short 280 character form like that. We um, I Don't think we could plan for it. I don't think we could necessarily build for that. I someone said recently to We just you know gathered a bunch of our leadership last week in Palm Springs for an off-site and someone said recently that Twitter was discovered and I think What's behind all that is that it it it hits something? foundational it hits something essential and My co-founder biz likes to say that Twitter can never be Uninvented It's here. It changed everything that the use of it has been revolutionary and it's just a simple idea of you know, if you could text with the Entire world if you could actually reach anyone in the world or anyone could see what you're thinking Which I think is also the beautiful thing about About text and the in the medium you can actually get it someone's raw thoughts and anyone in the world can see that instantaneously it becomes this subconscious it becomes this like global consciousness and It it gets to some really deep places in society and and some of those places are pretty uncomfortable