When Twitter CEO Realized It Was Out of His Control | Joe Rogan

Well, it also gets to some really deep places psychologically. There's a weirdness to it, right? There's a weirdness to sending text, particularly anonymously, and there's so many accounts that are just an egg, and so many accounts where they're clearly designed. If you... Sometimes someone will tweet something mean to me, and I'm like, hmm, I wonder what this person's up to. So I go to their site and it's just them tweeting mean shit at people all day long. It's probably some angry person at work and they're like, I'm just going to find people and fuck with them all day. Did you realize, or when did you realize, I'm sure you're aware of it, when did you realize that this was almost out of your control in terms of the scale of it? There wasn't one moment that it just felt completely resonant. It's unfolded into the next thing and the next use case, and it just keeps surprising us with how people are using it. It definitely... Recently, I think we've identified some of the areas of the service that we need to pay a lot more attention to. Twitter is unique in that it has two main spaces, one, which is your timeline, and those are the people that you follow. And when you follow someone, they've earned that audience. And then it has this other world where anyone can insert themselves into the conversation. They can actually mention you and you'll see that without asking for it. You can insert yourself into hashtags and to search. And these are areas that people have taken advantage of. And these are the areas that people have gamed our systems to, in some cases, artificially amplify, but also just to spread a lot of things that weren't possible with the velocity that they're not possible before. Now, when this is all happening, what's the conversation like at Twitter when you're recognizing that this is happening, that people are kind of gaming the system? How do you mitigate it? What's the discussion? Well, early on, it was pretty surface level. How do we change some of the app dynamics? But more recently, we're trying to go a lot deeper and asking ourselves a question. When people open Twitter, what are we incentivizing? What are we telling them to do when they open up this app? We may not explicitly be doing that, but there's something that we're saying without being as clear about it. So what does the like button incentivize? What does the retweet incentivize? What does the number of followers and making that number big and bold incentivize? So I'm not sure what we should not, I'm not sure if we should incentivize anything, but we need to understand what that is. And I think, you know, right now we do incentivize a lot of echo chambers, because we don't make it easy for people to follow interests and topics. It's only accounts. We incentivize a lot of outrage and hot ticks because of some of the dynamics in the service not allowing a lot of nuance and conversation earlier on. Student names, this ability to not use your real name, incentivizes some positive things, like it allows for whistleblowers and journalists to might fear for their career or even worse their life and under certain regimes, but also allows for people, like the example you mentioned, of just random fire and, you know, spread of abuse and harassment throughout. So those are the things that we're looking at and how do we enable more of the conversation to evolve? How do we increase the credibility or reputation of accounts? How do we identify credible voices within a particular domain? Not just through this very coarse, grain blue verified badge, but if you're an expert in a particular topic, how do we recognize that in real time and show that so that we can provide more context to who you're talking to? And if you want to engage in a deeper conversation or just ignore mute or block them.