In a 2017 interview, Ev Williams (the founder of Twitter), said something that has stuck with me since: “the trouble with algorithms, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it trie... See more

These platforms have traditionally been built towards, let’s call it, “web two metrics.” Remember back in the web two days, we would talk about engagement, and we assumed that more clicks, more playback, more discussion was all positive. If those went up and to the right, our business model worked, and it meant people were happy. I think that it’s ... See more

And too much of a focus on our intuitions about social media’s echo-chamber effect could obscure the relevant counterfactual: a conservative might abandon Twitter only to watch more Fox News.

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