This was the story about Twitter in the New York Times: More than a decade ago, the platform was in the throes of a future-defining discussion. As new users discovered Twitter, most of the company focused on enhancing the existing business model, reminiscent of other ad-supported models such as Facebook, Google, etc., to prepare for this hyper growth. Blaine Cook, a Twitter developer, was different. He argued for a different direction: the stage, he said, should not be a stage at all. Instead, Cook sees Twitter as a backbone for online chatter, allowing its users to exchange messages with people on other social media platforms rather than locking them into conversations among themselves. They hacked together a prototype to demonstrate their idea.” Although a revolutionary idea, Twitter did not support it and Cook eventually left. Twitter remained a walled garden.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey regretted the decision. He lamented the fact that due to ‘walled gardens’, the Internet had lost its way and became increasingly centralized by large corporations, moving away from the original vision of a decentralized and democratic web. “I realize I am partly to blame and sorry for that,” he tweeted. He also led Parag Agarwal and started an internal project called Bluesky, which seeks to give users more control over their data, allowing them to curate tweets using their own algorithms and logic, based on social media. To build an open protocol for, open data to other platforms, and integrate cryptocurrencies. Basically, BlueSky aims to give users the power to monetize and control data – a core tenet of Web3. “If bitcoin existed before Twitter existed, I think we would see a very different revenue model,” Dorsey said.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk was also having similar thoughts. Not accustomed to possessing them, he began sharing them with his more than 80 million followers on the platform: “The Twitter algorithm must be open source,” he tweeted recently, asking his followers to vote on it. asked for Dorsey voted ‘yes’. Musk was also raving about the centralization in technology. He left most Tesla patents open, famously, so that major EV intellectual property is not owned or centralized. He co-created OpenAI to share artificial intelligence research and breakthroughs with the world. The two planets clashed when Musk reached out to Agarwal to discuss their shared vision and then announced a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him its largest shareholder, though he later joined its board. Rejected the offer. However, as this column goes to press, Musk has announced that he intends to buy 100% of Twitter.
Musk is known to shake everything he touches, be it energy, space or crypto. How could he change Twitter, beyond just a possible edit button? The answer can go back to the original view of the World Wide Web. Its founders wanted it to serve as an equalizer to power the long tail and eliminate monopolies and middlemen. The Web solved three big problems for us: an information problem with search and wikis, a communication gap with email and messengers, and a distribution with file-sharing and e-commerce. But it could not solve the larger issues of trust and arbitration, and today’s users cannot be said to be its primary beneficiaries. In fact, Big Tech companies are more powerful than ever; They own all of our data, which even Tim Berners-Lee worries about.
Musk’s vision seems to center around decentralized social networks, user ownership of data, and radical transparency, all of which will aid the emergence of Web3. It can be unusual, revolutionary and iconoclastic, words with which it identifies. It would be a different way of building a platform: its basic technologies would be built openly, with every coder around the world seeing it. Users can customize their social feeds and set their own rules for what they want to see and do. This would be in contrast to the way Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were built, in which “companies decide which posts can remain and what should be removed.” Dorsey has been talking about this for some time and is attracted. The decentralized web, he says, has “the same energy” as open source, “it had the weirdness, the punk aspect of it.”
A radical remake is a daring act, and radical transparency is good, but uncensored and uncensored free speech can prove very disturbing, with a global clamor over the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories. The business models are also unproven, and there are scenarios where users may have to pay for Twitter access. But, if anyone can pull it off, it’s Elon Musk.
Jaspreet Bindra is Chief Technical Whisperer in Findability Sciences, and learning AI, Ethics and Society at Cambridge University.