Elon's Plan to Fix Twitter — With Alex Roetter

Alex Roetter ran engineering at Twitter from 2014 to 2016 and is currently a general partner at Moxxie Ventures. He joins Big Technology Podcast to evaluate the product changes Elon Musk has expressed interest in, looking at whether they are feasible and could actually help the company. We go point by point through six potential changes and then discuss whether society, Twitter users, and Musk himself will be happy with the deal five years from now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay?

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  LinkedIn Presents.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Well, Elon did it. He bought Twitter. The company and Elon agreed on a deal on Monday. And here we are. Elon Musk is going to be the next owner of Twitter. Can you believe it? I can't. I definitely got this one wrong. I thought that he wasn't going to come up with the financing. Turns out, he put up the most money an individual ever has for an acquisition, and that's what helped push it home. And here we go. It's an extraordinary moment led by someone who's definitely out of the ordinary. You know, there's been so much talk about who Elon's working with and what might have motivated him, all that stuff. But on this show, we like to talk about solutions,

• 2:08Speaker 02

  not just the problems, and we like to talk about concrete technology issues, not just the gossip. Although we do like gossip, and we'll get to that in the second half. And to do it today, we're going to talk about the solutions that Elons might bring to Twitter. We have an amazing guest. Alex Redder is here. He is the former head of Twitter Engineering. He ran the company's engineering division from 2014 to 2016, and he did hire the current CEO, Parag Agrawal. He's currently a general partner at Moxie Ventures. And we're going to spend the day really walking through some of the solutions that Elon has talked about and talk about, you know, whether they're actually feasible. So this is going to be less spitballing and more concrete discussion of what's going on. What could go on inside Twitter? Alex Redder, welcome to the show.

• 2:53Speaker 03

  Thanks, Alex. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Great having you. And sorry, excuse my voice. I feel like I made it just till the end of the Elon news cycle, and then my body just gave out. But here we go.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  I feel better.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  We will. We will soldier through. Can you tell me a little bit about, you know, your background and how you ended up coming to Twitter the first time? I feel like people should have a sense of, you know, who you are and the stuff that you ran while you were at the company.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Sure. So my background is in computer science. I was a software engineer for a long time at startups you've never heard of, at startups you have heard of, like Google back when it was a startup. I first joined Twitter in 2010. It was a couple hundred people, and it had almost no revenue. And when I joined, they said, basically, why don't you walk around and work on whatever you like? And I looked around, and as I mentioned, there was almost no revenue at the time. They just hired a head of sales, Adam Bain. And so I decided to work on trying to help build a monetization engine. So we built that for the first four years of my time there. And that was, we were lucky. That was very successful. I think the timing in the market was right.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  A monetization engine is a tool that people can use to place ads on Twitter.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  This is the ad system. That's right. This is the reason you can come and buy promoted tweets, promoted trends, videos, promoted accounts, all that sort of thing. So that worked. That was really exciting. I mean, that grew, I think at the time it was the fastest growing ad system from zero to whatever it was, two billion a year. I think in in Internet history as far as we knew. So that was that was really exciting. So did that for about four years and then I took over engineering at the company for my last two years there. So then I inherited all the other stuff other than ads engineering. So the core home timeline, the rest of the product.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  You clearly have a history at Twitter. It's never really been a stable company. Having worked there, your tenure there, working there for six years is probably three times the typical Twitter. It's always been a crazy company, but it doesn't happen every day that Elon Musk comes and basically walks up and says, I want to want to buy you and then buys you. So, you know, having been read in and being prepared for a certain level of nuttiness within Twitter, what was your reaction when you saw Elon made this deal?

• 5:07Speaker 03

  So I was like you, I figured it wouldn't happen. I just thought there are too many unknowns. Does Elon really want to do this? He has other things on his plate. He has a track record of making announcements about funding that didn't come together. I figured for some reason or another, it would collapse. And, you know, the board had the poison pill measure and it looked like they were going to fight it. So I was really surprised yesterday morning to read that it was likely and then that it actually happened. So I got it wrong as well. Don't feel bad.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Why do you think the the board changed his mind?

• 5:37Speaker 03

  I think at the end of the day, if you believe it's a real credible offer and you believe it's a higher value than the company continuing to be independent, which I think is hard to argue with, if you look at the historical performance of the stock, and there are no other competitors, in some sense, you don't have a choice. I mean, you are representing the shareholders. You have a fiduciary duty to maximize their value. I don't think they had a choice. I think if they hadn't done this, they would have spent a lot of time. In litigation, being sued by people who felt like this was the way to maximize their value in their past, and they passed.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so that's the story. And now Elon gets a chance to actually come in and do what he wants to do to the platform. So we get to the meat of this discussion, which is, we're going to talk about some of the ideas that Elon has brought up, and talk about whether they're feasible or not, how they might look, and whether they'll actually improve Twitter. Some of these ideas are good. I'll give it to them, some of them are good. So Alex, you're the perfect person to speak with, and then also, we can talk about the impact on revenue, because you did build the ad system. Okay, so let's start here. Idea number one is Elon wants to have, he wants to authenticate humans. My understanding is that would probably be, you know, making people either attach their

• 6:51Speaker 02

  account to a phone number, pay some money, confirm it with an email, because Twitter for a long time has had lots of bots account, bot accounts, running around with no such verification, and it's part of the harassment issues, part of the spam issues. And if you authenticate, you can actually, we're going to get to free speech at the end, but you can actually, you know, I think give people some more leeway to talk, because it's back, it's attached to a real person, as opposed to, you know, just made up out of thin air with no consequences for what you say. What do you think?

• 7:22Speaker 03

  So first, I should say, everyone has an opinion on Twitter features. I'm not sure how helpful my opinion is, but with that caveat, I love this idea. I think if you look at the history of social networks and behavior online, anonymity is overall, to paint with a broad brush, I would say overall, a negative thing for the quality of speech, and for creating an environment that really fosters the worst parts of speech online. There have been a couple 100% anonymous social networks, and they blew up very quickly, because it just devolved into a complete, you know... cesspool of all kinds of horrible discussions. So I think that's a really good idea. I think there's a reason. I think Facebook has a real name policy. I think this is really great.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  What it does to overall usage, I see why Twitter has always been reluctant to do that. There are great use cases for being anonymous. I mean, a perfect one was, you know, when I was at Twitter, the Arab Spring happened. And having anonymous people that could get messages out because horrible things were happening. And if their name had been attached to it, they would have been arrested or maybe even killed by the government. There are real reasons why anonymity matters. That said, overall, I think almost always what you see with behavior online is anonymity, on average, makes things pretty scary and unsafe and violent. It brings out the worst in people. So I love this idea.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, like one of I think Twitter's best features was allowing people to mute anyone with a default profile picture. Right. And they actually also made a good move turning that default profile picture from an egg to an avatar of a person. You know, sort of removing that, you know, putting, putting a layer of, hey, you're, you're supposed to act like a human being when you're out there, not just this asshole egg.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  Right. But you know, the, the fact that they did that is sort of a have your cake and eat it too kind of thing. You wouldn't do that if you knew everyone was a real person. It was a thing you were, you were trying to get the benefits of having one be real, but not make the decision to make everyone be real. And at the end of the day, you know, a modicum of effort that can be easily circumvented, of course. But right, it did, it did actually make a difference.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a half step in this direction, and I think Elon wants to take it all the way. At least it was very clear. It was the first thing he wrote about and after free speech, which we'll get to, but the first thing he wrote about is, is his desire to authenticate humans. What happens to the activists quickly? If, you know, if you do need to authenticate, then what goes on there?

• 9:50Speaker 03

  I'm not sure. Maybe that case goes away, which is unfortunate because I think it's a unique case. But I don't know. I, yeah, I don't, I mean, these things are to post. One thing that I like about this transaction is, I mean, you alluded to Twitter always is kind of being a Not a very stable company. I agree with that.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  I said it. I said it right out.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I mean, I agree with you. It is not. It is not a place to go to have an unexciting career for sure. For for good and for bad. One thing I like about, I think another thing Twitter has often suffered with is this half step kind of mentality. And I think the avatar is a half step. Elon is not a half step kind of person. So I think one thing that will be really interesting is he's going to do bold things. He is not going to take these half steps to try to placate everyone. Because as we all know, that doesn't work. You end up just upsetting everyone. So that I'm optimistic about.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And another thing, so the other thing he's been talking about is number two here. Spam bots and he really has met, he's mentioned that spam bots are like the worst. You know, the thing he would like look to fix and one of the worst things about Twitter, you can look at under any of his tweets. There's all these crypto spam bots that are trying to like scam off of his like his audience and taking his avatar and stuff. It must be frustrating. I mean, obviously it's not a problem that your everyday user deals with more of the super user. But everyday users can end up getting scammed and I'm sure they do end up getting scammed, which is why this stuff happens. So how, so let's get into a little bit of like the feasibility here.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Is the proliferation of spam bots on Twitter like a want to issue? Or is it just a tough engineering challenge? And how do you think the elimination of those bots would end up improving or harming Twitter? Because bots come in all shapes and sizes.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Right. And what's one person's spam is another person's protected speech. Right. And if you don't have a real name policy, then how do you know that a spam bot tweeting something is not just speech from a legitimate account? It's, I mean, it's, it's an engineering question like any binary classifier is. You can do it. You can train a model on what it is. But there are, there are no models perfect. Any model is going to be have false positives and false negatives. Right. I mean, false positive, what I mean is you classify it as spam bot, but it's not actually one. Or a false negative, you classify it as legitimate, but it actually is a spam bot. So you have a knob that you can tune to how sensitive the model is, just like with any test. Right. But I think the the challenge is going to be.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  He also is trying to bring this free speech. Any classifier you build to cut out spam bots will accidentally have some false positives. And then will the people that are excited about him bringing free speech be outraged? Look, this is just an example of more Twitter censorship. So I think you should do it. I don't know anybody that loves the spam bots on Twitter. I think the situation today is clearly the case that so far from optimal that you should do something. But everyone should be prepared. There is no perfect spam bot classifier. Things are going to get picked up that shouldn't and vice versa.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  That's interesting. So it seems like the spam bot classifier, the dial is turned pretty loose right now. Given all the bots on the platform. Does that sound like a fair assumption?

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Right, as far as I know, I mean, there isn't a spam bot classifier. I don't think.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Ah, okay.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  I haven't worked there in a while.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  How does it, how does it put Elon at odds with the free speech side of his support and his, his plan? If he's going to turn that dial? And it's like when you go fishing, right? You drop the net, you're going to get some dolphins with the tuna. So.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  How, how do those two ideals jive together? Can they?

• 13:31Speaker 03

  You know, I think one of the disappointing things about the free speech conversation on both sides of the platform is really people use free speech to mean, I want to be able to say what I want to say. But everyone is quick to try to kill speech they don't agree with. And you see this on both sides of the political aisle. And I think what's going to be really challenging is what happens when there are false positives? And we start kicking things out. It's going to be a very easy rhetorical argument playing to whoever's base around, oh, look, it's just censorship again. The guy who said he was going to do free speech is just doing the same thing again. So I think it's gonna, it's gonna be tricky to bounce those. On the other hand, you're also right.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  If you can remove automated bots and spam and things like that, it actually makes it, and you know, add real names. It makes it an environment where you can be more permissive because you know it's not random robots, crypto bots or otherwise. And you know, they aren't people hiding behind egg avatars or people avatars. So I think there's a, there's a world where stripping that out allows the people that are left to have better conversations with more free speech. But it's going to be very tricky when they're false positives and people will cherry pick examples and use that to drive home their point that they're still outraged and Twitter's doing the wrong thing.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I am curious because Elon has been, you know, deified essentially by the free speech crowd and we, you know, on Twitter and, and, you know, he's going to be at the helm of this product that will make content moderation decisions.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Even, even, and this is an example I give often on the show, but Fred Brennan, who started a 4chan and instrumental and 8chan, kind of lost it and wished the platform were, was, never existed or was shut down because of the lack of moderation there. So there's a line. It does feel to me that Twitter's gone overboard a little bit, you know, with this line, which is why Elon has, you know, so much support for this move. You know, the rank bannings of folks for questioning some of the COVID orthodoxy. Not that I agree, I think that like a lot of these questions were, were sort of wrong. Like I'm not, I never thought that invermectin, for instance, was a good thing to take if

• 15:42Speaker 02

  you had COVID, but like people should be allowed to, to discuss it. Otherwise you end up having an underground of people believing in conspiracy theories. What's your perspective?

• 15:52Speaker 03

  We certainly have that anyway. I mean, I don't know, it's not clear to me if they've gone overboard or not. There are a million examples of all kinds of violent speech, hate speech, personal threats that Twitter allows.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  So I think everyone who can, you know, make an argument that they censor too much. By the way, that's really code for they deleted some content that I personally still want up there. Every, every example like that, there's an example of stuff that probably shouldn't be allowed.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  Or a lot of people think shouldn't be allowed, that wasn't. I think the difference fundamentally, unlike the other stuff he's worked on, which is also extremely difficult, there's a clear success. It's, it's very clear what making Tesla successful means, or SpaceX, or Neuralink, or the Boring Company. It's not clear that there's any, we can even agree on what success for Twitter is. I think this is a very different challenge for him and it's going to be much, much harder. It feels a lot more like a no win situation compared to the other companies, as difficult as they are, there's a clear definition of what success is.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Right. Let me play devil's advocate and press you a little bit on this one, because I hear it a lot from conservative folks, that it isn't just about that Twitter just took down speech, that they, you know, wanted to be up or, you know, what, it's not just a bad faith argument, but it is. It is a place where like if you're questioning COVID, it's a larger thing if you're questioning COVID orthodoxy. I mean, they definitely banned a lot of QAnon folks, you know, which took out like a good chunk of conservative users. These people do exist where they've been banned for, for, you know, going afoul of the rules. And there's lots of people that have been banned. You know, it is Twitter's, I mean, look, you can see my mentions. It's not exactly a pretty

• 17:30Speaker 02

  place, but like they've definitely been pretty aggressive on the content moderation front.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  You know, when I was there, there was a bunch of stuff where they weren't aggressive in the other direction. So it's, I mean, it's honestly, it's really not clear to me. I mean, I remember there's all kinds of stuff that was, I mean, literally physical threats where that was allowed. There was, I mean, it used to be, it's sort of funny. I mean, we talk about bipartisanship being dead. I think one area where it's alive is actually the anti-vax movement. It used to be the anti-vax movement. It was kind of a left thing. It was like hippies in Marin County who didn't want to get their kids vaccinated against measles. And they tend to be Democratic leading. And now it's more of a right thing about the COVID vaccine. So

• 18:15Speaker 03

  maybe my snarky take is, hey, look, bipartisanship isn't dead. But it used to be at the time that people on the left were outraged about that. So I don't, you know, I, I, I do, a lot of people have spoken a lot about what the optimal thing for Twitter to, are they censoring too much? Are they censoring not a little? Or sorry, not enough? You can pick examples. There are a million people outraged on either side.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  And so it's just, you know, I, I really don't think there's an answer that's going to make everybody happy. And I think deifying any one person is oversimplified and foolish. And I think Twitter has a history of this. It's, oh, we've struggled for so long, but you know, thank goodness, founder X is back, Jack is back, or thank goodness, now we have a CEO who's not a founder, or now we have, oh, Elon's going to come save us. I don't think there's one person that is going to save Twitter. I mean, Twitter has a bunch of smart people that work there. They've been working on these things for a very long time. And I don't think there's an answer that, there is not an answer that makes everybody happy. It might just be the case that Twitter is not a thing that billions of people will

• 19:26Speaker 03

  ever use. That's okay. There are very few products. That are that are at that scale. Unfortunately, Twitter gets compared to them all the time because it has so much mind share. Um, but I don't think he is going to come in and make any decision on free speech. Or anti Elon could come in and be more restrictive in a way that substantially transforms the platform and gets us to this billion user product. Which, by the way, I don't think he hasn't said that's his goal. I don't think that is his goal. But that's certainly been the goal historically at Twitter. Get more usage up. Start competing and being on the scale of, you know, the Facebooks and Instagrams of the world.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the free speech thing is going to be interesting because he is being deified. Um, whether we like it or not, he is being deified. And now what are the people who are gonna, who are looking to Elon to end? Content moderation on the platform gonna say when he actually does moderate, is it, are they gonna make excuses for it? Um, like, let's say he doesn't bring Trump back, you know? Does he have credibility with that crowd anymore? How do they approach that? And who gets mad? That's gonna be really interesting to watch. Uh, why don't we talk about a little bit more about product stuff? So one of the things that seems like it'll be likely explored by Elon, he's talked nicely about Twitter, blue Twitter subscription product. Is more pay products inside Twitter.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  People have talked about the fact that maybe if you're a brand, you should have to pay. Or what happens if everyone pays a dollar a month? Like, does that, um, actually start to deal with some of the trolling issues? Because it just becomes prohibitively expensive to run an army of bots. Um, you know, at a dollar a month. What do you think?

• 21:09Speaker 03

  I think it's really interesting. I mean, going back to the point earlier about, hey, at least he's gonna make bold changes, you know, to be positive about it. He clearly is not gonna care about the quarterly results of the advertising system. In a way that the company before, certainly when it was public, but even before that, I mean, when it was private, really cared about that and couldn't, you know, kill the goose that lays the golden egg. So he is unshackled from that restriction. So it'll be very interesting to see what he does. But you're right. If you don't want a bunch of what you think of low value activity to happen, if you charge more than the value that you think people are extracting, it should go away. I think it's a really interesting idea. It's not going to make it a mainstream product, obviously, but I don't think his goal is to get, like I said, a billion people. That's not why he's buying the company, or at least

• 21:54Speaker 03

  from all the comments of his that I've read, he's not trying to maximize user growth. I don't think he cares. He's not doing this to get some financial return and make it more attractive in the markets. You can imagine things like, you know, maybe you paid a tweet. I would think the people that are great at Twitter today, celebrities, pundits, politicians, newscasters, you would imagine it's worth far more than, I don't know, 10 cents, a nickel, what, who knows, to send messages out. Those people probably would pay to tweet. For other people that are passively consuming, certainly for spam bots and things like that, it's probably not worth that. I think it's a really interesting idea. You can only explore it if you're not a public company, if you don't have an advertising system trying to report quarterly, quarter on quarter growth. So

• 22:38Speaker 03

  we'll see. I think, I think, I think a lot has been written about people not liking this transition, and I think that's valid. But from the ability to try different financial ways to monetize, I think that's really fascinating.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  Right. And, you know, I should note that there's, whenever I bring this up, there are folks that tell me that, well, there are countries outside of the US where like a dollar here, you know, might end up becoming privately expensive.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  So you would have to, you would, you would have to, you would normalize ineffective purchasing power and incomes by country.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that it's an interesting idea. And also the other thing that people say is, so I brought it up yesterday and on Twitter and, or Monday on Twitter and, you know, got criticized for it. Because folks are like, You know, you would have to charge this amount in order to make up for the advertising revenue. But who's saying the advertising revenue needs to go away? You know, it's like this can exist in conjunction where you can have a paid product and ads. Obviously, they'll be a little bit more difficult with ads because you need the scale. But Twitter, you know, only can look at the other platforms that we talked about comparing it to. It's got 217 million users a day, which is nothing to shake your head at. But it's not going to win the scale game against a Facebook or Snapchat.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  So I think the two can exist in conjunction. What do you think?

• 23:57Speaker 03

  I agree with that. This is also a case where the unique ownership of a basically a private individual. If he wants to have their quarterly revenue, he can do that in a way that a public company can never allow that to happen. So you could have less advertising or you could get rid of advertising. Or it could be a combination of, you know, you monetize the data and then you charge for tweeting. I mean, I would think someone like you with your job for what you're trying to do and reach your viewers in the various channels you have. You know, you would pay some small amount of money to get that message out. Maybe that's fine.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  No doubt. I absolutely would.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  It's ROI positive for you. But again, again, it's a little bit like the binary classifier on spam. Any price you set will be too expensive for some content that you wish could get out. And also too cheap to block some content that you wish didn't get out. So there's not a perfect magic price where you get exactly what you want. And, you know, that will make people upset on both sides. It's either too expensive, it's either too cheap, so it's ineffective.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Right. Okay, we have, we have a lot more to talk about. We haven't even talked about open sourcing the algorithm yet, longer tweets, some other stuff. So why don't we do that on the back of this break? Alex Rutter is with us, the former head of Twitter engineering, 2014 to 2016. He also spent four years prior to that, building the company's ad system. He is a general partner at Moxie Ventures. And he's here with us on the next half of this break to talk more about the Twitter product and how Elon can fix it. We'll be back right after this.

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• 27:32Speaker 02

  And we're back here on the Big Technology Podcast with Alex Redder, the former head of Twitter Engineering and a general partner at Moxie Ventures. You're working with a bunch of other former Twitter folks out there, if I'm not mistaken. Isn't that right, Alex?

• 27:46Speaker 03

  Yep. Moxie has two general partners, myself and Katie Stanton. Her and I have known each other forever. We met at Google, but we worked, she was also on the leadership team at Twitter. And so we worked together all day, every day, and it's, it's a ton of fun. It's great to work with people who you've known forever and trust.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  What's it been like in the office these days? Do you guys like see every Elon update and go, oh, ah?

• 28:10Speaker 03

  Well, we don't have an office, but uh,

• 28:14Speaker 03

  it's been interesting to watch. As you mentioned, Twitter has kind of been a tumultuous place. I think even by Twitter standards, the last two weeks have been wild.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay, let's keep going and talk about more of the things that might end up happening to the company. Open source algorithm, you have some ideas on this one. What happens if Twitter open sources the algorithm as Elon has said they might want to do if, when he leads it?

• 28:41Speaker 03

  So this one is a head scratcher to me because I don't know exactly if he means it literally. And I don't, I can't imagine a world where it would be effective to achieve any of what I think the goals are, even if so. So it's thing about, you know, and he said literally, he really means putting the code on GitHub. So let's talk about what happens if you do that. I think the most controversial parts of Twitter where he wants more transparency are really around either decisions for banning content and ranking algorithms. Why do you see certain things and not other things? So decisions for banning content, a lot of the policies are online, but it's a human judgment. It's not a fully automated system in many cases. And it's human judgment. You can't really open source that. A lot of it is aided and the ranking is aided by machine learning models.

• 29:23Speaker 03

  The interesting part about machine learning models is not the code. The code is actually relatively short. What how these work, excuse me, is that you look at all the data and behavior on the platform. And by example, by looking at billions of examples, a machine learning model will train itself and try to figure out, for example, what content, what ad is likely to be clicked on by a given user? Or what tweet, organic tweet in your home timeline is likely to be expanded? Or the video that's embedded inside of it is likely to be watched or not by given user? So the actual code is not interesting. It basically says, look at all the content, extract some features, try to predict what users are going to do, and then use that resulting score.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  But it's it's very uninspectable. So an active area of AI research is actually trying to understand what these models do better, because it's not clear, they just provide an answer. Pretty amazing. So there isn't a massive set of code that says, if you get this, then you get blocked. If your tweet looks like this, then move it to the top of the home timeline. So I don't think open sourcing any of this ranking is going to provide any transparency. The other thing that I think is odd is he compared it to other open source projects like the Linux kernel or Signal. The difference there is that there's a clear outcome that you want. So if I look at the Linux kernel and I find a case, oh, you know, if your computer plugs this peripheral into it, it will crash. That's clearly bad.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  And if I fix that bug and submit it, if you can reproduce the bug, you will accept the bug. There isn't a clear answer for what Twitter should do. So this idea that we'll all inspect it and submit bug reports and make it better, I think, doesn't really extend to the Twitter use case. So I I struggle a little bit more with that. I think the third thing, too, is the fundamental hypothesis is with more transparency, people will be happier.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  But that's not true if you fundamentally disagree with the decision. I mean, for example, the Supreme Court is pretty transparent. I mean, the arguments, you can read transcripts of the oral arguments. You can read the justices' opinions. You can read all the opinions that they cite in their opinions. But at the end of the day, if you don't think money belongs in politics, you're going to be angry about the Citizens United decision. It doesn't matter that it was fully transparent. It's just you don't like the outcome. So I don't think even if you could open source the algorithm, which I think you really can't in the most interesting cases like we talked about, I don't think that's going to help. I think people just aren't going to like the decisions.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  I want to read you a tweet that Rene DeResta, who's a disinformation researcher cited. It's from Liz Wheeler. It's, "I can't wait to see Twitter's algorithm when Elon Musk makes it open source. We're going to be shocked at badly it stifles conservatives and artificially promotes leftists." Your response?

• 32:22Speaker 03

  I don't know what the algorithm is they're referring to.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  I think that's part of the fiction of, oh, if we open source the algorithm, it'll be super obvious, right? There's no clue. It doesn't say like, if you are Republican, then you're banned. I mean, there's just nothing like that.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Right. There's an interesting idea going around. Nathan Biches, who writes at this Divination's newsletter, has talked about it where Twitter maybe should give users the ability to design their own algorithms, talk about what they wanted to prioritize, and then maybe like make like an algorithm store, so to speak, where you could go in and pick the type of Twitter you want to see. What do you think about that?

• 33:04Speaker 03

  I think you mostly have that by who you follow and who you block. I mean, I guess you could also have some control over, I want these sorts of tweets to be ranked higher or lower, or I don't want Twitter. I mean, Twitter for a long time was exactly only all the tweets by everyone you follow sorted by time. So you had perfect control over it. Now that they do some juggling in the home timeline, maybe you could give some control over that. I don't think it fundamentally solves the problem, though, of not liking what's allowed and what not's allowed. But, you know, giving users more control is a good thing.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Let's take it a step further. I mean, there's a movement inside Twitter now to open not, well, turn it into a protocol and decentralize it. So you can choose, for instance, a Twitter instance with Donald Trump on it and Milo on it, or you could choose one that's like even more, you know, happy to ban than it is today. What do you think about that?

• 34:03Speaker 03

  So isn't that the same as the previous idea? You forget the implementation. It's basically you allow all the content and then users decide what they see or don't see.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  It's a little different, but it's tough to, because to take a user like Donald Trump, for instance, like when he's on the platform, he animates a ton of the action there. So if you chose the Twitter without him, you'd sort of, you would be at a loss.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  Right. The other thing is most, almost all Twitter is consumed by people who don't even have accounts. Right? So it's, I'll go watch the news and I see Donald Trump's tweets. Or whoever, or Joe Biden's tweets, or whatever it is. Or I'll read an article and someone who wrote the article, the author of the article embeds the content. So I think that argument devolves into allow all content and then I select what I see when I log in. Except most people don't log into Twitter. That's not how they consume Twitter.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  Right. Okay, interesting. It's a nice bit of nuance that I think has been missed in the discussion. So thanks for bringing it up. Let's talk about tweet length. Elon's hinted that he wants longer tweets. I guess some people are making jokes that, you know, it'll week one, Elon will issue an edict that tweet length is expanded from 280 to 420 characters. What's your view on expanding the character count?

• 35:24Speaker 03

  So I wasn't at the company when they expanded it from 140 to 280. I don't know if it did anything for usage. My imagine, I imagine it probably doesn't. And anyone that wants to tweet longer can do it with not, it's not the easiest thing in the world, but it's certainly much easier now with the thread limits. It's also the case that most people don't tweet. So for them. Authoring, whether or not it's hard to author doesn't matter at all. It's just the consumption and they can consume it anyway. I also don't think it addresses the, I mean, the fundamental issues are, is this a public utility that gets regulated? Is there a right to free speech? Is there not? Are they censoring too much? Are they censoring too little? I don't think tweet length affects any of that. I don't think there's any magic feature that fundamentally changes the product, to be honest.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  Whether it's this or it's an edit button is another one that there's tons of religious like fervor about, but it probably doesn't matter. Like I said, most people don't even have accounts of those people. Almost all of them don't tweet anyway. So I, I think the effect that that's going to have is probably not a big deal.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  I'm going to disagree with you on this one.

• 36:24Speaker 03

  Great.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  I think the way they, they decided to implement the 280 character decision was seeing how Twitter is used in Japan, where it's long been more popular than Facebook. And they basically said, this is great. Like people are conveying more information. It's more thoughtful. It's more engaging. And they implemented it in the U S and elsewhere. And I think 280 characters is a big improvement over 140.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  You might be right. Great. I mean, why not? I, why not? Let's do it. Let's see what happens. I, I don't think it, I don't think it's gonna change any of the main things that everyone is upset about.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  But yeah, sure. Why not?

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Right. And I mean, they also like had something in development where it would be much more than 280. And they decided not to roll it out. So I'd love to see the research on that one day.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, me too. That was all after my time. I'm curious why that was. I do think though, this goes to this point of Elon, I think, being bolder than historically Twitter has been for a variety of reasons. His personality and the ownership structure and his financial incentives, or I should say lack of financial incentives. So it'll be interesting to see what happens there. But I, I don't think that it's going to fundamentally change the nature of the product or Twitter's role in society or democracy.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay. So you've, you said that a couple of times. So let's zero in on that. Is there anything that can? Is Twitter basically where it's going to be for a while and sort of in its niche? And that's that? Or is, is there anything that would actually start to tackle some of those bigger questions that you're, you're referencing?

• 38:02Speaker 03

  I think most companies that not everything scales forever and the hockey stick doesn't go forever. Twitter has been more or less at a plateau. I mean, they've been growing. I think the revenue now is five billion a year or something. When I left it was closer to two and a half.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  Up thirty seven percent twenty twenty one to twenty twenty.

• 38:20Speaker 03

  But they're not on this hockey stick anymore like when they were smaller. And the same stick that, you know, Facebook and Instagram, when they were at Twitter's size, still were continuing and ramping up. A lot of people have been working on this for a long time. It remains a product that a relatively small number of people find indispensable. And those are people that have larger microphones than the average person, right? Pundits, politicians, celebrities. And so we think it's this, we think it's much bigger than it is. But at the end of the day, I think what in the US it has something like thirty eight million actives? Monthly actives, maybe? I'm not sure if that number's right.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Total number's two hundred seventeen million a day.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  Globally.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Not globally, yeah.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  Globally, right. The most likely outcome is it remains close to the size that it's in, that it that it is today and on the trajectory that it's on, I think. That said, if there ever was a wild card, it's someone like Elon taking the company private and doing whatever he wants. So we'll see. But I I don't think there's a world this becomes. I mean, there are very few multi-billion user products. It's unlikely to expect anything will become one of them, especially something that's been on a very different growth curve for a long time.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  I mean, can you imagine, though, a path? And it gets there. Is it even is it even desirable that it gets there? It's also like not been Elon's priority. You're right. So maybe it's moot.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  There. So there are a lot of parts there. I can certainly imagine a path. I mean, I can imagine a lot of things. I don't think it's especially likely. Uh, is it desirable? It depends. I mean, certainly as a public company, yes, it is desirable. You want to keep growing and growing. This is the curse.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  That anymore. Yeah.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  Right. This is the curse. It depends. Is it desirable for whom? And I think the new owner has said the thing he cares about is essentially unfettered free speech. So as long as he can get, as long as he can allow that to happen, I don't think he cares either way.

• 40:22Speaker 03

  For the public, having two billion people use it or not, I'm not sure.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  When, when you say there, you can think of a lot of ways to get there. Let me, this is gonna be the, this will lead into a question that, that I have. My last product question for you, which is, so A, like, what are some of those ways that I could get there? And then B, let's say, let's say you had control of the company today, what, what would you be doing?

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Oh, boy. I don't know if I have good answers to either of those questions.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  No, you can take, take a swing at it. Yeah.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Did I say that I can imagine a lot of ways to get there? I think, uh, what I meant to say was, is it po- it's certainly possible.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  How?

• 41:02Speaker 03

  I mean, there are products that billions of people a day use. Facebook is one of them. Their use cases are very different. It's not about breaking news and celebrities talking to each other. I think it's really more daily activities, right? Keeping up with your friends, sharing baby photos, sharing fun things that you do. Things that kind of are maybe less world-changing, but the things that all of us do all day, every day. That's actually kind of the level on which we think about things. We're not thinking about, maybe, most of us aren't thinking about breaking geopolitical events and having different diplomats talk to each other publicly about them, right? Twitter's better at that, but that's not that use case. So I think if you built a product that was really more daily life for people, it would look a lot more like Facebook and Instagram. I'm not saying they should do that.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  Facebook and Instagram already exist, but I think the ways to get billions of people really have to address use cases that billions of people will have every day.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you don't want to put like baby photos on Twitter, cause

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, you shouldn't do it.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  That you'll have fifteen people calling your baby ugly by the time you let them check your phone again.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  To be clear, Twitter is unique at a certain thing. It should not try to be those other things. It should not try to be a Facebook or Instagram. The thing that Twitter is good at, though, is just not a billion user use case. That's my point. So if that were to change, it would have to fundamentally change the product and end up being a copy.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  And what would you do if you, if you were running it?

• 42:25Speaker 03

  Oh, boy. So first, I would stop trying to please everybody. I would be much more clear. I think a reason also why Twitter struggles is So they make decisions in a space where there's no answer that's going to make everyone happy. I mean, free speech is a perfect example of that. But two, I think they're not decisive enough. And maybe a great example of this is their long tortured history with developers. They allow external clients, they shut external clients down, they allow tweets being shared, they charge for tweets, you know, charge for the fire hose, which is the stream of all the tweets. I would be much more decisive and let a long-term strategy drive the decisions and publish it.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  Everyone's not going to like it, you're still going to get people to hate you, but that happens anyway. And then I would stop listening to the louder, loudest voices in the room so much. There are a small number of people that are very ardent Twitter users, and they have a disproportionate voice and they scream about things. And I think Twitter, one of its strengths is it provides a platform and a voice for people. But I think they overuse that strength sometime and they listen too much to small voices. So I think if they could actually be more decisive, we're going to do this, this is the reason why, here is why, be very transparent about it, but then not revisit it the minute someone gets upset. Because they're operating in a space where there are no decisions where no one will be upset.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  So I think whatever they do, more so than a specific product suggestion, everyone has a product suggestion for Twitter. I don't think the world needs one more former employee talking about product suggestions. I would change how they operate. I would make what they're doing more transparent, tied to something strategic, explain the why, and then get on with it.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  Yep. How is Elon going to make money on this thing? I mean, if he doesn't care about the business side, if he's gonna, content moderation, I think, has been good for the ads,

• 44:24Speaker 02

  ads business, but he has, he owes a lot of money on it. Thirty something billion of his own, of his own cash, how's he make money on it?

• 44:32Speaker 03

  Right, I don't know. I mean, he's talked about some ideas that will make some of the money, whether or not they recoup all or some of the reduction in the ad system, if there even is a reduction in ads revenue at all, I think that remains to be seen. But I don't know. I mean, you could imagine a world where Tesla's stock keeps going up and he just pays it off himself, for example.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:50Speaker 03

  He has a lot of money.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  He does have a lot of money.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  It doesn't sound like that's, other than the mechanics of having to be able to service the debt. In a company that's not, at least certainly last year, didn't generate enough free cash flow to do that. Other than that, I don't, I don't think that's on his list of things he's worried about at all.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it'll be interesting because, well, yeah, maybe he just takes the money out from his Tesla shares.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  Okay, let's get to some of the gossip. Um, what, what do you think Jack Dorsey's role is in all this? I mean, he posted after the deal was done, a Radiohead song, "Everything's in its right place." I mean, he was just basically pushed out as CEO and he talks about how like, Elon is like the singular, you know, best, Elon is the singular solution I trust. Even though he's just basically humiliated Parag, the CEO. What's going on?

• 45:41Speaker 03

  I don't know what's going on. I think that's part of this have your cake and eat it too thing. I also, I saw that. I mean, that was a head scratcher. If you believe the story that Parag was his handpicked successor for, what, four months ago? I mean, not very long ago.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:56Speaker 03

  That wasn't that awesome of a thing to go out, to be honest. And if you don't believe that, well, then I would sort of downweight future tweets from that person that's saying things that weren't true. So I don't know. I think it's, I think it's strange, to be honest.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. Strange in what way? I guess maybe you just covered.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  I mean, you just made it, you just said the story you've picked, "I have full confidence in Parag. He's my hand chosen successor." Whether or not Jack was pushed out or did quit of his own accord, I don't, I don't know. Either way. But either way, there was a whole, I mean, there are photographs of them with their arms around each other. I'm so excited. And then four months later, it's not like now we have more data. We've seen Parag as a CEO for so long that now we can change our opinions. It's basically too early to tell. And so then I think to come out and say, "I have full confidence in this one singular person," who by the way, has tweeted zero confidence in the management team that essentially Jack put together. I think it's bizarre.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  So strange.

• 46:51Speaker 03

  Secondly, it falls into this fiction. There is no one magic person who's going to ride in on a horse and fix Twitter. It wasn't the return of Jack. It wasn't the leaving of Jack. It wasn't any other of the many CEOs. It's not Elon. I think we have this like fairy tale mentality of the one person coming in. And I, I think that's overly simplistic.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  Twitter employees have also been like a maybe unwitting character in this whole thing where clearly they're not happy about Elon coming in. There could be a layoff, which was indicated that at least for now there won't be, but when you say there won't be for now, you know, wink, wink. How do you, how many of them do you expect to stay? And what do you think it's going to look like inside the company now that Elon has taken over?

• 47:35Speaker 03

  I would imagine, and I'm really not in touch with people inside the company any longer. It's been too long, but I would imagine it's extreme. It's a time of, I, we saw a bunch of other major points of turmoil when I was there. I would imagine people are really worried, probably not getting a lot done right now.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Oh, there's no way they're getting anything done, right?

• 47:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. There's probably a lot of distraction. It's really too bad because as I mentioned before, I think the Twitter thing Twitter needs to do is actually have a strategy, make big decisions, whether it's on free speech, developer platform, whatever, very explicitly against that strategy and then just focus and do it. There's no way they're going to focus and just get stuff done right now. So I think that's really unfortunate. How many people stay? I don't know. I mean, I know that, you know, I'm sure a bunch of people very publicly are shouting if they're going to quit, whether or not that

• 48:24Speaker 03

  turns out to be true, we'll see. Reminds me a little of like, you know, when Donald Trump won, half the country said they were moving to Canada. Almost no one actually moved to Canada. So I'm not sure. I, I would imagine some of that is overblown, but we'll see. It's also the case that I think that Twitter can make basically no guarantees about. I mean, I saw yesterday an announcement, oh, our compensation won't change. I don't know how they can guarantee that. Right. I don't know how they can guarantee much of anything at this point. Also, I think it will be very hard. This deal, I've read it's going to close by the end of the year, maybe in the fall. That's a long time to have that much uncertainty hanging over your head. So we'll see how it folds out as we get closer to the deal closing. If there is more clarity, but you know, I feel bad for the people in the building.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  It's got to be extremely randomizing and a ton of huge uncertainty. And like you, like you said more strongly than I did, I think it's almost impossible to make real progress on what they were working on at this point.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, I would be, I would be taken, I would not be working. And they even like put a freeze, I think on some of the features, according to Bloomberg. They couldn't, they could not ship features in fear of them, quote unquote, going rogue, which is wild.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. Wild.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  It's not like a Twitter employee would like do something like, I don't know, ban the President of the United States account without permission. Oh, actually, that did happen. Let's see. Barack, does he stay?

• 49:47Speaker 03

  Uh, I don't have any inside information.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  I should say, I'm a huge fan of Barack.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  I think he's great. I heard he's awesome. I would doubt it. I mean, I don't think you usually take over a company where you're not happy with management publicly and keep the CEO. I would doubt it.

• 50:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, tough, tough situation to come in. Jack points and he has like, what, a month to catch his breath? Next thing you know, Elon buys the company.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  Says he doesn't have faith.

• 50:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  Fascinating.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  It's strange, to say the least.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  Okay, final two questions. Uh, number one, do you think society is, well, I think, yeah, society will be happy that Elon made this purchase, let's say, five years down the road?

• 50:30Speaker 03

  I mean, I think what we're seeing already is probably true and indicative of what we're seeing in the United States and globally, which is, we have a split brain as a society. We have two worlds that increasingly have nothing in common. And I think today, there's a ton of happiness and gloating on one side. There's a ton of fear and anger on the other side, which is not unlike how in the US at least, we view almost everything these days, which is really disappointing. So I think it'll be, whatever happens, I think it'll be like that.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  You think Twitter users will be happy? Because, yes, of course, like, a big part of it is speech, but you talked also about a bold entrepreneur. I mean, let's not discount the fact that Elon is, you know, probably the best business person of our time, you know, building all that he's built, so.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. So Twitter users are a microcosm for society, so I'd give the same answer. But also, the people that are active users on Twitter disproportionately, they've figured out the product for all the shortcomings it has. They've figured out how to work in that product. So they probably skew overly strongly on liking things how it is now, right? Because they're successful users in that world. So I would imagine they will be less happy on average than society. That's just my guess.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  Okay. And then finally, is Elon happy five years down the road that he did this?

• 51:45Speaker 03

  Oh, boy. Uh.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  My guess is no. This feels like an unwinnable situation. And it's very different than the other things he does. So my guess would be no. That said, he's a very unique, to say the least, and unpredictable person. So we'll see.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  Right. And yeah, I mean, I would also probably lean on he won't be happy, but

• 52:11Speaker 02

  he's, he's already pulled off a lot of things that folks didn't think was possible, including buying Twitter, which I didn't think was possible. And he's done it. Or at least, you know, we have six months for it to fall apart, but looks like it's a done deal at this point. Okay. Well, why don't we leave it there? Alex, thank you so much for joining. Great having you on. I appreciate you bringing the perspective, being on the ground to this discussion, which is much better than like what I think most of my discussions have been, which has been speculation. So thank you for doing that.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Alex.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Great having you here. Thank you, Nate Quatney, for doing the edits. LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network and all of you, the listeners. Appreciate you coming back week after week. Next time, I promise my voice will be better. It's not as bad as it sounds, but thanks for hanging with us. All right, that'll do it for us here on Big Technology Podcast. We will see you next time.

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