Twitter's Kayvon Beykpour on product features Twitter is prioritizing

Twitter’s head of product Kayvon Beykpour sits down with Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and Silicon Valley editor Casey Newton to talk about how Twitter juggles its policy with trust and safety, the state of verification, the future of video in your feed, and how tweets can become more ephemeral. Please take our survey here: theverge.com/survey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 0:54Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everybody. It's Sam from The Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, Casey Newton and I sat down with Kayvon Bakpor, who is the head of product at Twitter. Obviously, you know, we talk about Twitter all the time. Casey covers Twitter very closely. Kayvon walked us through how he got to Twitter. He was actually one of the founders of Periscope, Twitter acquired Periscope. He rose up to be the head of product at Twitter, how he's thinking about the platform, how he wants it to move a little faster. They've just done some big changes on the backend to make that happen. How he manages the intersection of Twitter's policies, its content moderation systems, and how that stuff is expressed in features. That stuff is very complicated. This was really interesting to hear him think about it and explain how it works. And at one point, Casey and I just asked for features over and over again. You'll see. Kayvon is great. He's very direct. He's very open, very honest. It was a fascinating conversation. Check it out. Kayvon Bakpor, head of product at Twitter.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  Kayvon Bakpor, welcome to The Vergecast. Thanks for having me. You are head of product at Twitter, which is a service I think everybody uses and very interested in. But I want to just, the first question I have is, you came to Twitter through Periscope. So just talk about that process and how you landed at Twitter and how you took the role at Twitter.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  Sure. How far back do you want me to go? Full life story or Periscope?

• 2:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, when you were a boy, you were like, I'm gonna livestream some videos.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  When I was a wee lad.

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, so my, um, my co-founder and I have actually been best friends since like second grade, basically. And we started our first company together, which we, uh, we built, we got acquired, we were working there for, for five years. And, um, we both eventually decided to, to leave and take some time off and travel because we knew we wanted to start another company, but didn't, didn't really know what we wanted to do yet. And in the course of our kind of like year off and traveling, we both kind of got pretty addicted to this idea of how could we help people see what was happening anywhere in the world through other people's eyes? And the way we described it at the time was, we wanted to build the closest thing to the feeling of teleportation. And we started thinking about this idea for two main reasons. One, you know, this was in 2013 and then obviously like smartphones were pervasive.

• 2:53Speaker 03

  These really sophisticated cameras, as we were just talking about, were super pervasive with high-speed internet connections. But yet there is no way to kind of like rent the eyes and ears of someone around the world to see what was happening through their eyes. And I particularly was excited about this in the context of, one of the trips I was going on at the time was to Turkey. It was just like a place I wanted to go. And, um, the, uh, taxime square protests were kind of in full swing at the time. And I had this very funny argument with my mom where she was like, no, no, no, you can't go to Istanbul right now. It's dangerous. And I was like, no, no, no, that's like CNN dramatizing things. Like, it's actually not tear gas like on the street that my hotel was on. But Joe and I, my co-founder, were talking about like, why can't I actually see what's happening on the street that my hotel is on?

• 3:35Speaker 03

  Like, what if there was a way for me to rent someone's eyes and ears and kind of see through their, see through their eyes? And so that was kind of the inkling that led to us. You know, prototyping solutions to this and we went through kind of some, a bunch of different variations before we arrived at what became Periscope. And along that journey, probably eight months in, while we were still in private beta, Twitter found us and a few of the bleeders, you know, Jack, Dick, a few of the other folks at the company, used the prototype and reached out to us and basically, very quickly, were like, "We would love for you all to pursue this vision with Twitter's support." And that was kind of fast forward and we ended up joining Twitter and that was almost five years ago. It would be five years in January.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  And how did you get from there to now, leading Twitter's product efforts?

• 4:22Speaker 03

  I would say I've had like three different chapters of my time at Twitter. So for the first two years of my time at Twitter, I was hyper-focused on Periscope. My role was CEO of Periscope. We had a, basically a separate organizational structure with a separate office, like physically. We were like two and a half blocks away from San Francisco HQ, but we had our own space and I was kind of laser-focused on Periscope, you know, from launching it to the, you know, two years after that. My second chapter, which started around that time, was leading the video efforts of the company, which obviously Periscope was a part of, but there's lots of other video efforts, you know, VOD on Twitter, our professional, kind of like, publishing efforts. And that was kind of my foray into broader Twitter. And it was around that time that I joined Jack's executive leadership team and kind

• 5:07Speaker 03

  of started getting exposed to Twitter more generally. And not to say that in the first chapter I wasn't exposed to it, but it was far less intimate than like actually leading some of the areas of the product that we're.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're getting the real talk when you're on the executive team.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Also that, like just getting exposed to like the problems and the challenges and the opportunities that Twitter generally was thinking about, whereas I was, again, like hyper-focused on Periscope stuff. So that was chapter two and then about a year and a half ago, I guess it was June of last year, chapter three is my new role, leading product, which has been, it's been a really fun kind of progression because I feel like. It was important for me to also figure out my own reconciliation of being laser-focused on Periscope, understanding and believing in how Periscope contributed to the mission of Twitter, but then, over time, I actually, like, putting aside my role changing, I became more passionate about all the other opportunities and challenges with the Twitter product.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  And so it's been, I feel really fortunate having had the progression that I have, such that when I did take on my new role a year-plus ago, I didn't feel like a total stranger to the company, to the organization, to the challenges. It's still, it's been a lot of learning to get ramped up on stuff that I didn't have nearly as much context around, but yeah, that's been the journey, it's been fun.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  That's right, and you're now, if not the, then one of the longest-serving heads of product at Twitter.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  I'm constantly reminded, yes, not least of which by you. For the first year, it was kind of like a running joke for me, like, whenever there was controversy, like, "Well, I've got like two months left on the job, so I might as well, you know, tell you how I feel about the situation."

• 6:42Speaker 04

  There you go. But you made it anyway. Well, great, well, knock on wood.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, this interview's the end of it, Kayvon, be careful. I feel like this is a setup joke, guys.

• 6:53Speaker 04

  Well, speaking of setup, you know, Twitter is a product that people have opinions about, you know, from time to time, and we thought it would be a fun and novel thing to, I don't know, just, you know, kick around some ideas. But as sort of a way of getting into that, I wanted to take something topical, which is that the day that we're recording this, y'all rolled out searches and direct messages. So now if you're looking for someone who you have DM'd, you can now look up their name. And I think, you know, we could all agree, that is a good and obvious thing, and it seemed like it maybe took longer to arrive, you know, than it might have. And I know that Twitter has historically had some challenges around shipping things, so I wondered if you could maybe give us some insight on where you're at with the product

• 7:35Speaker 04

  development process, and how is it that a feature like that, which again, very good, but arrives on this day in 2019?

• 7:41Speaker 03

  So, fair question. It might be helpful for me to maybe start with some context around DMs generally. Yeah. So, DMs, as much as I feel like I can pick up that you love DMs. I do. I'd love to hear more about that. You may be surprised to know that DMs, for a good chunk of time, like in the order of years, were basically, as a product feature, on maintenance mode. And so, the reason that you didn't see a lot of features like search or any other set of things that you might reasonably expect in a modern messaging product that's private, the reason why you didn't see a lot of that stuff land is not necessarily because it took us a long time. It's because we'd made an explicit decision not to prioritize it. Now, rightly or wrongly, you can debate that. But we changed our perspective on that about a year ago,

• 8:22Speaker 03

  where we not only decided that we shouldn't have a service like DMs on maintenance mode, but that we actually should have a strong point of view on like, why private messaging is important? Because it is somewhat counterintuitive as a service that, whose purpose is grounded in serving public conversation. You'd be right to say, "Wait a second. Why are you investing in private messaging?" And our perspective on that is, you know, public conversation, at least in the form that it exists today, is a pretty high-anxiety form of talking. It's a combat sport. Yeah, you're getting onstage in a public square and saying something that is subject to the public scrutiny of everyone. It lasts forever. It's subject to the popularity contest of likes and retweets and all the other social engagements we have.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  And it's nevertheless very powerful as a form of broadcasting, you know, something you care about. But that's like, on the spectrum of talking, that's on the very, like, public, lasts forever, subject to public scrutiny and public replies. And, you know, there is this other side of the spectrum where you can have more private conversations, whether it's one-on-one or groups. And then there's lots of rich stuff in between. Like, we are having a public conversation that's in a small room right now. Yeah. Right? Like, we're having three people and a couple listeners in this studio that eventually will be published. Like, this analog that we're talking, that we're doing right now, doesn't exist as a mechanic on Twitter, and we think that's a miss. Anyway, I point out the spectrum to you because I believe DMs fit in very clearly into that spectrum.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  It happens to be on one, one kind of severe side of the spectrum, which is... The more like private, you have room to air out your thoughts one on one or with a group. And sometimes you need to scratch the itch of what you're thinking to really feel like you can articulate it well enough in public. Like, we believe we should be providing a venue for people to develop their thinking before they put it on the public record. One. Two, oftentimes, when you see things that are happening in the world, you may want to talk about them in a smaller forum, either with a group of people who have shared topical interest in that thing, or whether literally in a private forum. And DMs very clearly fulfill that need. And we felt like we'd been underserving them. And lots of kind of table-stakesy ways, which is why now that we're prioritizing, we literally have built a team from scratch.

• 10:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  For the most part, like, we have a new PM, we've got a new engineering team. Now that the team is healthy and is, you know, has a charter that is kind of like, has been ratified, like, they're churning out, like, lots of great stuff. They're working on really great. And you haven't even seen the best of it. Like, there's a lot of stuff that the team is working on that I'm excited for you all to see that isn't in public experiment yet. So, and we wouldn't have, that would not have been my answer three years ago, because we were, it was on maintenance mode.

• 10:57Speaker 04

  I love it. I mean, this is exciting to me because, one, just like as somebody who wants Twitter, the company, to succeed, messaging is the lifeblood of so many great social products. And I know that Twitter is really focused on how many daily active users it has right now. Nothing builds DAU like a messaging product, right? So, I hope eventually it spins off into a standalone thing. I hope it has all kinds of, like, cool widgets and stuff. Neil, would you use, like, a standalone DM app?

• 11:23Nilay Patel?

  You know, my DMs are closed. And so, I actually, I think, has kind of an upside and downside. The upside is, it's a very high-quality conversation, right? It's like, just people, like, that, you know, I'm in a follow relationship with. But I often find that that's where the conversation starts. That's the easiest way to get ahold of me. Like, we already follow each other on Twitter. We're, like, maybe talking in public. You know, like, make the switch DMs. And then it's like, here's my phone number, here's my email. Like, let's move this to a place where I actually do conversations. The downside is, they're closed. So, like, it's a very limited set of people, which I guess in other ways is an upside. I guess my question here is, like, there are other table stakes of messaging service now. Like, I would like to see DMs be encrypted, right? I would like to file attachments. And like, there's all kinds of- Crazy things you could add to a messaging product,

• 12:07Nilay Patel?

  but some of them are really important. Like encryption is important to me. Is that something you guys are thinking about?

• 12:12Speaker 03

  Definitely. Yeah, I think there's a, there's a long list of encrypted, there's a long list of, I think, features that are table stakes, some more squarely important for why DMs are important for us. And I put encryption in that bucket. It's, it's not one of the first things you'll see us launch. That's mostly because, you know, as a, as a first project, as we've kind of built this team from scratch, basically, we felt like there were other projects that we could sequence first, whereas encryption's a pretty gnarly one that.

• 12:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a whole like policy thing and you gotta, yeah.

• 12:41Speaker 03

  There's those considerations. There's also like, there's a minimum viable set of things that you need to build for encryption to be useful. I, like encrypting one-on-one communications is different than encrypting group conversations. Encrypted media is a different level of scope than encrypting just DMs that have text in it. So like, we're, we're definitely thinking about all these things, but like philosophically, like absolutely, we believe that we should be able to support encryption. But I'm curious, like, other than that, like, what are the other? I mean, you, you all are obviously power users of the product. Like, what are the other things you would expect, specifically within a DM product in Twitter?

• 13:11Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm, I'm a believer that single-purpose tools are great, which is why I tend to like standalone apps. Some people think that's crazy. They want the entire experience in one thing and they get frustrated when they have to switch back and forth. But I think that if you had kind of a blank canvas like that, you could do a lot more with it. I think you look at some of the things that other social apps are doing with their messaging apps around like ephemeral sharing, I think, is really interesting. Group conversations, I think, can be really good. You know, I, my, my DMs are open and so it winds up being kind of my inbox to the world. And so maybe if you want to give me a, a tip, like you, you reach out to my DMs first. Would love an encrypted way for, for people to do that. But, uh, you know, I, I don't know.

• 13:55Speaker 04

  Uh, I'm just really excited to hear there's a team working on it. And like, to, to your point, DMs are where a lot of work gets done that then later shows up as a, a better public conversation. I had, one of my very favorite writers, I like, wrote something that was like very gently critical of me today. And like, we didn't go back and forth in public about it on Twitter. Like, he just sent me a DM and we, you know, traded a few friendly messages. So I think that kind of thing happens a lot.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's sort of telling to me that there are many customers who are frequently DMing for whom those same people are not frequently tweeting in public. And there's something to learn from that around the comfort of having a space where you can control the audience who can participate in that conversation. And DMs are so clearly that. But again, one of our biggest strategic initiatives right now is more generally, we call it conversations, which is a pretty obviously simple and intuitive word. But for us, it's like that spectrum that I was talking about earlier, filling in that spectrum and being super thoughtful around where the biggest customer needs are that we don't currently fulfill as a product, or that people are kind of hacking together. Because despite not having great mechanisms for this, we have customers who hack this together into the product.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  They create multiple accounts, and they'll have some of those accounts be protected, or some of them be public but have a very narrow follow graph. And they're essentially trying to do what we're describing here, but by hacking together the product in ways that it wasn't necessarily intended. And so, we can learn a lot, and we have learned a lot, just by productizing those, we call them "help wanted" signs in the Jobs Framework. People are asking for help, and they're hacking the product in a way that we can learn from and productize.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Which, by the way, Twitter's history is filled with, I think, our best, some of our best innovations have been productizing things that customers have hacked together, whether it's the @mention, or whether it's the hashtag. And so, I think there's a lot to learn from that. The retweet.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  The retweet, yeah. Well, let's talk about another product that y'all have introduced recently, or at least described, which is this interstitial that you're going to put in front of some tweets that might violate your standards, but you've decided to keep up because they're newsworthy. This week, we saw the president tweet some things that suggested that maybe there would be a civil war if he was impeached, and some people wrote takes about how Twitter, if it shouldn't ban his account outright, should maybe at least have used the interstitial in that case. So, it seemed like a good chance to ask you, like, how and why did you build this kind of interstitial thing? And then, how does the company think about when it might actually use it?

• 16:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I would say that there's two different kind of components of this conversation, at least in how we think about it, that I want to distinguish because I find that they sometimes are conflated together. There's this notion of what's in the public interest, which we've talked about, like us having a perspective on as a company and our policies. And then, separate but related, is this product feature, which is the interstitial or the sort of like information pane that we put on tweets, and how and when we would use that. So let's talk about both of them. So with respect to the public interest concept, really what we've said is, there will be, in particular from people in powerful positions or public officials that have a certain threshold

• 17:02Speaker 03

  of following and greater, we will bias as a company towards keeping up tweets, even if they violate our policies, as a default. And that's not something that everyone will agree with. Like, I know Kara, for example, openly and blatantly disagrees with that. And that's fine. But like, we have very clearly said as an organization that we believe that these tweets from these types of folks, we intend to keep on the platform even if they violate our policies, because we believe it's in the public's interest to know. Related to that, the reason why we built the interstitial is because when we make such a decision, that something does violate our policies, but that we're going to keep it up anyway, we want to be able to make that clear and transparent and understandable

• 17:46Speaker 03

  in the product experience, so that you don't rely on a tweet from Twitter, or a blog post from Casey, or a CNN article, or a TV broadcast, or whatever, to understand the fact that, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, this did violate the policies, and here's why Twitter didn't take it down. So that is the thesis of why that feature exists, and it would only be used in the case that we deem a tweet as violating our policies, but that we would keep up nevertheless because of this public interest notion. We hear lots of feels about that. And the feels, and again, I'm curious to get your thoughts, but my understanding of the feels are that there's really two different notions, right? Some folks really do disagree with that decision to keep tweets up that we believe are in the public interest. And that's, I respect that, but we've made the decision. That that's how we want to operate.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Two, I think there is, there has been, and this is where I think we've got work to do. There's been a lot of confusion around how we make those decisions and what criteria we use to make those decisions. And I think in the absence of that clarity and transparency, it's super understandable that there is frustration and like borderline sometimes like lack of trust on like how that process even works. And that's something that I think we, we understand, I, I, I agree with, and we are, we're going to hold ourselves accountable to coming back publicly with an articulation of how we make those decisions, what is the criteria we use and so that it's more understandable how we might apply that to a specific tweet or not. Separate from all of this, and by the way, I should say on the interstitial, sorry, on the public interest exemption, there is a case where we will actually take a tweet down.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  And that is if one of these individuals says something that is inciting violence or, or harm against a private individual. It doesn't matter who that person is, we will take action on that tweet.

• 19:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  That is a very specific exemption. It has to be a private individual, not a public figure. And again, people might disagree with that, but that is our stated policy right now. And I, I do believe that we have been enforcing our policies consistently, given that standard. Now, separate to all of this, and I might be preempting some of your questions, but just to get everything out on the table. Separate from all of this, there is an independent question around what do we believe the policies should be around which we use a remediation like the interstitial or what other such product features should we create that allow us to take actions that are different than just keeping content up or taking content down? I believe that one of the challenges we've had as a company over the last 13 years is that our primary form of remediation has been, do we take this tweet down or not?

• 20:12Speaker 03

  And that's a super heavy hammer that doesn't provide a flexible enough product experience around how you remediate different forms of severity. And the interstitial is like scratching the surface of one of these such remediations that gets you away from just enforcing based on take down or take up. And I, I do believe that there's other things that we should be doing and thinking about that, that go beyond that. So that's kind of like, maybe

• 20:37Nilay Patel?

  Like three different components of how we think about the problem.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  I mean, one alternative is that the official Twitter account could quote tweet it and say, damn, now that's a bad tweet. Something to think about.

• 20:46Nilay Patel?

  I don't think we need that. We have you for that.

• 20:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's true. I will point out a bad tweet from time to time. I will say, I am actually mostly aligned with you on this policy stuff. I think that if you were to ban some really bad politician, that person's fans would just create an account and that politician would be posting elsewhere. And some bot would be screenshotting it and posting it on Twitter. But I actually think the technical question of how you stop someone from using Twitter is maybe harder than it looks. Particularly when it comes to, you know, a politician who has millions of followers. I also do get really worried about politicians using the platform to incite violence. And I hope when the time comes that a politician really does use the platform that way, that, you know, Twitter sticks to its guns. But, you know, the alternative is that Twitter has to spend a lot of time deciding like, what are the boundaries of free speech in America?

• 21:34Speaker 04

  And I just don't really want to trust any public company with that. Neil, I?

• 21:38Nilay Patel?

  So maybe. I mean, the thing you're describing, when you describe remediation against policy, I mean, you're the head of product at a huge Silicon Valley tech company. And that, like, quite frankly, is some cop shit, right? Like, you have to build a product that enforces policies in a way that I think Twitter in particular sits right at the center of. You have a trust and safety team, a legal team that's developing policies, rules for how people behave. And then your product either incentivizes people to behave in certain ways, or punishes them when they don't. Or provides some transparency into why other decisions get made. I think, I'm fairly sure, that is like a unique moment in software history. Like, I don't think like Windows 3.1 had that architected into it.

• 22:24Nilay Patel?

  And I'm very curious how you think about that is like, the traditional head of product role is like, you know, I'm gonna build some cool software features. People are gonna use them. They're gonna use the product more. Hopefully we'll make some money, right? Like, this is now very much directly, when does Twitter censor the President of the United States? Right? And like, how are you thinking about that role, the split between product and policy? And how to manage all of the many demands that you have?

• 22:50Speaker 04

  Well, I guess you said a lot of things there. I'm trying to tease apart what the question is.

• 22:53Nilay Patel?

  Well, do you believe Windows 3.1 had? Speech enforcement. Yeah, but it's like entirely new for the product to enforce the law. Right? Like, a normal person walking down the street, you know, if Congress changes some law, they just keep walking down the street. Twitter changes its policy about what you can and cannot tweet. The product can actually affirmatively enforce it, right? And that's, that's not normal necessarily. That's much more impact on individual people and how they behave. So how do you think about balancing that responsibility against keeping the platform as open as I think Twitter's values want it to be?

• 23:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think what you're highlighting is that we are, we're in this fascinating and fortunate, but challenging position where Twitter plays a really important role in the world, I believe. And we have to be super conscious about that role and that responsibility and take it very seriously. And that's why I feel like there's a fair share of like incredible excitement, passion, and like slight degree of being terrified about like doing our, having, having the roles that we do. I personally find it extremely challenging and really gratifying. But I think to your, maybe more specifically to your question is, I don't, I think it's really important that we not divorce things like the product from the policy and the enforcement around the policy.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  Because it is, at the end of the day, like an end to end experience. And I think, quite frankly, one of the reasons why we've maybe, over the last, you know, decade, haven't moved as quickly as possible to solve some of the foundational issues that we're now hyper focused on is because we did think of them as somewhat divorced. And we didn't really acknowledge and prioritize as much as we should have early on, some of these really critical things. So like the fusion of those things together, I think, is why we've got, we've got a lot of work to do and why like health is such a crucial priority for us. That is not a, it's not a policy priority versus a product priority versus an engineering priority. It's just like, it's a Twitter priority and it's an end to end set of things that we have to do. And there's an interplay between how we can, you know, we have existing rules.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  We have to make sure that we're enforcing those rules better. But then sometimes the rules aren't right. We got to create new rules. But then also sometimes the product isn't right. And we are using as a crush the policies and the enforcement of those policies to really make up for deficiencies in the product. And so a creation of new product vectors might then lead to new rules that then have gnarly enforcement criteria around them. So I think it's an interplay that we have to be super thoughtful of. And there isn't any one silver bullet. Like, we have to kind of do all of the things, like enforce the current policies that we have better. Think of where our current policies need to be evolved. And also, quite frankly, where we've under-invested the most, evolve the product experience. For example, and this is like a hypothetical example.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  If you had the ability to tweet and decide who can reply to your tweet publicly or not. That, like, a whole class of what we would consider abusive today, i.e. like, people getting all up in your mentions and replying to your tweet and having, like, a dogpile on a conversation you're trying to have. Suddenly, that abuse vector is fundamentally different because if you introduce a product mechanic that can, gives you the control of who can respond to your tweet publicly. So that's just one example of, I think, we've been under-investing in how product mechanic changes, and in particular incentive changes, can then alter the ecosystem of how people interact on the platform.

• 26:10Nilay Patel?

  So where does that policy team sit with you in that kind of decision matrix? I mean, to me, the most interesting thing about every sort of person in your kind of position I talk to is, where do we locate trust and safety in policy, right? Like, if the product and the policy are influencing each other so directly, is that one integrated team? Is it, you know, we're giving presentations to each other every week? Like, how does that actually work for you?

• 26:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, you know, it's something that we talk about a lot. And I think the company's gone through its own evolution of how, both in terms of structure and decision-making and priority. Like, there were times where we just didn't prioritize any of this stuff from a product standpoint. So I think the way I think about it now is something like, I mean, this is true for everything, but in particular, health takes a village. It takes the policy team. It takes our, sort of, we call the Twitter Services team, which does a lot of our, which does all of our enforcement. It takes the product engineering, design, resources, public policy team. At the end of the day, like, I personally feel accountable for the product experience. And so we have to make decisions that are the right fusion of, you know, policy and enforcement, but also like the scaffolding of how the product experience gets used.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  And those are highly collaborative conversations. That in particular are complex when it comes to creating new product vectors. And when it comes to, you know, the more, the less new they are, you can kind of decompose them very clearly. Like if we have a, if we have a policy right now, like the enforcement, there's a, you know, the enforcement of that policy is relatively less complex than, hey, we're trying to build this whole new surface area that actually has a different thesis around how we want people to use it. And like, what should the net new policy for this, this feature or this interaction be? And how would we enforce that? And those are, as we, in particular, as we, as we evolve the product in new ways that I think are fundamentally different than how Twitter's worked in the past, like those will be equally complex.

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• 29:35Speaker 04

  Let's talk about another kind of nexus of product and policy, which is verification. So I was thinking about y'all last week when YouTube really stuck their foot in it over verification. If you don't remember, they announced that they were going to take away checks from various people and that also they'd been just verifying anyone who had more than 100,000 followers. And they've since sort of recanted all about that. You know, verification might seem like a niche issue, but to me, it kind of goes to the heart of can I trust that I'm talking to the people that I think I am on this platform? And you know, if I can trust that, I might use it more and I might have a better experience. So would love to get an update from you on verification.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  You guys have officially paused this program, but you do continue to verify some people. And we'd just kind of love to hear what the heck is going on there.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  Yep. So I'm happy to start with maybe revisiting why we paused and then how we're thinking about it now and like on the spectrum of paused to launched, where is it now? So we paused verification for a couple of reasons. One, we just did not have a rigorous or consistent enough set of criteria that we felt like matched our intent behind the verification feature. We were sort of conflating the notion of authenticating whether someone is who they say they are with the notion of whether they are like a public figure. And those are actually quite distinct things that you would validate in different ways.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  That and you know, we did not have a sufficiently transparent and self-service process by which people could apply. And on top of all that, it just was, as much as I agree with you, it's, it's, it is a critical feature, actually. And it's a very, very powerful incentive, actually, that exists in the product experience. One of the only account level incentives that we offer, other than the follower account, which is also very powerful. All that being said, it just was not our most important problem. And you know, we decided to put it on pause, as messy as that is. The, and what we mean by that is like doing the work to fix everything that I said, we decided was not a top priority, in particular relative to all the more important problems we had within. Health that we can talk about if you're interested.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  So that's why we paused it and, and you know, we did. We did say, you know, when we made the pause decision that we will continue to. As unideal as it is, we will continue to make sort of Twitter centric, like behind the scenes verification decisions when we think it's in the public interest to do so. Again, that's not ideal because there's no rigor around the criteria or process and blah, blah, blah, blah. But that is the state that we entered when we made that decision. So fast forward now, what's different is that we do, I was talking about how DMs were on maintenance mode and we've, we made it a priority. We similarly have decided that building a strategy around identity is, needs to be a priority. For all the reasons you just said, it's actually like a pretty critical way of understanding the credibility of who you're talking to.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  And by the way, verification to me is one of the things that we feel is important as part of the strategy is really teasing apart what we mean by verification. Because there's actually, we believe that we should be exploding into more decomposed features, what the notion of verification actually means. Like you can actually decompose identity into lots of different things, like validating whether someone is a human or a bot. Or validating whether someone is who they say they are from like a real name standpoint. Or validating whether someone is a public figure is another form of that. And I think we've, we just had this very coarse feature with the blue tick that kind of meant a lot of things to a lot of people. And two, the criteria around it wasn't, wasn't particularly clear to folks, nor was there a self-service process.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  So we're now building a strategy that allows us to, we think, solve those problems in the right order. And so this isn't something that internally we consider paused anymore. It's going to, you know, take some time for us to actually manifest the work into something that people will be able to see. But that's different than like a year and a half ago, my response would have been similar to your question about the edit button, which is like, cool. It's a problem we could solve. It's not anywhere near the most important problem. So we're not solving.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  Wait, did you preempt the edit button question already?

• 33:37Speaker 03

  I find with Casey, I have to. I actually preempted some of my tweets about product launches with the editing, because at this point it's such a reliable meme. That, you know, the first comment's going to be, yeah, but edit button. So I just figured I know my audience.

• 33:50Speaker 04

  Well, look, I'm very excited because once you start working on verification, that will mean that your last remaining problem to solve is the edit button. And then maybe that can also come out of pause.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  Look, you think that's the last remaining problem, I think is.

• 34:02Nilay Patel?

  This is why Casey is not in charge of product at Twitter.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's very true.

• 34:05Nilay Patel?

  I will say it's a feature you should have. Wait, I want to focus on verification for one second. Casey brought up YouTube. I think YouTube had a botched rollout, botched communication. They did have a relatively good core idea, right? Which is, we're going to have different kinds of badges for different people, right? So if you're an actor, you get the verified actor badge, or whatever it is that they were going to do. At the end of this all, are you still just delivering blue checkmarks, but through different routes? Or are you going to show different kinds of things? Do I get a different verified badge that says, I am, this is actually Neil Patel versus, I don't know, Darth? Like, this is the real Darth?

• 34:43Speaker 03

  I think there's a couple of dimensions that are interesting. So one, in terms of what the product experience would want to do, like, and what the customer wants. Like, what exactly are you verifying? I think is one question. And to me, there are lots of potential dimensions, like, are you verifying humanness? Are you verifying, which, what I mean by that is, like, someone as an individual, validating that someone is an individual versus a bot versus a business? Like, that is a dimension of verification that you could choose to implement in a product. Validating credibility is another dimension. And how you do that, I could imagine lots of different solutions to. It seems like the approach YouTube was trying to take was kind of around credibility as denoted by some, like, category that YouTube decides exists.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  I think that that's, that's not an inherently flawed idea. I think maybe the way they implemented it didn't go over super well. And I actually don't, I didn't really, like, grok the specifics of how their solution worked. But I think that the notion of validating someone's credibility on a certain topic is actually pretty interesting, especially in the context of Twitter where, you know, Casey Newton might be the journalist that you know from The Verge, but actually, he's got like a quantifiable, perhaps, level of credibility around WWE that if he's like jumping in-

• 35:56Speaker 04

  It's true, by the way, yeah.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  Sorry?

• 35:57Speaker 04

  It's true, by the way, yeah.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  Well, you would think, at least. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  But I think that's an interesting notion where, given how people talk on Twitter, you know, one of the challenges, I think, is that people kind of like boxed in into the follow graph that they- They have, like, one of the, one of the things that we hear often from, from customers is, I feel like I have a lot of followers who follow me for a certain dimension. But, you know, like, I remember having this conversation with MG Siegler, I hope, I hope he doesn't mind, but he was one of our investors back in the day, and he was talking to me about Twitter, and he's like, I'm followed by the VC community, but whenever the Michigan game, game happens, I want, all I want to do is tweet about the Michigan game, but like, all of my, like, investor community and Silicon Valley community friends are like, ugh, I want to mute MG.

• 36:40Speaker 04

  That's me during every WWE pay-per-view, by the way, which is why I recently created an alt account, but go on.

• 36:45Speaker 03

  Well, exactly, and I think this, this circumstance that we're talking about here actually crosscuts a lot of interesting parts of the potential product experience that we're excited about, be it giving people a place, a, a space and control around having conversations with people who have shared interests, that's one of them. Two, how do you even find the people who have the same shared interests as you? Like, that's kind of one of the superpowers of Twitter is helping you stay informed about the things and talk about the things you're interested in, but it's actually quite challenging and indirect to do. The entire service is predicated around following accounts. And following accounts is very powerful, but very distinct than following an, an interest.

• 37:21Speaker 03

  Like, if you care about the WWE, you have to know the people who are experts, who have credibility in that, in that topic or in that sphere, and that's a lot of work. It's not as simple as following the WWE account, i.e., Casey might have some good thoughts, maybe. And so that's, I think, identity plays into that. We have an initiative we're calling "Interest" that is a huge, I think, will be fundamental change to how we all use the Twitter experience that you're starting to see the beginnings of with what we're launching. Like, we, we had, one of my favorite launches recently is we elevated lists, right? Like, you can swipe between your lists. To me, that's like scratching the surface of our work to give you more control around

• 38:06Speaker 03

  kind of diving into what's happening in a specific interest sphere that you have. And today, those interest spheres are a collection of specific accounts in a list, because lists existed as a product primitive, but you can imagine forming more sophisticated spheres that are collections of people, collections of interests, where Twitter then does the work to find the people who are most relevant, and only show you their tweets if it's about that interest, rather than like, every fucking thing that Casey can says. And I'll swear.

• 38:34Speaker 04

  Oh, I guess. I mean, I never would, but you can.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  I don't believe you. Anyway, so I think, I realize it's sort of, it touched on identity and then some other stuff, but I really do view identity as a cohesive layer that we have to think about in the context of the whole cohesive application.

• 38:49Speaker 04

  I love that you guys are focusing on this, and I hope you find various ways to elevate and display that stuff. I've always thought that verification features should be open to way more than just like the journalists and the politicians and the public figures. If somebody is on Twitter and they have verified their real name and their phone number, like, I want to know that, right? It's very helpful to know, you know, when you're dealing with a Russian bot versus an American, right? For all kinds of reasons. So I think verification and all of the kind of maybe subclasses that you described is just like such a great way for y'all to start thinking about it.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, and there's some explicit signals of credibility that, you know, customers would opt into, and there are some implicit ones that we've already built into the product experience, right? Like, it's no coincidence that when you look at your tweet, we now show you what client you tweeted from. It's no coincidence now that when you look at your profile, we show you automatically, like, when that person joined Twitter. And these are all sort of implicit signals of credibility. I think where we haven't done as much work is on the explicit signals, and I think that's a really interesting, there's a lot of interesting potential there.

• 39:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. Let's do a little bit of a curveball. How does Twitter think about ephemeral content? And will I ever see Twitter stories?

• 40:03Speaker 03

  That's your curveball?

• 40:04Speaker 04

  I mean, not like a crazy, like, you know...

• 40:07Nilay Patel?

  Well, you preempted the edit button, man. That was, that's like the last one. He's got like the ultimate curveball in the hopper. You've talked so much about policy and trust. What about the edit button? That's how you...

• 40:18Speaker 03

  I would go back to, you know, we were talking about that spectrum, right? On one hand, you've got private, on the other hand, you've got public. Today, really, the two form factors we support are tweets as a mode of conversation and DMs is another mode, and arguably, maybe somewhere in the middle, you've got protected accounts, which is kind of like sits in there. To your question of ephemerality, I view that as another dimension that is really important for some customers, for some specific set of circumstances where you want to talk to people, but you're not quite sure you want it to last forever yet. And so I think as a dimension to focus on as a specific customer problem, like absolutely, I'm very interested

• 41:00Speaker 03

  in exploring how we might give customers more control. Where ephemerality is just one of those dimensions. I think there are other dimensions that, you know, while we can get excited and talk about it from morality, because there's lots of other kind of standards of how other apps do this, I think other dimensions like control around who can see or control around who can participate is really critical. You know, we talked about my example of you tweeting something and, you know, in fact, actually, the Kara Jack conversation is a perfect example of this, right? Like Kara and Jack were trying to have a conversation in public, but they were-

• 41:33Speaker 04

  This is real quick. This is a sort of thing that happened on Twitter. Kara Swisher, our good friend and colleague, talked with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and they had a sort of extended back and forth on Twitter this year.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I believe that the intent behind that conversation was to have a fireside chat where the two of them were on stage and the world could watch. But it was actually quite difficult for them to do that for a number of reasons. One, like the mechanics of the conversation and following it were really challenging, and a lot of that we're addressing with our work in the Little T app, the public beta that you've hopefully seen. But I think another one of the issues was it's actually quite difficult to have a fireside chat when you have like a billion people screaming in your ear. Like imagine we had like tens of thousands of people in the studio with us right now talking into our ear while we were talking to each other.

• 42:15Speaker 04

  No, thank you.

• 42:16Speaker 03

  And so I think that's another dimension of how our conversations features work or don't work today that's really important to us. That and ephemerality, I believe, is up there as well. So you will see us, you should expect to see from us various product features, because there's no silver bullet for all of these things, but you should expect to see various product features that try and nail different intersections of the spectrum.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  I'll tell you, my request is, I would love to set all my tweets to just go private after a year, basically. And the reason is just that cultural standards change enough that I either have to delete all of the tweets on a regular basis, or I could just like set them private, right? Because we've now seen bad actors sort of digging into people's old tweets, taking them out of context, and like wreaking all kinds of havoc. So I would just love a way to never have to think about that again, basically.

• 43:06Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I pay some, I pay other companies to delete my tweets for me. I'll just pay you. I mean, it's, in terms of-

• 43:13Speaker 04

  What service do you use for that?

• 43:16Nilay Patel?

  Tweet deleter dot Russian hackers dot biz. Like, it's like, it's not, I don't love it.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  They're all super shady looking, yeah.

• 43:23Nilay Patel?

  Like, I really, truly do not love that this company has, like-

• 43:27Speaker 04

  Your Twitter login, yeah.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  That is actually kind of shocking to me. It's clear that you care so much that you're willing to-

• 43:33Speaker 04

  I mean, journalists' careers end because someone digs up an old tweet, you know? It's like, it really is a very existential, I realize we're like in pretty niche territory, but-

• 43:42Speaker 03

  No, no, we're actually not, though. Like, fear of, fear of speaking in public, and fear of retaliation, or fear of being harassed. And harassment, harassment means many different things to many people. Or fear of being held accountable for something that is like not what you meant. Like, these are some of the biggest reasons why people don't tweet. Which is why, like, we actually take this very seriously. And there are many different product solutions. I mean, auto deleting tweets is something that we could do. We have, we have thoughts on other things that we could do as well. But like, the point is, like, this problem, we're hyper-conscious of. And if we believe that getting, getting people to feel comfortable talking in public is critical,

• 44:22Speaker 03

  and that there need to be bridges to that, that mechanic, because, you know, talking in public is, is pretty terrifying for most people. So yeah, we're super interested in, in coming up with multiple solutions to solve it.

• 44:33Nilay Patel?

  Do you think about, like, literally auto deleting tweets as part of ephemerality? Or do you think that's a different kind of product?

• 44:39Speaker 03

  No, I do think it's a form of ephemerality for sure. I would say it's a, don't take this the wrong way. I think it's a less interesting solution to the same problem. But it's absolutely a form of ephemerality. But we are interested in exploring a couple other solutions that have the same potential effect of you not having to worry about what you say lasting forever, but giving you some of the other control that I think is missing. Because I don't think the ephemerality alone solves the most important problem. But we may, you know, we may realize that we should still, we should still offer that. But, so I'm not dismissing it. I just think that we've got some, we've got some other ideas around how we might solve it in interesting ways.

• 45:18Nilay Patel?

  This is a curve, it's not really a curve. It's thematically connected. But I was just thinking about how a lot of people I know experience Twitter and like things people personally experience. And I think I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about harassment. Like Twitter as a service is a primary vector of harassment and abuse for a lot of people. Something I have experienced waves of, something in particular, like the young women on like the Verge staff experienced quite a bit. How are you thinking about fixing, like fixing the product elements that enable harassment in that way?

• 45:47Speaker 03

  Good question. So first of all, everything you just described is why health has been our number one priority for the last three years. Health, I think, really distills down into a few different things. Conversational health, where abuse and harassment are kind of central focus areas of, is obviously one bit of that. And then sort of information integrity is another piece of that. Like if, as a company that believes that our purpose is serving public conversation, if that conversation isn't healthy, if you can't trust the integrity of the information on it, then what is the point of the whole thing? Like the whole thing is existentially at risk if we can't ensure those two things. So that's the basis for why health has been our, our top priority for the last few years. In particular, conversational health is critical because the fuel that helps people stay informed

• 46:32Speaker 03

  on Twitter is atoms of content that were tweeted by real people. And if we, if we are not able to serve the needs of those people, whether it's the tools they need to, to talk, or whether it's the risk mitigation to ensure that they're protected and not being abused or harassed. Then we can't expect them to feel comfortable talking in the first place, which jeopardizes the whole purpose of the platform. So that is why we've prioritized it. The way I think about it to your question is, we have to do a mix of things. There's no silver bullet, but we have to clarify our rules, make sure we have the right rules. We have to enforce our rules the right way. We have to make sure that we're proactively enforcing those rules.

• 47:13Speaker 03

  Because a lot of the problem right now is customers have to face the burden of experiencing and then reporting the abuse, which is, even if we have the best reporting flows, it's almost too late at that point. And so, one of our biggest initiatives this year in 2019 is something that we call proactive health. Literally, our goal is how do we enforce our rules before our customers have to enforce them themselves through reporting? And so, I think by January of last year, about like 15% of our Terms of Service violations that we actioned were done proactively. At this point now, it's about 50%. So we've made a huge amount of progress, actually, just enforcing our rules more proactively so that you don't have to report it, or even see it in the first place.

• 47:56Speaker 03

  So that's one way that we think about it and one set of things that we do. And then, the other is actually building more product mechanics that give you control around having a healthier experience, so that you don't rely on the rules and Twitter's enforcement of those rules in the first place. So one example of something that we've launched recently, that again is scratching the surface, but it's an example of what you can expect to see more of, is we launched a feature that we call Author Moderated Replies, where you can hide, globally, a reply to your tweet, such that no one else can see it in the conversation thread. And that's the first time we've ever given anyone the power to make a moderation decision that affects what other people see. Obviously, you've been able to block or mute people, but those are sort of local decisions.

• 48:39Speaker 03

  And we think this is important, because we want to change the balance of power between the various actors in the conversation. You've got a few different actors. You've got the original tweeter, you've got the repliers who are participating, and then you've got the audience, like everyone else. And the balance of power has been totally off-kilter in the past. Like, people replying have had too much power in abusing or harassing, which again, like, everyone has different interpretations of what that means to them. And we want to change that. And one way we're changing that is Author Moderated Replies, where you can... You can hide something. I would eventually love, like, we, our plan is to open APIs around this. You can imagine developer tools that allow you to create super customizable actions

• 49:20Speaker 03

  around what you want automatically hidden in your replies, so that we, we shouldn't have to build all of these first-party features. Like, we should build core ones, like you being able to hide a reply, and you might, kind of like, in Automator, you can create super complex actions around automating things. Like, you ought to be able to create rule sets that you can share with other, other people. So, that's an area, a lot of the conversation we were just having around ephemerality, in terms of giving people control around who can participate, they're in service to the same goal. If we give you more control around how conversations unfold, that is one other thing that will help you feel like you can have healthy, controlled conversations about topics that are interesting or sensitive, whereas, you know, some people don't feel comfortable having certain types of conversations

• 50:02Speaker 03

  right now, because they're entirely dependent on us enforcing a global set of rules that spans cultures, geographies, time zones, and like, that's just inherently not scalable.

• 50:11Nilay Patel?

  Do you think you have to shrink that? I mean, that, that's something, I think Casey writes about in the interface all the time, and we talk about, like, maybe internet scale is not the right scale for the world. Like, you need to create smaller communities, more proactively. Is that something, you know, you're talking about lists and maybe interest groups, but just around people and individuals and audiences. Is that something you want to do more proactively, or let people do themselves?

• 50:31Speaker 03

  I mean, the, the way I would articulate it is, the way we think about it is, we want to invest more in decentralizing moderation capabilities. Right now, it's entirely centralized. And I think in order to pursue a concept like that, we have to think about other product mechanics where that sort of decentralization makes sense. Because one of the beautiful things about Twitter is that it's extremely fluid, right? There is no clear space. Like, everything exists in the Twitter sphere, and it's a very powerful, but fluid thing about the platform. And so, it's one of the, one of the really interesting problems that we're looking to solve, you know, moving forward, we've been talking about a lot recently,

• 51:13Speaker 03

  is, is how we can, how we can decentralize more. And so, yes, is the short answer to your question. But I think this is, this is why we have So much fascinating work in front of us and like so many problems that we have to focus on, but we're deliberately trying to be, and hopefully you all see this with the work that we're doing, we're trying to be a lot more ambitious about what problems we sign ourselves up to solve. And we're trying to be a lot more ambitious about the speed at which we're solving them. And, you know, believe me, I'm sure people are still frustrated with the pace that we're moving, but like we have, we're trying to deliberately increase that pace and, and really solve some of these, these hardy problems.

• 51:50Nilay Patel?

  The truest curve ball of them all. Apple is putting out Catalyst, which is their framework to bring iOS apps to the Mac. Twitter onstage demoed as one of the highest-profile Catalyst apps. We haven't heard a lot about it from developers. Are you involved in that app? Do you think that framework's gonna work? Do you think that iPad apps on the Mac are the future? Is that something you're excited to be a part of?

• 52:08Speaker 03

  What I'm really excited about is that Apple is making it a lot easier to actually port iOS, specifically iPad apps, onto the Mac. And I think, you know, we had to make a tough decision a couple of years ago, a few years ago, to deprecate our Mac presence because the cost of maintaining yet another client was just too high. And we couldn't, we couldn't keep up to pace with, you know, the features that we had on our other clients. And so, you know, we just had to focus. So what I'm excited about with the Catalyst stuff is that that, that equation is a lot different now and that the ease at which developers can, you know, bring their iPad apps to life on the Mac is, is a lot easier, relatively speaking, in a way that can ensure that as we do product development on iOS, that it's,

• 52:51Speaker 03

  you know, it's coming to the Mac at a far lower cost. And so, yeah, I'm, I'm very excited about it. I've, I've been involved. I'm, you know, I see the builds and, you know, we, we're waiting for Catalina to launch, obviously, and we're excited to bring it, bring it to customers.

• 53:05Nilay Patel?

  Are you spending cycles being like, we gotta make this as Mac-like as possible? Do you have those kinds of events? I mean, that's like one of the big questions, right? Are these just gonna be sort of bad iPad apps sitting on top? I mean, Apple's own Catalyst apps are like, not great. Are you trying to perfect it and make it feel very native?

• 53:20Speaker 03

  We definitely, we, like, one of the lenses through which we're looking at the, the product experience is like, what are the core aspects of this feeling like a desktop app that we should make sure we? We build into the experience that aren't as in the forefront when you think of it in the iOS context. For example, like drag and drop. Drag and drop is a pretty critical, fluid, sort of aspect of the experience that I feel like has to work right in the Mac app context. And so, yeah, we definitely like, we look through that filter as we think about the product experience and, you know, especially in the context of like, what do we put in the V1? We may not get everything right in the V1, but like, we are not, I don't think we would go through the effort if we just wanted to have like a lazy port of something that feels out of place. So that's, we definitely want to make sure it's, it feels great, like anything else we launch.

• 54:05Speaker 04

  All right. Last question, bringing it full circle. You are a video person. What is the future of video?

• 54:11Speaker 03

  Is that my brand?

• 54:12Speaker 04

  Yep, that's how you're known and always will be. No, I'm just kidding.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  What type of person are you?

• 54:16Speaker 04

  A tall one. So, you're a video person, among other things, and what is the future of video on Twitter? And should it look like TikTok?

• 54:25Speaker 03

  It's a loaded question.

• 54:27Speaker 04

  No, it's an open question. I don't have feelings.

• 54:29Speaker 03

  What does it looking like TikTok mean to you? What do you think of when you say that?

• 54:32Speaker 04

  Well, Twitter once owned Vine where people sort of made wonderfully creative entertainment in looping six-second, you know, videos. And then that went away. And then another company came along and made new looping videos. And people are now doing very entertaining things. And it's like very popular, at least for the moment. So I just wonder if you think that is part of video on Twitter or if you think Twitter on, or video on Twitter will look totally different?

• 54:53Speaker 03

  So, and the reason I ask the question is because I feel like there's two different aspects to what you're saying. Like, what does video on Twitter look like as different than like, what creation tools should we be creating? Because like, you see a lot of TikToks on Twitter. The main way I find great TikToks is actually on Twitter. And they render, they render, you know, quite fine on Twitter. What we don't provide and what we haven't invested, you know, anywhere near the same amount of time and effort in is, I think a lot of the basis of what companies like TikTok do is build the tools that help creators make those, that interesting content, which is somewhat distinct from distribution and discovery. You know, I think that the way we think about it is like, we, we have to prioritize a core set of jobs that we believe customers hire us for.

• 55:35Speaker 03

  Creating super compelling, short-form video content is not a main job that we get hired for. People do it still. Like, there's lots of things that we, that aren't in our focus that people end up using Twitter for, like it's a big product. But I don't think this is an area where we're extremely differentiated. And so it's not like a top priority for us. But I do think that the ecosystem is obviously super fascinating. And I've personally spent a lot of time thinking about how you can give people tools to create compelling video content because that's kind of what my startup did too. You are a video person. But yeah, I think we need to make sure that we're prioritizing the things that are core to why people hire Twitter every day and make those things better before we try

• 56:18Speaker 03

  and do the ancillary stuff that we're less differentiated in and I think is less important for our purpose.

• 56:24Nilay Patel?

  All right, Kayvon Bagpour, thank you so much for joining the Vergecast. Really, really enjoyed it.

• 56:28Speaker 03

  Thank you guys, and specifically, thank you for staying for the entirety of our conversation.

• 56:32Nilay Patel?

  All right, my thanks to Kayvon Bagpour, head of product Twitter. Also, thanks to Casey for joining me. That was really fun. We've got to do that again. We'll be back on Friday with a chat show, back on Tuesday with an interview show, on and on it goes. Hit me up, let me know who you want me to interview. These suggestions have been very helpful. I'm at Reckless on Twitter. I also just love hearing your feedback on the show. Tell us how to get better. It is tremendously useful. And it's also just great to hear from you. So hit me up, at Reckless on Twitter. We'll be back on Friday with the chat show.

• 57:00Speaker 11

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