Thoughts

1. Jack Dorsey is stepping down as CEO of Twitter. Wow. Whichever origin story you’ve heard, he had a huge part of its beginnings, as well as (obviously) its current direction.
2. Under Jack, Twitter has consistently added crypto functionality and strategies, from Bitcoin tipping to Project Bluesky, and a new team led by Tess Rinearson. I wonder if that will persist, or if his interest in the space will be limited to Square (where he’s still CEO).
3. I hold a modest amount of Twitter stock - purchased in the open market - and the news made the value jump. I wonder how that feels for Jack as a person.
4. I think decentralization (but not cryptocurrencies) holds the future for Twitter. If it can be the place both facilitating and surfacing conversations on the web, that’s Google-level powerful. I’m not sure being a social network in itself is quite as valuable, both in the social and financial senses.
5. I continue to appreciate how the discourse around decentralization has changed as a result of the rise of crypto. It’s important to understand that they’re not the same thing: crypto is a subset of decentralization. (Also, not all cryptocurrencies are truly decentralized.) Conflating the two is a problem. Whatever you think about crypto, it’s a technical and organizational approach, not a catch-all tool that can fix everything.
6. Regardless of what happens to it next, Twitter is my favorite social network. I have interesting conversations there; I’ve met new people at a scale I haven’t met elsewhere; I have a lot of exposure to new ideas. There’s a lot of vitriol, too, but I’ve found it easier to filter out over time.
7. That doesn’t mean that controlling the vitriol on the platform generally isn’t important - and it could even be the most important thing for the future of the company, given the effect community health has had on growth.
8. How does controlling for community health work in a decentralized environment? It’s a much harder problem, but still one that affects Twitter’s bottom line, regardless of its underlying architecture. Legally it may have different requirements depending on that architecture, but the user experience requirements are always a vital part of the growth of any ecosystem.
9. If Twitter is doubling down on decentralization, this makes providing community health tools in the decentralization space one of the most valuable problems to solve right now.
10. If Twitter isn’t going to continue moving in this direction, I'm not sure where it’s going to go.

Actions

1. After some travel and some extended time on the east coast, I’m hunkering down and thinking about the future. There’s a lot on the table. Somehow it’s now only a few weeks to Christmas (and zero days to Hanukkah), which makes planning for 2022 imperative.
2. I’ve really got to get back on the health train. My loss this summer is no longer an excuse, and my mother would not want me to be unhealthy on her account.