Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, suggests a future in which you can choose what you see on social media by choosing your favorite recommendation algorithm, rather than relying on a single company to get it exactly right.
In a conversation with investors today, Dorsey elaborated on his vision of how a decentralized social network can work – and why Twitter wants to create a network that is beyond the control of itself or any other company. Dorsey said Twitter would benefit from access to a much larger conversation from which relevant content could appear to users. “This is where we will be competitive,” he said.
Dorsey said Twitter is excited to build features that will give people more choice than they see. “You can imagine an app store-like representation of ranking algorithms that gives people the best flexibility in terms of” which posts are placed in front of them, “Dorsey said.
Twitter can both create its own ranking algorithms for people to choose from and provide a “marketplace” where people can choose different options. “It’s something that can not only accommodate us, but also that we can participate in,” he said. Giving people more choice would ‘not only help matters, but also get more people involved in social media in the first place,’ he said.
Dorsey also sees decentralization as a way to address ‘some issues’ around Article 230, the law that provides platform protection against user-created content. The law has recently been a popular target for some lawmakers, and a decentralized network can provide Twitter with a way to avoid problems if stricter rules need to be put in place, or rules need to be made more moderate or if Twitter takes a more neutral approach must apply what content appears.
Twitter has been working for more than a year on developing a decentralized social network. Dorsey announced the project, named Bluesky, in December 2019, but the company is only now trying to hire a project manager – so this is clearly a way to give up. TechCrunch published a deep dive last month on where the project is headed, and it describes Bluesky as ‘stuck in the research phase’.
Decentralized social networks already exist, although no one has achieved great success (remember Mastodon?). Twitter said the Bluesky team could choose to work with an existing decentralized system, or that they would eventually build a new one if the team thought it was the best approach.