Twitter: @jack Resigns as CEO, Spaces are a Dumpster Fire
A new CEO at Twitter, serious questions about Spaces
The Update:
@jack has resigned from Twitter. It’s a strange moment. Historic, desired, and anticipated but now that is upon us it feels anticlimactic. The resignation has been sometime coming. Firstly, the deal that Silverlake and Elliot struck with Twitter earlier last year was made under the tacit understanding that Dorsey would go. The series events that lead to that particular episode of shareholder activism wasn’t inevitable. It was the triple consequence of absentee management, lacklustre product development, poor business performance, and eventually poor stock performance. With that said, there has been tremendous strides made in product and operations at the company since 2019, and the current management team should be congratulated for that, even if they should chastised for the 5 years before that.
The reaction in the price action of the stock tells the story. Initial elation, a trading halt, with stock ending the day down. The most compelling interpretation of this in my mind is:
Excitement that a full-time CEO would be announced,
That excitement abates as the market digests that the appointee would come from within Twitter,
Ultimately, acceptance that many of the questions left for Twitter to answer about it’s business model are still yet to be answered.
Parag Agrawal, former Twitter CTO, is that appointee. The fact that Dorsey’s replacement is from product, and not finance is significant - and positive for the future of the platform. Agrawal joins a growing list of Indian CEOs leading some of America’s largest tech companies.
Dorsey’s internal email announcing his departure, and the ascension of Agrawal was shared on Twitter (it was quite touching):
Parag has been behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around.
This is high praise. The bar is set high, and it will be extremely fascinating to get a better read on @paraga in the coming quarters.
Spaces
One of Twitter’s most successful products of the last 12 months has been Spaces. Spaces has been a success in my mind not least because it was copied directly from a potential competitor. Furthermore, the execution was swift enough that they have effectively capture quite a bit of this social audio segment. Most great technology platforms have copying deep in their DNA - almost all of Microsoft’s products are a rip off and Facebook was initially copied from a concept called Harvard Connect.
My gripe with Spaces is that, for a lack of a better word, it is an absolute dumpster fire of extremely controversial content. The initial roll out of the product was carefully controlled: content creators and curators were carefully selected to host them. This had the double effect of making sure that a Space could reach critical mass, but also that the subject matter discussed was genuinely compelling. I separate this from ‘engaging’ content that hijacks the human mind’s reward centre: extreme politics, hatred, pornography, and violence.
Most poor social products degenerate to this kind of content. Aside from the legal complications that proliferating such content engenders, the effect is generally that commercial opportunities (especially in advertising) are heavily curtailed. Coca Cola doesn’t want anyone associating their brand with racial hatred. It’s a negative downward spiral. Until this point, Twitter has been able to decentralise its sequestration of the platform. Pornographers and sex workers could use the platform to advertise their wares because you would only find that content if you went looking for it. Their ability, if not their desire, to moderate content is constrained by their scale. They simply don’t have the resources to do it effectively. This hands off approach to policing the platform was momentarily suspended for the ‘existential threat’ that was Donald Trump - but I digress.
Spaces, in its current form, poses serious questions. Extremism of all kinds pervades the open Spaces at any given time. Idle conversation, or speculation about the future prospects of Dogecoin is one thing. These are another:
It is not a stretch to state that Twitter is now a major platform for racists, sexists, extreme right and left wing radicals, and conspiracy theorists. Furthermore, Twitter is helping them to reach a more engaged audience than ever before. To be clear, I am not against free speech. Society is, however, demanding more and more responsibility from its large online platforms. Twitter now openly hosts the exact type of extremist that Facebook has been crucified for allowing on their platform in the not-so-distant past.
Unlike the rest of Twitter’s user generated content, Spaces have their own home on the app. At the top of the feed you will see Spaces where your follows are participating. From there you will generally be confronted with the most popular Spaces which, surprise-surprise, are those that are hosting some of the most controversial content. The search function is pretty weak, and there’s no easy way to sequester a Space on, for example, how to be a successful OnlyFans content creator, from vanilla conversation.
I am not advocating for puritan morality, or even extreme political correctness, it is simply a poor user experience, and degrading to the platform as whole, to have extreme content be readily accessible to users. This is doubly true for new and casual users. If your first experience of Reddit was r/realpublicfreakouts you’re probably not coming back.
The difficult question is: what do you do about this? Many of these Spaces are wildly popular. Thousands of people were listening to the why you can’t trust women pt 2 Space. It is extremely hard to tell if the participants are trolling and LARPing, or if the listeners are interested or mildly bored with nothing better to do. The degree to which participants and listeners are sincere or even engaged begs yet another question: how long until a serious episode of cyberbullying, radicalisation, or incitement to violence takes place? In my mind, it only a question of when, if it hasn’t happened already.
The current format in which Twitter presents Spaces leaves it quite exposed. It isn’t doing much to make radical content hard to access, and that can easily be interpreted at abetting in this climate. I hope this is something that they are looking at closely.