Suggestions For Improving Twitter

An Open Letter to Elon Musk

Here are some suggestions for someone who’s been thinking of ways to improve online conversation for years. If you like these suggestions, I’m on the job market, so check out my resume and send me a message.

Let users reply with ‘agreement’ or ‘disagreement’ specified

Simply adding this one feature would dramatically improve twitter as a tool for functional conversation.

Users could now see the highest upvoted arguments for and and against an initial tweet.

When users specify ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’, we could also easily get measurements of things like groupthink. Independent thinkers who reason on their own are the only people who add value to a discussion. If two posters have identical ‘agree/disagree’ histories, then both of them responding to a post means nothing different than if only one of them responds.

Twitter could become a place where we could measure, empirically, who is actually thinking for themselves, and who is just Supporting the Current Thing of whatever their tribe is.

Let people pay whatever they want for their twitter verification badge

Sure, have a minimum price. But give people the option to pay much more, and put their recurring and total contributions on their profile.

Users can then decide who they want to listen to. If you’re willing to pay $500 a month to support the service, I’m much more willing to listen to you than if you have millions of followers and you’re not willing to pay at all.

This is how taxes could work in a totally free state: people could gain social status by directly supporting the operational load of the collective.

Those of us who care deeply about intelligent real-time conversation should have some mechanism of finding and listening to each other while tuning out the rabble.

People who don’t have the ability to spend all day on the internet posting hot takes should have some mechanism, other than follower count, for showing they are worth taking seriously. Let people pay whatever they want for the ability to prove to others in the conversation that they are paying significant amounts to support the conversation. Let people pay to demonstrate credibility.

Someone paying $1,000 a month to prove they value good conversation is someone I’m much more willing to take seriously than a professional tweeter who’s paid by an advertising business to spread propaganda.

Not every intelligent, thoughtful person has the time and energy to build a large internet following. Lots of intelligent people are mostly busy living their own lives, doing things, and these are the people whose opinions are drowned out by a chorus of professional talkers and internet addicts.

Make it easier for busy professionals with opinions and thoughts to share to find each other, and twitter makes more money, while the network grows richer and more alive with different perspectives.

Of course, not everyone sees it that way, which is totally fine. Let every user filter which accounts we want to follow and listen to based upon subscription dues, as well as anything else we care about. Speaking of filtering…

Redesign the feed around personalized content ranking and filtering.

Let users use whatever ranking and filtering algorithms they want.

Twitter can run these algorithms in house for a small fee, or users could run them on their local clients. Users could trade, mix and match, and combine ranking and filtering. Places with state censorship can be served by adding in the official state censorship list.

Let users share which ranking and filtering algorithms they use. Let me filter out users based upon their filtering strategies. If someone only consumes propaganda from one tribe, let me filter them out! If someone tries to deliberately consume perspectives they disagree with, let me hear what they have to say!

I stopped using twitter because I found the temptation to consume clickbait and dunking tweets far too difficult to resist. Let users supply the labels to the ranking algorithms, so people can get the tweets that actually help them grow and develop as a human being instead of whatever will drive advertising value.

Computers can help open up the golden age of liberalism, but that will only happen if individual people are able to put their personal values into machines, and have the machines help them communicate in ways that line up with their own values.

We are sliding into the politics that characterized much of Europe after the printing press, primarily because the ‘hidden establishment’ is losing its ability to control narratives. It is fighting back with censorship.

There’s no reversing that process; help us call the emperor naked and we can finally stop having emperors.

Think Far Bigger Than A Place for Real Time Conversation

There’s no reason twitter can’t be a place where any url can be discussed, any concept can be debated or explored. Why not have twitter be the place to follow the conversation between academics around some abstruse topic, both what is being said now, what has been said in the past? Let people quickly catch up on The Great Conversation as fast as possible by understanding tweet-length summaries of various philosophers.

Let people own and run their own private or semi public feeds, and let them compete to produce the best discussion fora. Democracy, capitalism, and science are all based, ultimately, on the belief that one single centralized authority loses to a rabblerous coompetition between a large number of attempts to get at the truth, taking risks, rising or falling, cooperating or competing based upon how accurately they reflect the true nature of empirical reality and its intersection with the human condition.

Let the straussians return to their tower and sneer with each other at the public, so long as they fund themselves. See how long sneering elites can broadcast contempt for the masses without an endless supply of cheap debt-money.

If the 20th century was characterized by the rule of a clueless class of blue-check elites controlling the credulous public by means of propagandizing corporations, let’s see what happens when we actually try freedom and democracy, powered by modern technology.