Offline with Jon Favreau - A Twitter Founder on Elon, Trump, and the Edit Button

Episode Date: April 10, 2022

Jon is joined by Ev Williams, Co-Founder and former CEO of Twitter. The two discuss Twitter’s early years, including the design decisions behind some of the app’s most important features. They dive into the promise of Twitter and attempt to make sense of what’s changed. Ev also talks about Twitter’s newest board member and largest shareholder, Elon Musk, and if Donald Trump should be allowed back on.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

What was your reaction to Elon becoming not only a passive investor, but now a seemingly very active investor who's on the board? I think it's interesting. And I'm very impressed with what Elon has done in the world and his approach to PR and tweeting and everything else. He's fascinating. I'm, you know, I'm fascinated like anyone else. I appreciate what he's doing with Tesla. I have a Tesla. Hope to go to Mars someday. Is he good for Twitter? I don't know. It would make the board meetings more interesting. Who knows how Elon even has time to pay attention to Twitter and everything else. Is it a fascinating fancy? We'll see.

I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest today is Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter and its former chairman and CEO. Every week, I conclude this introduction with a call to action asking for your comments and complaints. And every week, we open the offline inbox and see a familiar message. John talks about Twitter too much. Absolutely right. No argument from me on that. But there are a few reasons I talk about Twitter so much.

A, I'm an addict. B, most people in media and politics, which is what I do for a living, are also addicts. And C, because most people in media and politics are on Twitter, the platform has an outsized influence on shaping our views and understanding of the world around us. And that's even true of people who don't use Twitter. So I think the platform is fairly central to the story of what's gone wrong with the Internet. Which is why there's no way I could pass up an opportunity to talk to one of its founders.

Someone who also told the New York Times back in 2017, I think the internet is broken. Ev was in the room when some of the earliest design decisions were made about Twitter. The character limit, the retweet, the follow function. And from 2008 to 2010, Twitter's most formative years, Ev served as the company's CEO. Before Twitter, he founded Blogger, which made publishing on the internet accessible to everyone. Today, he serves as CEO of Medium, a social publishing platform he started in 2013, where articles are much, much longer than 280 characters. We talked about Twitter's earliest days, why he pivoted to a platform for long-form writing,

and what he thinks about Twitter's evolution, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I also asked him about two men who have shaped Twitter more than any other, Elon Musk, who as of this week is Twitter's largest shareholder and newest board member, and of course, Donald Trump. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or complaints about how I talk too much about Twitter,

feel free to email us at offline at crooked.com. And of course, please rate, review, and share the show. Here's Ev Williams. Ev Williams, welcome to Offline. Thanks for having me. So, this is a show about all the ways the internet is breaking our brains. And just about every episode inevitably includes a discussion about Twitter. Thanks for having me. how we got to this point and where we might go from here, which I know you thought a lot about. And I guess my first question is, when you guys created Twitter, what was the dream? What were your greatest hopes for the platform? Gosh, I think in the early days of these things, you don't necessarily

construct a grand dream. It sort of unfolds over time. And so, you know, Twitter was very iterative. And whenever you create something that seems to be bigger than you initially planned, then your ideas for it expand. So at some point, we may have imagined, you know, world leaders and global politics playing out but we certainly didn't think that in the beginning beginning we thought this is a fun way to stay in touch with friends to to and we thought a lot in terms of it being an information network and we used the term real time a lot in the beginning, because that was what was unique about Twitter was it was really pre mobile, or at least pre pre smartphone. And the idea of getting a notification or a message about something happening right now was interesting.

And we thought there were social uses of that, that we observed just in our own use of like, oh, it's fun to hear what your friend's doing right now. That was novel and cool. And then there was utility. And we would talk about things like, oh, there's an earthquake, and we just felt the earthquake, or there's a fire, there's emergency. And so, and that seemed enough on its own. That seemed worth developing. I mean, no one, I think, could claim that they knew what it would evolve to. That's interesting.

It seems like the immediacy of Twitter was on your minds early on, which is interesting because, you know, it ends up becoming a place for news where every journalist in the world is on. So it does seem even from those early days, there was a thought that this could be used for news, even if you didn't think maybe like the professional media industry. to me when I was still running the company I remember probably the last big strategy presentation I gave to the company in 2010 was to define Twitter as a news platform and I think that people didn't fully buy it internally at the time like news news like You mean like the New York Times or like reporters? And I was defining our view. And later, I think Dick and other people took up this idea that Twitter really is a news platform. It's about things that are happening right now. It's about things that are new. It's about public announcements.

And it's also a social network, which we shied away from in the early days, even though it was a social network. But it was clear at that time, and that was 12 years ago, last time as CEO, to me then that it was news. It had evolved to be news. I saw that as its best purpose to be a broadcast service, really. Why did you guys want to differentiate ourselves from Facebook and you don't want to claim to be the thing that there's a giant 10 times your size already in that. You want to be different a little bit.

But also what interested me, and this has always been true of the internet, isn't necessarily the social aspect. To me, it was like social meant, oh, we're hanging out, we're having fun. It's, it's about connection, which is great. I'm all for connection. But especially at the time, I'm probably more interested in that now than I was then. At the time, I kind of saw that as like, well, that's, that's interesting to teenagers, but let's talk about, you know,

knowledge and information and ideas. That's really what we're trying to enable. And that goes back to the very early design and Twitter, I think, invented the word follow in the context of online systems. And meaning like, I can be interested in what you're saying whether or not i know you and you don't have to be interested in what i'm saying publish subscribe

model is is what other people have called that it existed obviously with with email and traditional media and blogs with rss uh but we we thought about that a lot in the very early days like we want to create a different sort of network here, a different sort of structure that enables more than just friends chatting amongst themselves. Can you talk about some of the early design decisions that went into that initial intent? Like what was the original purpose of retweets? Why did you include favorites, which then likes why 140 characters uh sure i mean they

they all have their story and and somewhat famously twitter evolved in response to to what people did with it um the 140 characters came from the idea very very early that it was it was a text message platform text messages in the early days and this is 2006 so text messages in the early days. This is 2006. So text messages in the U.S. were behind most of the rest of the world, at least Europe and Asia. And they were limited to 140 characters because of some obscure telecommunications hack. And Jack and other members of the team that said, hey, we could create, use this to do something on mobile, which was very hard at the time. Before smartphones, doing applications for mobile were hard to build.

There was no dominant platform. They didn't work very well. And so text messaging seemed like this clever hack to have something that was mobile and text messages were limited so that was the whole idea that was why it was 140 characters um you know the other things we kind of just figured out as we went there was actually a friend model in the very early version where you would um similar to well friendster was probably more a model or MySpace is our model. Facebook existed when we were creating Twitter, but we weren't on it because we were too old. We were in college.

We'd kind of heard about it. I was like, ah, that doesn't sound like a thing. We're doing serious work here with this Twitter. And so we had the friend model, but that was like, oh, that seems complicated. It's like you could friend and follow or something. We maybe had different words, friend, subscribe. This is very, very early. And then retweet came a few years later. It wasn't until I think 2009 that we actually built that into the product.

That was users had started retweeting. Replies were another thing that was a response to users. Now an app mentions hashtags. All these things people started doing. Then we created a native version of them. Was there a moment when you realized that Twitter had gone from a fun place to share random thoughts and information to basically an indispensable platform for media and politics? Again, it evolved. There was no one moment. There were things that happened very early on that made us go, whoa, what did we create here? I think one of the big ones was we got word that the protesters in Egypt were using the platform to communicate in real time. During the Arab Spring? Yeah, even prior to that, I believe. And there was a gentleman whose name I'm forgetting, but we talked about all the time.

He was from Berkeley and he had been in Egypt and actually got arrested at a protest and put in jail. And he tweeted and his followers maybe helped get him out. He came to the office and spoke and we're like, whoa, this is interesting. Although perhaps not totally surprising to some people on the team, some of the early engineers actually knew about how to program for SMS and had built systems

for activism. So there was some roots of that early on, but then things just kept happening. Every time something would happen in the world, it would happen on Twitter. And then new people would sign up. And just for a tiny startup that's trying to make something, there was a period where just mind-blowing things would happen.

Like the race to a million followers between CNN and Ashton Kutcher was very bizarre. And I was invited to go on Oprah, which was also bizarre. And on the TV the night before, I'm in the hotel room, and Anderson Cooper is telling people to go follow CNN on Twitter. Of course, this is 2009, April 2009, I think. Hardly anyone knows what Twitter is. But here I have this, you know, broadcasting, basically an ad for us because CNN wanted to beat Ashton to a million followers. And so those things, it was just like, you can't

make this stuff up. And then there's the Arab Spring and then, you know't make this stuff up and um and then there's the arab spring and then you know and on and on and on cnn and ashton kutcher competing to see who get a million followers first really seems like a foreshadowing to where we've all ended up doesn't it yeah i mean i i joined twitter in 2010 while i was in the white house and in those days the press office didn't want the rest of the staff tweeting so i I was just on it for news. I thought it was also pretty fun. I still thought it was fun by the time I was tweeting myself when I left the White House in 2013. Though even then, it was starting to feel a little snarkier and nastier by then. And we had gone through the reelect campaign and in 2012, it was like that a little bit as well. When did you notice that this

indispensable platform you helped build might be causing more harm than than you guys might have intended um what i thought you were gonna say is more harm than good no i wasn't gonna go there um obviously no but because i i felt this point too i like i love twitter at first and you know i mean i'm still on it right so that's tells you everything you need to know. But there was a moment where suddenly, and I don't remember exactly when it was, but I was just like, wow, this has gotten really nasty. The tone is different. It seems angrier, nastier, snarkier. And I'm just wondering your thoughts on that. When do you think that happened and why? Yeah, good question. I'm not sure if I have a good timeline for that. I know

there were complaints early on that we probably should have taken more seriously about harassment or abuse. We weren't totally laissez-faire. We thought deeply about these things. And I think some of the early members of the team, fortunately, we had had some experience with open platforms and undesirable behavior because some of the team workedas about whether it's political or abusive content or misinformation. And we were very thoughtful about these things, but it wasn't, we didn't anticipate, at least I didn't, that this was going to be a major, major thing

for the history of Twitter, just because of the nature of it, enabling very free form, very low friction communication also meant lots of negativity. And combine that with the state of media and the state of the world, I think it's part of an ecosystem where everyone's more divided, et cetera. Yeah, so I think that probably Trump 2016 was a turning point, as was Trump's removal from Twitter. I mean, then things just got intense, I think. Yeah, no, I do think the 2016 campaign is when it all kind of went to hell. But I mean, there's this long running debate about, you know, how much of this, and this is not just Twitter, but all platforms, how much of what goes on years is that technology doesn't just accelerate and amplify human behavior. It creates feedback loops that can fundamentally change the nature of how people interact and societies move in ways that probably none of us predicted.

In what ways do you think Twitter specifically has changed the way we interact? What are some of the feedback loops there? I think I remember writing that, by the way, that sounds pretty smart. So, um, better, better writing than talking. Uh, well, just just the fact that I think generally about media in general, there's a system on the internet where attention is rewarded period and that isn't that isn't necessarily true in real space or in the history of human evolution it was like attention um could be very negative sometimes you really don't want attention and and there's harm that will come from that if you get attention in the wrong way. And then we created this virtual world where there's the benefits of attention and little downside of attention. Now, that's not entirely true.

Anyone who's been the subject of a flame war or been canceled or anything else, like tweeted the wrong thing, said the wrong thing ever sees a lot of downside of attention so we measure that and one of the things computers do and these systems do is we measure attention that's the main get attention people thrive off that and they figure out that that one way to get attention is to stir people up that that's pretty basic but beyond that you could you could say well does 140 characters and add 280 characters

make that even worse because we can't have nuanced reasoned debates. The fact that it's so quick moving, you have to respond really quickly to get your word in or to play the game. That may affect it as well. Yeah, the retweet, there's a guy who helped build the native retweet at Twitter and others I think who have said we should have never had the retweet without the quote because misinformation spreads because it's so easy to just hit the button and replicate that and then I've seen others say the quote retweet

when you add context is the worst thing because people hit that and don't realize they're amplifying the original message that they may disagree with. We can get really geeky in the nuance of all that stuff. But all those things affect how people behave for sure. At least if you quote tweet, you have to think about what you're retweeting at that point and you have to add something to it so it does take a little extra step in your mind so you're not just like mindlessly hitting the button and spreading it so i might be on the might be on that side but you can just dunk on them you it's an easy way to dunk on someone say you know look at this loser look at this yeah that's true so i don't know is that great where it versus you can hit the

retweet and just like this is great and like it's an implied this is great if you don't see anything well as we know retweets do not always uh equate endorsement i always i always thought one big problem is that you have a bunch of journalists breaking news in a platform that doesn't really allow for context, nuance, or a sense of proportion because of the character limit. So it's not, it's sort of the existence of journalism and media on there when, you know, the idea behind journalism is that you break news and tell stories with plenty of context so that the consumer really understands the story. And it's harder to do that on Twitter, I think. Yeah. There's also, I think, a negative feedback loop with journalists on Twitter who are writing for journalists or or they're writing their stories, wherever they're writing them, and really responding to the Twitter conversation,

which, you know, has, there's a certain culture, I would say, about journalists on Twitter that is, you know, hard, hard to ignore, if you're a journalist. And so it seems to me that the peer respect or lack of journalists really has changed what people publish and write about, more so than their audience. Well, there's also a hive mind effect there, right? That's kind of what I mean. You are shaped, yeah, right. You're shaped by the information that you consume. And so the journalists who are on Twitter, which is most of them,

like they are spending all day, not only reporting their stories, but reading the tweets of their fellow journalists. And because those tweets aren't strictly news, but first analysis and now opinion about whatever, and there's so much opinion on Twitter, that sort of bleeds into the news coverage. And there's the whole, you know,

Twitter is not real life thing. But part of that is journalists, I think, and you can't blame them for this, because again, this is their information environment. They see what's happening on Twitter and maybe mistakenly believe that it represents broader public opinion when certainly it does not. Absolutely. And the other thing is it's just very hard to be positive. It's very hard to defend anything and say anything is good.

And it's very easy to say things are bad. And so if you look at everything why do you think that is do you think that's a more of a human nature you know it bleeds it leads thing with journalism or do you think that's the that's social media i think it's partially humans i mean it's it's it's very unrisky to say something sucks or something is not going to work or people, people are bad, but, but it drives journalism culture more. It's what's respected. I mean, there's a lot of values or speak truth to power and, and, you know, take, take down the man and all that, which is valuable and good.

And if that's the highest value, it's very hard to say, actually, this person over here is doing something pretty good. Or, you know, this is interesting. Maybe I'm optimistic about that. It just, it's very hard to get away from that. And it's like, I think that the part that's human nature is if you can see that in companies, you can see that in cliques, you can see that in high schools.

Like if the dominant culture is everything sucks, then that affects everybody. And maybe it's how we're wired. We're more wired to be sensitive to negativity because survival, you know, whatever. So that's a bummer. And the thing to remember though is, and this is very, very important to the ethos of Twitter from day one, you can choose what you pay attention to.

And that's a thing people forget. So we're talking about Twitter like it's one thing. It's not one thing. It's a million things. From very early on, we built in the ability to choose what you pay attention to. And I think that's something sometimes people forget if they don't like the tone, just like you can change your friend group, you can change your timeline. Yes, that is very true. That is something that I have been trying to do as of late, unfollow certain people, mute certain people. Every time Twitter tries to change something where the default is giving me the top tweets first. I change it back so that it's latest tweets because I don't want Twitter's algorithm about the top tweets.

My top tweets are great, by the way. I love my top tweets. Your top tweets are great? I think my top tweets are like just the same shit. It's all the same. It's all the same political opinion that I always get. So that's why I try to avoid the top tweets. One of the reasons I asked about the character

limit is because when you left Twitter in 2011, you ended up starting Medium, which is a digital publishing platform that allows people to write posts with as many characters as they want. To what extent did you view Medium as a response to the shortcomings of Twitter and social media writ large? Honestly, it wasn't at all. It was meant, and it's still meant to be a compliment. I wasn't trying to fix Twitter. I was trying to take lessons from Twitter and really apply them to things I'd worked on before that, which was blogger mainly.

And the way I thought about it was, at blog blogger we're making it easy to publish on the web and we thought everyone should have a website anyone who wants to share knowledge or ideas on the web we're going to make that easy to do that's a great benefit to society what we didn't do and a big miss at the time was really creating a network amongst those people. And then Twitter was all network and Instagram and Facebook and all these other things where we really learned the internet is for networks. That's really where the value comes from is where distribution, feedback, growth, defensibility, business potential comes from. But most of the internet, the longer form stuff, there's no network for.

And so let's build a network for longer form stuff and it will be a better place to publish. That was really the whole idea. It was like a network publishing platform for more substantive content. Not to say that's better. It's just clearly you can't say everything you want to say on Twitter. What people spend a lot of time doing on Twitter is linking to stuff that's longer, that's

written outside of Twitter. So we want to create a better environment for that stuff. And this was almost 10 years ago now. So I'd say publishing platforms in general on the web have gotten better. But even at that time, half the websites you could barely view on the web have gotten better but even at that time half the websites you you could barely view on the phone and so part of it was just let's create a better environment design wise and technically and then secondly because of the earlier point about if you can design systems you can influence behavior um really the aspirational goal of Medium was to create an environment where

good stuff floated to the top, where people weren't just rewarded for attention, where people were rewarded for creating value. So that was core to our ethos very early on. And today we're subscription-based, which is consistent with that. In the early days, we weren't subscription-based, but we thought a ton about how do we make sure that the same superficial click-baby stuff doesn't bubble up here? Let's look at different types of metrics and really try to measure that, which is something we're still trying to do. It's a very hard problem. But that was the motivation. I do think the subscription versus sort of paid advertising model, which I know you've thought about a ton and written about a ton and are working on this at Medium, sort of gets to the crux of the whole issue here, which is, you know, you were just

talking earlier about attention is the driving force behind a lot of these platforms. Well, the reason that it is is because the paid advertisers that many of these models depend on require attention. And so you're trying to keep people on the platform longer. seems like it will always be difficult for a platform like medium to compete so long as there are platforms like twitter and facebook that have really perfected the business of capturing our attention with just a constant stream of clickbaity content it's it's like asking us to choose vegetables over dessert like is that is that fixable what do you think about that that challenge? In some ways it is asking us to choose vegetables, meaning in any effort to promote or enable high quality content. I put high quality in air quotes for the,

because it's, it's a tricky word. I, I, when, when we debate a lot at medium, but I think people generally get the idea of that's your goal. Are you are you just fighting an uphill battle that you'll inevitably lose against human nature? I choose to be an optimist about that. Food diet is a good metaphor. The fact is, we're driven to consume junk food,

if we just go by our base instincts and have no self control. And some people do that. But a lot of people choose otherwise, because they they have different goals, they realize how that makes them feel. And the same thing applies. If you consume junk content all day long, you don't feel great. You don't learn much. You don't reach your goals. And so some people, at least part of the time, choose to eat a salad instead of the fast food at lunch. And some people choose that a lot. And so what we've tried to done at Medium and what I've always said to people internally is like, there's enough of those people, but like, and those people should have a choice. Let's create something great for them. And let's create something great for the people

who want to create that stuff. And if you had a purely advertising driven world, and by the way, there's a nuance in particular about advertising for written content on the web that makes it very, very hard to support thoughtful stuff. Let's create an option for that. And maybe that reaches 10% of people, which would be many millions of people. And that'd be great i always wonder though like how much of it is individual willpower versus the incentives of these platforms and what it's doing to our brains like you know i mean sometimes it's like cigarette smoking or uh or even like maybe a better analogy is like you know prescription drugs which is there is a good use for them, but they can be very addictive and then people become addicted to them.

And then it goes beyond a question of individual willpower. And I know you thought a lot about fixing the Internet writ large. paid advertising model of so many of these social media platforms is just sort of rewiring our brain chemistry in a way that is so focused on clickbait and garbage content that it's becoming harder and harder for people to make individual choices about where to focus their attention. I mean, to some degree, it's undoubtable it's becoming harder. I mean, the epitome of the internet, I think, is TikTok. It's unbelievable. And it's brain candy like nothing has ever been invented. And it's seductive as hell.

And everyone who's on TikTok feels that. Now, there's good stuff on TikTok. I've spent time on TikTok. There's everything you can imagine on TikTok, just like there is on YouTube. It's just generally shorter and portrait mode. But even if you're consuming that in large measure, it's a little exhausting. And you can feel what it's doing to your brain, just like you can feel if you consume too much stuff that's not great for your body, you can feel it's too much. And I just, I do worry a little bit about where that's taking

us. And I have, I have two preteen kids. So we're on the verge of probably having a lot more of those discussions, but TikTok or Instagram or these other things that are really more the epitome of that. But I still think people are going to learn that. We're going to be, just as we become more sophisticated about cigarettes or food, I mean, there's a hell of a lot more intelligence and, and mindfulness about what we consume than there was when we were kids. And I think the same thing is like, we're, we're sort of in an earlier phase of the, the processed food, now processed information. What is this really doing to us? We got to get, we're going to have to go through some pain and get more sophisticated about it over time.

Uh, I want to ask your thoughts about Twitter today. First, was it hard to walk away from the board in 2019? Yeah, I thought about it a ton and, uh, I, I ultimately did it. I was, I was on the board for like 12 years. So it was hard. But ultimately, when I stepped down as CEO, I thought, well, I still want to be on the board because I feel responsibility. And I feel like I can learn a lot. So if I can be helpful and helping as one voice on the board, which really doesn't have that much sway, depending on who you are, to, to, and learn a lot. I mean, the company I, I, I helped start went public while I was on the board. I'd never been through that process.

You know, it got bigger and bigger. It was, you know, doing billions of dollars in revenue. That was a great, that was just a great opportunity to learn for me. And, and yeah, I had opinions that I wanted to have influence. And, and at that point in time, I thought, okay, it's the, the ROI of either my influence or my learning is less than maybe spending that time on different things. So once I realized that, it was fairly easy. What, in your view, are some of the most beneficial changes that the company has made to the platform over the last few years? What I've observed, like many people, most of the time I was on the board, what I kept pushing for is changes. I just thought we need to try new things.

But the last few years, I think there have been more significant changes than in the 10 years or whatever. Before that, you look at 280 characters. It sounds like a small thing, but that was, Oh, that, that was kind of sacred for a long time. I think, you know, other stuff they've, they've tried and they tried fleets. That's, that seemed like a bad idea and they got rid of fleets, but Hey, they tried something. Spaces seems to be working great. I mean, they may have borrowed the idea, but learn from Facebook.

You don't have to invent all ideas yourself or any, really, if you can execute them well. And I'm forgetting stuff. More emphasis on topics is driving more discovery. The big, big challenge for Twitter always, and that's a challenge for Medium, is once you get a whole bunch of stuff, how do you connect people to the right stuff? I think that's underappreciated as a big challenge in Twitter and goes back to, well, if you don't like Twitter, there's a different Twitter for you. How do you figure out who to follow is a big problem on Twitter. Facebook didn't have this problem because it was just import your address book, find your friends. Where'd you go to school? Here are your friends.

Twitter is like, we had this problem forever. It's like, what are you interested in? I'm in, you know, it could be your local roller derby team or politician, or you have like the, or your profession. And so they're making progress on that too. So with topic following and groups. And so I'm sure I'm forgetting some stuff, but the pace of change is better than it used to be.

And that's a positive sign. The Twitter blew it and now they have a subscription product. We'll see how that goes. Some of the crypto stuff they're integrating. I think it's an exciting time. Controversial question. Are you in favor of an edit button? I'm actually not in favor of an edit button, although I'm not religious about it. It's weird to me that people are. It's early on. I was like, no, we don't need that.

Just delete it. It's short. Whatever. Correct it. And at the time, early, it was like it was an engineering challenge. I mean, we were having trouble just making Twitter run. And the way we had engineered everything was like edit would have been really, really hard. Now I'm sure that the team could figure it out even though it's 100 times the scale just they're better than we were then but um i also don't think it's as bad as but like oh there's

gonna be all this like people changing their tweets that was liked and you're endorsing i was like you know what we figure out how to deal with those things it's okay i worry i worry about that with an edit button is that like look people want it about it because everyone's making typos and then they're embarrassed because they're typos whatever yeah um like it's a typo i also think that people think deleting tweets is some big deal like if you deleted a tweet oh it's like oh sacred why did you delete it like just delete it you made it a mistake delete the tweet um but i do think yeah if you've retweeted or quote tweeted a tweet and all of a sudden someone completely changes it so that it says something else or offensive or what a controversial then suddenly it can cause all kinds of mischief no unless i

guess you can solve it but i mean you think about okay then you know do you use slack at first you could yeah you can edit slacks and then you could only edit them if if no one had replied to him yet or something i don't know exactly how it worked now i noticed you can edit a slack and guess what it says edited there and then so if something looks fishy and it's i'm sure twitter will do this be like all i have to say is it was edited yeah can you see the old version maybe you can see the old version this is actually something i wanted to do at Medium forever, and I still think it's a good idea.

The funny thing about digital publishing is it can change. So tweets are more like a statement or can't necessarily change something you said. But published on the web, a funny thing about it is we still kind of treat it like paper. Like, well, that's what was published. published on the web a funny thing about it is we still kind of treat it like paper like well that's that's what was published and then and there was a etiquette that was created with blogging early on where if you change something you needed to like put updated and what you change

in it and and it was sort of verboten to like oh i don't want to change this thing because i'm on the record i'm like well that's kind of silly. Because why shouldn't you make a thing you've written better? And guess what? Computers can track these things. So why can't you just always make it better? And then you could, Mark, you know, this was updated. Maybe you could see the changes that were made over time. The Wikipedia does this does this obviously and you don't get upset about it but most of all the other publishing on the web i think it should get better over time maybe that should be okay it's probably less important for tweets than other types of publishing but that's still something that we were sort of hung up about this this old idea on i think

yeah there are a lot of recent reports about how Twitter executives want to decentralize the platform. What does that mean? And what might it look like in practice? Oh, gosh, that's a, that's a hairy topic. I don't know what they mean, or what what anyone's intentions are. And by the way, all my talking about Twitter, as you mentioned, I'm off the board. I don't have any inside track of Twitter anymore, which makes it much easier to talk about it than it used to be.

You don't have to worry about it. I don't have to worry about it. It's fine. I can speculate like everybody else. So, I mean, generally, these days when people say decentralized, it has to do with Web3 and the blockchain. Technically, it doesn't have to. I mean, there, these days, when people say decentralized, it has to do with Web3 and the blockchain.

Technically, it doesn't have to. I mean, there's been an effort that I think Jack started a few years ago what Blue Sky is doing, they're exploring all kinds of decentralization technologies, many of which have been in the works for many years and don't necessarily have to with the blockchain. So there's Twitter-like services that are what they call federated. So you could have a Twitter server and it could have its own name, not a Twitter server technically, but a Twitter-like thing and people can create accounts on it. But there could be another Twitter-like thing

that it's almost like, more like email is probably a good way for most people to picture it. It was like, you can sign up on Gmail, you can sign up on Microsoft, you can sign up on your company thing and they all talk to each other. So you could do something like

twitter or where where it's more of an open protocol that anyone can can play and um in theory you could do that with with the blockchain and with with um what people generally call Web3 technologies. And it's interesting. I mean, I think that my take on that is a lot of the most ardent supporters of decentralization in the context of something like Twitter are they're not necessarily focused on the most interesting part of it, in my opinion, i.e. there's people who want to create an uncensorable Twitter or uncensorable social network to make it

so no one can ever be removed. You know, there's no central authority. And wherever you fall on the censorship line, I personally don't think that's the biggest problem to solve. But what it does enable is potentially whole new takes on the experience, the discovery algorithms, all kinds of things that could be extended would be possible with a decentralized model without losing the network effect. I think that's potentially interesting. And so I do hope that they'll explore that. You talked about this on Jon Stewart's show a while back, decentralization in terms of content moderation. And you brought up the censorship issue. You said, what's the Twitter that no one owns? That can't be controlled centrally. It's not clear why that wouldn't be more anarchy and chaos. Can you also decentralize moderation is your concern there that if there's a whole bunch of different twitters and then no one is actually watching what happens on those twitters and no one's able to like kick people off or or moderate

content then we could have all kinds of problems that we were trying to solve by decentralizing in the first place yeah i mean it depends on what you're going for. Some people see the ability to censor it all on Twitter as a bug and that thing needs to be fixed. And there's alternatives to Twitter, like Parler and a whole host of them who when Trump was kicked off, rose up and was like, here's the, we're the free speech platform. And I don't know if you've dipped your toes

into those, but those are just cesspools. Yeah. They're not bad, bad places. I mean, but I don't know, maybe some people like him and look like you can go hang out with your

friends. I don't, I don't think it should be illegal or anything to, to talk and have bad ideas. But if you want to create something that's useful and more inviting for uh a broader swath of society then i think some management of of norms and rules and and behaviors is helpful put it that way in a decentralized world that could happen. You could sign up for the gated Twitter that's very curated and moderated, and you could sign up for anarchy Twitter, or you could do something in between.

Maybe that's cool. Maybe that's useful. And maybe it's even inevitable. And if you look at other systems like Telegram or some of the messaging systems, that's kind of what you have. You have your groups you opt into and different rules apply, even Reddit, you know, it's kind of the same thing. I mean, one person who's been pushing decentralization and less content moderation is the company's newest board member and now largest shareholder, elon musk who just recently criticized twitter for too much content moderation and failing to adhere to free speech principles what do you think about that criticism from elon um

i don't know exactly what he's referring to um so i don't know i mean it and i actually don't know i I mean, it, and I actually don't know. I'm not even defending Twitter. I'm not like saying he's right or wrong. I actually don't know. Um, I'm not, despite this conversation talking a lot about Twitter, I don't even think about Twitter every day. So lots of controversy.

I just, I just don't opt in to a lot of these conversations. Um, and so maybe it's right. Maybe they've overstepped their bounds. don't opt in to a lot of these conversations. And so maybe he's right. Maybe they've overstepped their bounds, but I haven't observed that. And I don't think it's a major problem. Like I said a minute ago, I do think if you host an environment where people are coming together,

whether that's a party or a discussion forum, setting some guardrails, I think improves that environment, especially if it's online. There is incentive and little downside to being a bad actor. You know, peeing in the pool is not cool. So let's have a rule that you can't pee in the pool is kind of the way I look at it. And if someone else has like, pee is cool pool, like, okay, you can go play in that pool and people can choose what pool to play in is my take.

What was your reaction to Elon becoming not only a passive investor but now a seemingly very active investor who's on the board uh i i think it's interesting and i'm very impressed with what elon has done in the world and his approach to pr and tweeting and everything else he's he's fascinating i'm you know i'm like, like anyone else. I appreciate what he's doing with Tesla. I have a Tesla. Hope to go to Mars someday. I have,

is he good for Twitter? I don't know. Here's, I think, you know, it had been a few years ago when I was on the board, like really pushing for, for more change and evolution.

I would say, great. We have a very bold technologist on the board. That's what we need more of. Let's push for some more innovation. Is that what it'll do? I have no idea. I think it'll be fascinating. It'll make the board meetings more interesting. I also have friends who are very, very concerned, and I respect those concerns. I think it's a little too early to tell. Who knows how Elon even has time to pay attention to Twitter and everything else?

Is it a passing fancy? We'll see. He certainly mastered the attention economy himself being on Twitter. Amazing, yeah. he certainly mastered the attention economy himself uh being on twitter amazing yeah i mean you were uh once a board member and once the largest single shareholder of twitter do you have any advice for elon as a new board member uh i can't possibly think of advice that that i would have for elon but um interested interested to see see what he uh what he does but i mean i think the thing for everyone else to know is as a former biggest shareholder twitter and board member he can't dictate what the company does and um i think people get confused about that it's like they

they invited him on onto the board, he perhaps could have forced his way onto the board if he took an activist investor path, like other board members did. But he's one of 12 people on the board. And boards actually can't do that. They're not making decisions about details. Boards do not decide much other than should we, you know, who is the CEO? That's the main thing boards decide. Do you think Donald Trump should be let back on Twitter if he runs again? nah i mean if it was up to me that now twitter seemed to get better when he i think so didn't i think so i mean i think he definitely left a mark on twitter just as he left a mark on politics and left a mark on media right like he has left a mark that we are still a lot of people might say it's more than a mark that we're all still grappling with. But I do think, you know, I do think Twitter has felt a little better without him on it.

I sometimes worry that much like we were having this discussion about what happens when people aren't on Twitter and they're on Parler. Donald Trump is now in sort of a closed information ecosystem on the right where he still gets enough attention on the right and there's still a Republican primary. So whether he gets attention from all of us us it matters little in terms of winning a republican primary so i do i do think that but i don't i don't think i don't think he should be left back on i mean he was there was a reason he was kicked off just because now he's getting more attention to take power again yeah that's why he should get more power and amplification it doesn't seem like a good uh a good rule yeah i i agree but i mean my my answer is somewhat politically motivated i don't want to give him a voice but i i could see an argument why he should um i could also see arguments like the the violin he you know he he was causing harm in a way that we we did not

want to enable and that's uh that there's i don't know if there's rules around there's a like he served his time or something in in twitter jail and we should let him back on but i i wouldn't be for it yeah you mentioned how you don't think about Twitter all the time. What are your social media habits these days? How online are you? I'm kind of weird. Well, I really am sporadic about Twitter. I think I tweeted more in the last couple of days than I did in the last month. I read Twitter, big consumer, very rare tweeter.

And don't use Instagram. I have an account. I'll post a picture of my kids once every six months. Prefer VSCO to Instagram. And no other real social media. Well, as mentioned before, I have checked out TikTok.

That's barely social media. Well, as mentioned before, I have checked out TikTok. That's barely social media. I think that's entertainment. And I spend a lot of time reading. And I read a lot on Medium. I read other things. I mean, there's so much great writing. And to me, I read a lot of books. My media consumption is generally not of the social variety,

but Twitter would not surprisingly be my number one social media. Do you feel like that's improved your mental health, your happiness being online less? Yeah, for sure. I really don't like the feeling of being in Twitter debates in particular. I hate, I just hate it. And so even when I tweet, I don't even look at the replies because, you know, there's always just some asshole. And I was like, I don't even look at the replies because there's always just some asshole.

And I was like, I don't need that. So I don't really bother. And it's just, it's not what I'm interested in spending my time doing. I don't find it that rewarding to, but I do find it rewarding to reading Twitter and learning about things and, um, you know, following people and finding ideas and links. And I love that. Like I'll like consume information, uh, write things, but just being part of the flow and being, you know, and looking at my number i don't i don't get

i don't get a lot out of that yeah never read your mentions uh last question i ask all my guests what's your favorite way to unplug and how often do you get to do it uh i unplug quite a bit um a major unplug would be to go to hawaii with with the family more of a daily unplug is is just hanging with my kids i have 10 and 12 year old boys and i don't know i try to get them to go for a hike and we have all these great trails right by us it's rare to get them out there but that would rank very highly yeah it's a good one ev williams uh thank you for joining offline really appreciate it thanks for having me, John. Offline is a Crooked Media production.

It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis, sound engineer of the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Somenator, Michael Martinez, Andy Gardner-Bernstein, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, and Amelia Montooth, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.