Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) An Interview With @kayvz, Who Is Leading The Twitter Product Revolution

Episode Date: September 11, 2021

Chris and I thought we had not guests lined up this week so we were going to just potpourri some topics. But then Keyvon Beykpour, who is heading the Twitter project revolution came on and talked to us longer than we had any right to ask for. It was a great conversation. Sponsor: Otter.ai, code RIDE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This week is going to be, I think, a little bit more meandering, but there's just so much to talk about, so much to put into context. And that is what we are here to do. So, Brian, you started off by observing something new about my Twitter profile. I imagine we're going to get into a bunch of things related to stuff that Twitter has been doing. Specifically, they launched communities today in a limited test. And so I think I want to, I don't know, run some thoughts about this by you, but let's start with your initial observation. Well, let's talk about communities specifically.

Explain it to me in a sense, because have you haven't been in one yet, have you? I have not. No, I feel like there's like these, you know, garden hedge rows that have like popped up suddenly in the middle of the Twitter multiverse. And I'm walking around it and peeking inside and trying to jump over the hedge to see, like, like what's happening. But alas, it is a limited rollout, as so many things on Twitter are, I feel like it's a completely fractional, or no, fractional, fractured user experience for a lot of people, because we're all in different ABC, D, EFG tests going on simultaneously. But to answer your question, no, I am not in one yet. But I've seen a few screenshots that relate to that.

Okay, so then... Tweets of some of the stuff that I've discovered also. Right. So then answer my other question, which is, and a Broadway, what's this now? What are Twitter communities? I mean, basically. Yeah. It's a good question, actually.

Let me start by saying that I think that grafting a community architecture onto the Twitterverse, given the way that it's been designed and where there's sort of a public and private, profile setting, and that's about it, I think is a really hard, just circumstance. from a product designer perspective to build community functionality into. And so what it seems like you can do is you can create a community, which is somehow adjacent to or related to or not related to it at all to topics. And when you, let me think if I can sort of map out how this might technically work, now if you are a creator of a community, you are a moderator of a community, when you go to post a new tweet, there is now a drop down. And in that drop down,

it'll say everyone or it'll have your list of communities. And so this is sort of a way to have a more faceted profile, you know, experience where you can just post stuff to your NFT friends or to your sports friends or to your comic book friends or whatever it might be. And in that way, those tweets can be seen by everyone on Twitter, but they can only be interacted on by people who are also in that community. So like I said, it is kind of like, you know, Garden Hedge Row that keeps other people out of your little garden party on your property, but anybody else can

kind of see what you're doing. Okay, let me, let me try to clarify for a second. Okay. So, um, Arsenal Football Club. Yep. Uh, that I have my certain people on Twitter that I follow for Arsenal in theory, is it that? Or these, like conversely, would it be, could we create a tech meme right home community? Yep. Yep. Right. It's both or something? Yes. In fact, I'm going to update the description of this space to be, let's say, at join communities. Because there was a whole brouhaha about the Twitter community's username, I guess.

They'd taken over at communities sort of secretly and then some of us discovered it. And it turned out that someone, this guy named Dan actually owned that account. and he was not so happy that they used eminent domain to grab his handle. So, you know, that's a whole different conversation. Anyways, it's join communities now as the username. You know, and if I, as we get folks from Twitter, if you guys want to come up, actually, happy to, you know, talk to you. I'm looking at you, Leah, of course.

But yeah, so there are a few screenshots, actually, that I have shared, and I'm trying to find those. I did post a tweet from Kavon. And one of the things that he said, what I thought was pretty interesting, Let's see. So tweets that you post in communities are, quote, narrowcasted to only the people in that community. There's still public tweets, but they aren't amplified to all your followers and they don't show up on your profile.

Ah, that's interesting. Okay. We think that this can help lower the pressure of talking on Twitter. So, of course, fleets was intended to be that low pressure context for activating more Twitter users to actually contribute to the network. And that failed. So tweets are gone. Rip tweets, rip fleets, whatever they're called.

fleets. And now they have communities. So that's interesting. So it is sort of a, I don't know, not a side, it is sort of a side posting, side channel type of way of getting people to contribute more without it actually going on their permanent record. The second thing that Kavon said was that communities have moderators and these mods determine what the rules and social norms are within that community. They'll be able to enforce these rules, norms on their own, which includes hiding tweets, kicking people out, et cetera. So, you know, like I would say that it's some basic, primitive rules for cultivating these environments. And ideally they'll, I don't know, create more, I would say to me, and I tweeted about this before, it feels like Twitter is sort of pursuing

something like Reddit, where it is a place for your interests and you can subscribe and get and you know, you don't have to necessarily create a whole profile that's your permanent record of everything you ever said for all time. You can have your arsenal tweets, but they're not there for everyone to see. So your profile. might become more like a LinkedIn or a public sort of persona that you want to broadcast to the world. And if people find you, you know, in search or something, it represents that aspect of your life. But the smaller, more nuanced things that, you know, you don't want to broadcast, go to communities. Well, if it's, right, like, if you join the communities or create them, right, essentially.

So, like, as a subreddit, like, if they're talking about moderators and things like that, So that again, if we use this idea of there would be an arsenal fan base that could be tens of millions of people, then it would function as a subreddit where my tweets would go there if I decide that there are still related tweets. And then at the same time, if I created a TechMeme right home one, then I'd be the moderator that would be essentially the moderator of a subreddit. basic. Yeah. Am I right? Yeah, more or less. Yeah. And so in that case, you could be the owner or the creator of the community and then you could make me a moderator. And so then I have, you know, a sort of

a lesser set of activities that I could do in relation to the group. I can't delete it. I can, you know, maybe change the metadata, but I can enforce some of the rules, you know, to keep things on topic, for example. So if someone, you know, joins my new NFT club and they start, you know, pumping something or trying to shill their project and I'm like, uh-uh, that's not what this space is about, I would be able to remove them or any moderator, for example, that I've deputized with those controls. Can I ask you a question, which is, you know, the joke of Twitter not iterating or shipping new product is so old at this point. It's ridiculous. But with things like,

like I didn't even talk about like the remove a follower tool and things like that. they were testing edge-to-edge pictures, which I passed on talking about to any things like that. Right, right, right. What do you think about the idea that maybe Twitter is thinking of itself of, forget about, like, well, can we shove stories into anything because even Twitter couldn't do that? But is Twitter now thinking of itself that it could be any sort of social? Do you know what I mean?

Like, it seems like they're trying to do. trying to graft on to, and some of them might not work, but they're trying to graft on to any idea of a community, of a social thing, even more than, like, Facebook has ever tried at this point. Well, let me first say that I can't speak for Twitter. Obviously, I've never worked there, and I'm just an active, heavy user. I know. And I observe with that. I know. So, no, I think what you're asking, so let me also comment on what you said about Facebook. I mean, honestly, Facebook has tried and continues to try to, you know, both every different permutation of, I think, social software that's possible. They're constantly doing experiments. They're redesigning their

composer. The feed is roughly their core product that they just can't fuck with. That's their advertising base. That's everything. But groups is also very, very important to them. And I think, I don't know if there's some theory of change that Twitter is working under or the Twitter product team is working under, except that one, they recognized that. One, they recognized that. they needed to change, you know, whether that's related to the Elliott management, you know, coming in and putting a fire under Jack's ass or not. I don't know. But the other thing is that social is just changing, you know, and the creator economy is coming more competitive. And so you've got to do two things. You've got to bring a lot of audience. You've got to figure out how to

get creators paid. You've got to get them building businesses or microbusinesses on the platform. And then you've got to give people a lot of things to do, you know, sort of like building like a mega mall where people can just kind of like, you know, walk around and find things and think it's cool. You know, Twitter is not in the streaming, you know, uh, movies space. So the content that is on Twitter is made by the users and the users have been contributing an amazing content for a long period of time. But now it's, uh, how do you slice and dice it and actually break it into the component parts or maybe part so that people can actually get the very content that they want when they want it and when something is going on, you know, so for example, when a new TV show drops,

you want to hop into a Twitter space to talk to your community about that new TV show or sports game or whatever, sports ball. And you want to talk to folks who maybe you have some affinity or connection with. And that's been really, really hard to do. It's very, you know, it's been random and scattershot. And, you know, you're like, who am I even talking to? And you can't build up intimacy over time because of that, the nature of the network. So communities creates that place of persistence where I can leave the app, go away for a couple days, come back, and then I can see what my community is up to. And I've been seeing some of this, to some extent, happening in private DM groups on Twitter. It's a very awkward platform for DMs, to be honest, relative to telegram or even Facebook, Messenger, or Instagram.

But a lot of that activity, if it goes off into private channels, then that actually kind of hurts the overall Twitter ecosystem. So more of that content should show up in public feeds, but it just might restrict who can access or jump into those conversations because they're in those little walled spaces. It is so interesting that they keep coming back to this idea of we want to reduce the friction of people using our product because

even something like Discord where it's like if your average user is still hesitant to tweet because they're not exactly sure who they're tweeting to or what will happen if they do it. I feel like in a place like Discord

which in a way feels like more wide open and crazy. Like you don't have that sort of hesitancy from users. So that suggests that users understand better what happens when they contribute to something like that, you know?

I think it's a really good point. Or at least it exposes a seam between two different modes of communication. So there are two contexts where I notice this behavior happen. One is on, yes, Discord. The other is on Telegram. I follow Dorov, the founder and CEO creator or whatever,

the sort of mysterious James Bond-like character that runs Telegram. And every time he posts something on Telegram, which is basically, you know, he has a post, which is like a blog post, it goes out to, you know, hundreds of thousands of people who follow him or something. like all over the world. And it's that behavior where people jump in and they want to be the first person to like comment. And they don't really even care. It's the very,

it's a very strange, you know, sort of chum in the water kind of piranhas all jumping all at once. And it's, it doesn't make sense. In Discord, depending on the server and depending on how active it is, I've seen similar behavior, you know, where people will just kind of jump in and they'll say things. They won't even like take, you know, stock of the room. And part of that is because of the speed of the flow of content and conversation. that it almost doesn't matter.

Like, there is no shame at play because the content is so ephemeral. And Twitter has a different dynamic. Even though it's meant to be somewhat real time, every post could go viral and it could become permanent. That's so weird. Go ahead. That metabolism difference, you're right, is so weird.

Yeah. Say more. Go on. Yeah. Well, it's just that, like, it is, like, if you, you know, I mostly use Twitter through tweet, deck. And so, like, I said it to, like, scroll, scroll, scroll, and it's always like scrolling. And so I'm, like, you know, glancing to the left and like, oh, here's what's happening.

But at the same time, you're right that, like, a Twitter feed does feel like, well, this is a post that will live in Amber. And it will sort of, like, also potentially go viral and or ruin your life. Whereas, like, there's so much, and it's not, I don't mean this in a bad way, but there's so much cruffed in a Discord channel where there's so much you know, like you're saying, just first or, you know, memes or like

whatever. So like there's less, it doesn't feel as permanent in a way. But it's also about like, I think the focus or the intention of a group coming together. And as we're talking about this, this idea comes to mind, which is not to be too literal.

with, you know, Twitter and birds and flocking behavior, but people behaving in these social structures do create emergent forms of kind of meaning creation and sort of bouncing around each other and kind of gradually arriving at, may not even be coherence, but just sort of communication. And what I mean by that is, like, if you do jump into a Discord server and there's tons of people saying random-ass things and posting emojis and there's emotes and there's emotes and there's gifts and there's all this like kind of stuff going on to me that actually feels like being in like a sports stadium during a game you're just around other people and there's this kind of din or chatter

that feels like you're part of something it feels you know who knows you know what people's lived experiences are like but that's kind of i think the vibe that you get and why esports kind of especially when you're watching you know someone or people playing a game and then you've got all this chatter going on in discord or twitch that's kind of of the vibe. That's like, you know, you can be semi-anonymous because identity just really isn't that important. Whereas when you're creating content and then posting it to a persistent place, i.e. your profile, that becomes performative. That becomes a way of saying, this is what I think, this is who I am. This is, you know, my permanent record. And there can be, you know, it's hard to

get to a place where that feels like a safe activity to do. I want to, I want to shift gears because I do feel like we do talk too much about the stuff that we're on, be it clubhouse or Twitter. But at the same time, I want to acknowledge that unlike recent episodes, we don't have guests lined up and stuff like that. So we're sort of flying by the seat of our pants right now. So I'm going to give you dealer's choice.

What do you want to talk about? And also, people in the audience, since we don't have guests, feel free to raise your hand and stuff like that. Chris, what else is striking your fancy today? Well, yeah, let's see. There are several things that you pointed out, and there's just sort of like a mess of things,

obviously, you know, going on in the world, as there always is. I think the thing that I was, which one do I want to go down? I was going to say, oh, I know. Okay. So the Apple event coming up. Of course, we have to be aware of that that's happening next week. the reason why I don't know there's been so much news

and this event I feel like there is more pressure on it than there's been on many recent Apple events you know like during the pandemic I think everyone was just like stoked to sort of you know see their virtual crazy production and all that and then they did it again back in the spring and now

you know all eyes are on this event for a number of reasons first we've got like just all the regulation and antitrust stuff going on I think people are starting to lose a little bit of attention span on that, but nonetheless, things are happening. Whether it's what South Korea did with putting rules on the app store that basically said, no, you have to allow apps to have alternative payment methods. I feel like that conversation is a little bit stuck because we don't even know what we're talking about because we're, you know, people are like trying to tell us, oh, you're a fish and you're wet and we're like, what does it even mean? What would it mean to have alternative app stores available with the apps that we download on iOS? We've just never seen it, so we don't know what it looks like.

And I've been listening to a bunch of Ben Thompson's podcast interviews lately about how we talked about kind of like the golden era of Mac apps and all the bespoke apps in the productivity space that existed and that they just don't exist and can exist on iOS because the business model isn't there because of subscriptions and et cetera and so forth. But it does raise a question, and I think we can do a better job of this of identifying what are the components and aspects of the overall, I don't know, whether it's the payment, ecosystem or in-app purchases or about the services or the service layer that can be designed on top of more competition in that space. So, for example, one thing that I was thinking about was right now, when you go to buy an app, there's the sort of double-click on the side and then there's like the face ID or whatever to, you know, purchase. What if at that moment, you know, sort of like, you know, if you've used Metamask or the

Coinbase wallet, something else popped up and it said, where do you want to conduct this transaction? and you could choose, you know, whether it's Google or it's or it is Apple or it's someone else. And then they are, and I don't know how this works from a security perspective, and this is where it kind of breaks down, but there are a set of APIs that would be available to certified in-app purchase providers that would give them access to the hardware to do their own verification process, right? So then essentially the phone becomes a type of utility.

You kind of blew my mind in a little way because I realized that like, do you think, I'm sure they have. Has Apple ever mentioned crypto ever? I don't think that they're very in favor of it. And no, they haven't. And actually, so to bring this back again to Twitter, they're experimenting with and have already, I guess, you know, seeded the launch of tipping with crypto.

So I want to bring this up because I think this is actually incredibly important for both the creator economy as well as, you know, Jack's big plans to bring crypto to the world. So we oftentimes have a very U.S.-centric view of technology. Obviously, that's where we live and that's, you know, we're used to banks and credit cards, et cetera. But that's not the way it is in the rest of the world. You know, in fact, El Salvador just, what was it yesterday or was it today?

Yesterday. I am. To enable Bitcoin as a legal tender, right? Imagine like the U.S. government doing that. Like, it's just like mind-blowing. But of course, there are very different dynamics at play in El Salvador. And I have no real judgment about whether it's a good idea or it's not or it's marketing or it's, you know, covering over corruption, whatever. The fact is that a government, you know, sovereign government has decided to move towards crypto.

Like that's a big deal. So to your point, you asked, has Apple ever, you know, talked about crypto or things like that? To my recollection, I can't think of anything like that. You can't use crypto for Apple Pay, for example. But right now with super follows on Twitter, your only option, you're only option. is to pay through Apple's in-app purchases. What this means, and I don't know what the upper limit is, I think it's 10,000 skews,

is that Twitter will only ever be able to have essentially 10,000 superfollow recipients because that is an Apple pay limitation. And so by moving to crypto and allowing people to do tipping or superfollows using crypto, that moves around the entire App Store ecosystem and create something very interesting. So when you think about what Jack is doing with Square and Title and Twitter and tipping

and the creator economy and all of that, that's where, I mean, you know, we don't think a lot about Twitter and Apple sort of being, you know, in a battle. We think more like Facebook and Apple, but that's because their ambitions and I think their goals are ultimately different. Well, what I, what I, and this is pure spitballing because this is not going to happen, but like, what if on Tuesday, Tim Apple's... stood up and talked about a MetaMask-style wallet integrated into iOS and stuff like that. And who would be included? Or who would be allowed to insert?

I mean, I'm so spitballing here. I don't even know. But this would be something that would be out of the Facebook playbook, which would be we're getting all this criticism for what we do with X, Y, and Z. And X, Y, and Z in this case is the App Store. And so we're going to be like acknowledged. Also, we're going in this direction. And by going in this direction, we're going to maybe answer some of your criticisms, but also like we're going to double down in what we believe in, which is sort of this, we're protecting your privacy, we're protecting you from spam and, you know, bad actors and things like that. It feels, or at least my sense, is that the learning curve for crypto, is too steep. The loss of control is too great. And Apple, you know, not only tends to follow everyone,

and I wouldn't even say it's like a fast follow, it's like a slow follow. Like they'll do things two or three years or five years after other people have already started moving out there so I can understand the use cases that can build and plan and do all the hardware stuff and all the full integrations across everything. Unless they're doing their own crypto thing, where I just, I don't see the benefit of them doing that, even though they're partnered with Golden Sacks. They run such an incredible international operation. I don't see how this would work in China, for example, or other places. Oh, right.

Well, I mean, listen, this is what made me say, you blew my mind, is that no one has ever put those two things together, at least in my reading of stuff. Like, no one ever mentions Apple and crypto in the same breath ever. Right. I see that you brought some speakers up. We can continue on this, but before we leave Apple, I do have one thing that I want to bring up about next week. But go ahead and bring up some speakers and let's continue this conversation. Yep, I brought Corny up. I know Remi wanted to say hello.

If anybody else wants to pop up, feel free. Raise your hand. This is going to be a little bit more open-ended. If you guys have questions for us, happy to also go in that direction. direction too. Hi guys. Thank you so much. You're welcome.

It's so interesting as always. Listen, just a really quick question from me. I'm very interested in the, I guess, evolution of being able to record natively on Twitter. Uh-huh. So I teach podcasting. I'm really interested in, you know, the accessibility of this. There's some really interesting uses of Twitter spaces in the development. country journalism community where I do a lot of my work. And so just any intel would be lovely.

That's really it. Thanks so much. Thanks. So I just pinned a tweet. And I, okay, let's see, how much do I go into this and how much do I reveal my secrets? So I made a mock-up, basically, today using my sleuthing skills to figure out kind of what's happening. Yeah, I saw that. That was awesome. The Twitter app. And one of the things that I've noticed is that, you know, Twitter now has, and I remember what are the reasons Brian to go back to your sort of admonition slash joke about Twitter being slow to innovate, is that Twitter had to do some major internal re-architecting to enable, to enable them to move faster. You know, and I don't know if that's just, you know, with, is that me or you? I'm getting some feedback. Is that you, Brian?

I don't hear it. Interesting. Okay. Anyways. Right. So once that re-architecture was done, that seems to unblocked Twitter and the product teams to be able to innovate and build and move forward quickly. And one of the things that they did earlier this year was they created kind of a set of

design standards and brand guidelines that have allowed teams to basically work within a design system, finally, and to produce features at a rapid pace. And one of the things that they do is they kind of reuse the same interfaces over and over again to launch different feature sets. And so essentially, I took what they used for launching Superfollows, and I just took what I found inside the app for recorded spaces, and I imagine it's going to look like something like I just pinned to the nest, as they call it. And so essentially, I will read this for folks who are listening after the fact.

What the text says is the title is Recorded Spaces, and then the subtitle is Let the Audio Live on in a Replay. and there are four value, I guess like value statements. One is live recording, and it says only speakers will be recorded and included in the replay. So it makes sense. Two, replay later. When the space ends, listen to the space again to find your favorite moments to share, highlights, share memorable moments, and continue the conversation.

So that suggests that there will be a snippeting tool or a way to basically, you know, use spaces or recorded spaces content to create more content within Twitter. and then to promote spaces. Now, one idea, and one thing actually that I have no idea how this is going to work, but this will be interesting to watch, is whether ticketed spaces will be recorded. And whether those ticketed spaces will also allow people to excerpt or share highlights, you know, to different groups. Or, and or if those recordings will be made only available, let's say, to people who attended the ticketed space. And so I'm not quite sure how that's going to play out. And the fourth value is to download and share, which allows you to download the auto file to share off platform.

Now, there's all sorts of questions about this in terms of, you know, whether this is going to, I guess, you know, be in a standard format, whether the quality is going to be good enough, whether we're going to be able to upload it, you know, and share on other podcasting platforms like Brian and I already do now. But it does certainly seem like it's going to open up the possibility for more people to become, you know, media broadcasters. without even having to learn about, you know, podcasting and the rest. So I'm pretty sure that we can expect, you know, today was the community's launch. I don't know if recorded spaces will launch next week. It seems like the cadence is that Twitter will roll out some of these new features in a small or private beta test. And then within a week or two, they'll actually roll it out to the broader community. So that's, that's, Corrine, does that answer your question?

Yeah, yeah, it does. Oh, boy. Yes, well, I noticed that as well. I might just put myself back in the audience and you can put the question to him. Thanks so much, guys. I want to cave on up, but he might decline. We'll see. But I just will say that one of the sessions that I've been listening almost daily to in the Pacific Islands,

you'd probably be aware that the COVID pandemic has been a real problem in this region. And, you know, the received wisdom is that developing country communities don't use Twitter. Do you know what I mean? like as I know, they were all on Facebook. I mean, I actually think that it's huge. It's huge in the Philippines. It's huge in the Pacific Islands. I mean, yeah, all over the world, for sure.

Yeah. Especially because it's such a small, well, anyways, continue. Sorry. Oh, no, that's okay. There's a daily Twitter space that's run by a journalist in Fiji. Her name is Li Verveer, but it's L-I-C-E, Le Verne. And it's called Tala Noah. And it's actually such a lovely concept.

So Tala Noah is a Fijian word. that means community and sitting down together and talking. So it really sits well with the spaces concept. And that's where people have been sharing their experience of lockdown and, you know, I guess sort of shared grieving and so on. So it's, you know,

the ability to be able to record those conversations in an appropriate way, obviously, is really valuable because then it can go everywhere. It can go then on Facebook and so on. So what are the things that I like about what you're bringing up is, again, that small group intimacy in the sense where if, as you say, there's a small group of people, maybe it's, you know, 10, 15, 20 people, it doesn't have to be a lot. And they are using Twitter on a regular basis to come and to share and to, you know, collect themselves and maybe to grieve.

That creates a reason to record those things so that they can stay connected to that community. And, you know, one of the things that you might imagine is that those recorded spaces may just be a matter of minutes, maybe five or 10 or 20. 20 minutes. And that in and of itself, if you can catch up after the fact, especially if there's transcriptions at some point, that could be very valuable. Kvon. 100%. Do you want to add anything? Chris, how's it going? Good, man. Long time to talk. Yeah. Yeah, welcome. Kayvon, sorry, can I just say that you're Kvon from Twitter so that listeners will know that

true? I guess that's my identity now. I'm Kavon from Twitter. Well, this is also Kavon that I quoted earlier. Kavan, I did excerpt your tweet earlier about communities. That's kind of where this conversation started and, you know, maybe your ears were burning or you had spies. I'm not sure which. It doesn't matter. But the thought was just to, you know, one, parse out aspects of Twitter communities and what's going on with the launch and what are some of the intentions and some of the, you know, I would call it either restrictions or challenges based on the existing Twitter privacy model. You know, building communities is always hard and people have a lot of requests and demands. And I'm sure, you know,

wedging this into a, I don't want to call it a legacy product, but a product that has legacy is certainly challenging. And then we were just talking a bit about the possibility of recorded spaces and what that might mean and how that might be useful. Yeah, there's lots of good stuff there. I think one of the interesting things about Twitter as a product is really that, you know, communities have existed for quite some time. It's one of the coolest things about the Twitter product is you can actually create community and talk with people who share very similar interests. But the product itself doesn't offer a very structured way of doing that, which is part of the charm and awesomeness of Twitter. But it is nevertheless somewhat limited in terms of its boundaries and how you can sort of make sure the conversation stays on track

and that the community really establishes social norms that are shared amongst all the people who are talking about it. So that's really one of the things we're really interested in sort of productizing through the sort of Capital C community's product that we announced today, or at least made available in beta today. And there's a lot that I love about this product, now least of which is it's really starting to expose some new sort of like foundational product mechanics that you couldn't really use before in Twitter. So I sort of mentioned some of these in my thread, which I think you might have posted in this. If you look at the nest, you'll find it. Yeah. So narrowcasting, being able to make sure that when you're talking within a community, it's only being sort of amplified to the people who are in that community. I think is, sorry if you're hearing my doorbell.

I think the door dash is here. So hopefully that's not knowing. But I think that sort of being able to narrowcast so that your tweets are only being amplified to the people who are in that community is. is something I'm really looking forward to see how it evolves. But personally, I think, is a really powerful mechanic that's been missing on the platform. And we'll hopefully make people feel more comfortable talking without the sort of anxiety of like,

oh, man, this thing I'm saying is going to get broadcasted to all my followers. Some of my followers really don't give a shit about this thing that I'm talking about right now. So you sort of constantly have to evaluate whether what you're saying is worth broadcasting to all of your followers. The community's product, at least intends to solve that problem and just give you a more targeted space to talk freely about the things that you're interested. And right now, obviously, that's enabled through tweeting to the community.

But as you, I think we're alluding to when I hopped in this space, there's no reason why that can't also extend to, you know, having a space like this. Any media objects, really, right? Yeah, exactly. So, so this raises a number of interesting things. And I, one, I agree with you that community has always been, you know, the sort of mycelial structure. within Twitter, but as my cilium is, it's sort of a mess of different, you know, shards and different things like that, like that are trying to connect and find each other, but sort of never push through the soil, maybe to come up and say, this is this community about this, other people can

come over here and hang out with us and we'll find each other that way. One of the things that I think is actually very funny, and I don't know if you saw this, but in the blog post that I wrote before, I proposed the hashtag, I had this idea that I called whispering tweets. And the idea was that if you prefixed your tweet with a with a exclamation point, which is probably not the best character for it, but regardless, it would not get broadcast to all of your followers. And of course, this was back in 2007 when if you tweeted, of course, it would be sent out via SMS to everyone that was following you. And so I didn't want that stage fright pressure either. And I wanted to be able to still post to my profile without having that broadcast. So obviously now we're in a

different era. We have mobile phones and, you know, push notifications, et cetera. So, the way I kind of think about the community's product as it's launched today is as a kind of set of hedge rows where people have their little garden parties and people can peek into them or peer over the hedge and kind of see what's going on. And that allows for, as you said, kind of a depressurized way of gathering people together without necessarily having to create an expressly private or secret context for those conversations to occur, which then allows for the mechanic of, you know, someone, Oh, man, now I'm thinking, what was that show with Tim and the neighbor, you know, the handyman show? Anyways.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tim the toolman Taylor. Exactly. And he, like, has the guy who is just always the eyeballs in the hat. Anyways, he looks over the hedge and he's, you know, hey, neighbor, how's it going? That kind of thing. It feels like this allows for that mechanic to occur. And so, for example, I saw a couple of communities today.

One is the Astro Twitter group. The other is climate, which Eric, who we've had in the show before, has talked about. And in that way, I can not see the tweets. They're not on Eric's profile, but I can reach out to Eric and say, hey, I'm really interested in this topic. Would you mind adding me to that community? And so that creates something that's a little bit more of a porous membrane than just having a perfectly secret context or space for those conversations to occur.

Yeah, I think that's spot on. I think it's the combination of the community space existing and the mechanics allowing members of that community to be able to have free form conversation within it, but then mixed with the sort of mechanics of tweets, in particular, quote tweeting, because people who are sort of like peering into the community or find something interesting and want to take that piece of content or that thought and expose it out to their followers outside of the community, the quote tweet will always be there for that. So I think it's that interplay that gives you the sort of the, the, sort of the, the, sort of the, the, fluidity of Twitter and the sort of like singular universe that exists on Twitter today, which is like very magical and fluid, but combining it with the depth and the space and the control that the community participants, be it the mods or be it the folks who are actually talking within the community itself have. I think it's that interplay together that we think is really fascinating. Obviously, as with any other early product, like I'm sure it's going to evolve in lots of directions based on how people use it, but that's what we find really exciting about it.

So I got one quick question here, just in terms of process. So given, again, what I said before about just the nature and the structure and, you know, the norms, I suppose, that are present on Twitter, building a community product, you know, on top of can either be sort of a slot in or, you know, it's like building a parking lot and like hoping people use it effectively. Is the Twitter community, now, granted, it's going to evolve, et cetera, you know, but I imagine it's intended as kind of your best current thinking and also, you know, know, some features were probably cut to explore just the basic fundamentals.

Were there any compromises made along the way to get to this sort of expression of communities, or is this the ideal community's product that you wanted to bring, you know, you and the team, you know, to Twitter today? Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, it makes sense in the sense that I totally understand the question you're asking. The answer to this, I would answer the same way for literally any other product, which is our MVP is always a very, very small fraction of what the product actually wants to be when it grows up. And there are all kinds of decisions we had to make around where do we want to start and what are we optimizing for in terms of learning.

And what is the right sort of end-to-end experience that we can put a bow around as like a first thing to put in front of customers? Because we could easily iterate into oblivion endlessly for years and not actually putting anything in front of customers. So I think we got to a good place. Of course, there's a bunch of things that give us heartburn. and we're super excited about to improve and ship. I think a big, on that sort of note,

one big area where we definitely need to improve and add some functionality is around making the management of the community space, making the capabilities that the moderators have at the disposal, just way more full-futured and way more self-service. It's quite limited right now as a starting point. Exactly. And that's, to me, to the team and in my personal view as well, like, that is probably the biggest deterrent to us scaling out communities.

Because, you know, we have a very small number of communities that we've sort of made available to start with. But like where the future of this product goes is it's completely open and people can form their own communities. And we're never going to be able to predict upfront what the best communities are and what the right social norms are. So I think we have to put that capability in the hands of customers to be able to evolve that on their own. that's going to require some features in place that just don't exist right now. And so that's kind of like one of the primary things were... What are the... What would you say are some of the top things you want to learn with this test right now?

At the top questions that you're like, ah, I really wonder how this is going to go. It's a good question. I mean, I think for me personally, I'm super interested in... To me, like, any great community's product, the people who are crafting that space, and I'm using that term very loosely, need to have an immense amount of control

around setting the tone, the culture, the vibe, the norms, the rules. And I think, like many other things on Twitter, like people are going to do lots of very creative things to craft those norms. And so I think what's going to be important for us to learn is what are the capabilities and levers that we need to introduce in the product?

to give people that canvas. Like right now, that canvas is quite limited. You know, you can title a community, you can set rules for the community, you have a banner, you know, piece of artwork for the community. But I suspect that over time will want to introduce lots of other levers

that let people kind of express the intentionality of the community, the norms around the community. I think that's where a lot of the magic happens. So that's one thing, in particular earlier on we want to learn because, again, it's that sort of gating function of how we can expand community creation more.

Kavon, I am curious about the fact that, you mentioned that at the beginning that we want to encourage people to express themselves more. When you shut down fleets, it was like, well, we were hoping that this would encourage people. It's the whole 99-1 rule where most people are lurkers and 1% of users participate a lot. But at the same time, clearly,

a lot of your other initiatives are about enabling the 1% to monetize what they're doing, have a greater reach and platform for what they're doing. So if you had to say what your team's focus is the most, is it encouraging the 90% to participate on Twitter more, or is it platforming and enabling the 1% to do more on Twitter? You know, the short answer is it's a portfolio balance. You know, Twitter is a vast enough product, and we have a wide enough cohort of customers that are using the product that we, I think we do need to improve the product across different dimensions at the same time. Sorry, I'm literally being chased by my dogs who are making a lot of noise, and I keep moving to a different room so that they're not annoying me, and they just keep following.

So hopefully that's not a door dash pluster dogs. That would be just very stressful. It's just a perfect storm. But so that's the short answer is like we need to improve the product in multiple dimensions. Like one such dimension is, you know, creators who are probably in your, in the definition that you just laid out, but part of that 1%, you know, they're already sort of heavy and, you know, common content creators, but they have sort of a unique set of needs, which is they're really trying to sustain a living with their craft.

And one of the ways that we can help them do that is helping them make money on the platform from their audience, whether it's through tips or subscriptions or one of off gifts or whatever it might be. And so that is an important part of our strategy because we know that in order for creators to feel sort of motivated and inspired to continue creating content on the platform, we need to help serve that need. And then on the other hand, we have other customers that were really focused on. Like for example, a lot of people come to Twitter for the first time on a daily basis.

And it's our job to help understand what they care about, what they're interested in, beyond that thing that brought them to Twitter that day. And it's our job to help connect them to the content of people, the communities. And so there's a whole lot we're doing in that dimension as well that focuses on a very different problem, right? It's not creator focus, it's more consumption focused. And it focuses on sort of like the beginnings of a customer's journey into the product rather than someone who's been using the product for years potentially.

So, you know, we don't focus on any one of these cohorts, but we do think that, you know, the combination of all the products that we create that serve these needs should and can work cohesively together in the same way that communities and topics and spaces and super follows are starting to converge and have like a cohesive feel to them or at least that's our aspiration I mean and I want to get Remy up here does this and I know this is probably going to be too soon so I kind of know the answer but does that suggest that paid communities would be on the horizon possibly it's not something we're actively working on right I think the intersection that we're more focused on right now is making sure that new form

factors like spaces can work cohesively across these new things. Yeah, we mentioned like ticketed spaces in communities and how those things might relate or not. Yeah, and being able to start up space to just your super followers, for example, which you can't do right now. So that that sort of intersection we're quite focused on right now. But the rest of it is not any sort of like philosophical deter. more just, you know, we're prioritizing.

Yeah, got it. Remy? Okay, so, Kevin, by the way, thanks for the invitation earlier. Sorry, I was like multitasking in a meeting. I couldn't join. No, no worries. Like, I think that's what happens with so many Twitter spaces.

We just have there, and we know that there are a lot of people that come, that poke their heads and then go, I can't actually join, but I really did want to listen in or I did want to poke in for the 90 seconds that it had. So no worries at all. My question is going to be one of the things that we were actually talking about earlier, which is the balance between ease of use slash access and trust in the product. So right now, it's really easy to send a tweet, right? That being said, there are quite a few tweets that aren't the best and sometimes are often negative.

sometimes. And on the other hand, there's this, when you curate who can, when you have less people that are curated to be able to use a product or use a feature, then there's a higher trust in the feature in itself. Right? So because there's only five communities right now, there's at least speaking for myself, there's a pretty high trust in V that those five communities are going to be pretty good representations of how those communities represent themselves on Twitter. So looking into the future, how do you balance, like, I'm not sure if you can't answer this question. How do you think about the balance between opening, having a feature accessible for people on Twitter while also. trying to promote a higher level of trust as you move into the future of Twitter than maybe some people have had in the past? You know, it's a really insightful question, and it's something that I think we weighed quite a bit. I would say it gave us some anxiety as we were thinking about how to roll this out, because,

you know, the short answer to the question is this is a very temporary sense. state. It is not actually accurate nor durable for us, for there to be like five communities that represent the totality of what communities are people are interested on Twitter. Like even Astro Twitter, you know, there are probably many, many permutations, I won't even mention a number, whether it's dozens or hundreds, who knows, but there are many, many permutations of quote-unquote communities that are likely to exist in, you know, in the future. So it's just, it's not the case that we could pick one community or one set of moderators to represent that entire sort of like informal community that exists in the Twitter sphere across regions and

geographies and languages. Like a classic example of this would be, you know, sports Twitter, right? Like there's probably like many such derivations of like NBA Twitter or Warriors Twitter. Like there's Steph fans and what, you know, like you can cut it in so many different ways. So this is a very temporary starting point where we wanted to make sure we, um, made the product available, had it available to enough of a cross-section of communities that we could sort of hit the ground running and learn as quickly as possible, but not open it up wide enough that we would have to spend, like, many, many quarters building all the features that we think would

be necessary for us to feel like we were responsibly making a brand new product permit available very widely. Like, that's ultimately the trade-off. But I think, you know, really the more interesting future point is when the community, no pun intended, the people on Twitter can sort of craft as many of these permutations as make sense to them. Maybe they'll gravitate towards one master astro community, maybe, you know, mods disagree and want to have their own sort of slightly different take on the community that focuses on the different subset of the space or has different social norms. Like, we don't want to be in the business of determining that. ultimately the community, again, no pun intended, should be determining that.

And so this starting point is a very temporal starting point and not the end state. So, Remy, sorry to jump in there a little bit. Like one of the things that I think Remy is pointing to, and we also had a question from the audience that I think pertains to this, is a little bit about, you know, one, I mean, not that I'm too close to it, but a little close to it. You know, there's obviously, you know, hashtags, and that's a way of finding and joining communities. Then there's topics, and those are not hashtags, but they kind of are, I guess, curated by, you know, the overlords at Twitter or something or a system or something. And then there's these communities. And one of the features, as I understand, the narrowcasting is to communicate with a small subset of people. And yet there are still Twitter-like actions, for example, retweeting a community,

targeted post to a broader audience. So there's still the potential of things going viral. There's still the possibility of broadcasting occurring. And I guess I'm just curious how or if these communities are intended to be small and more group-like or something that's actually new and novel and doesn't exist on any other social platform. Like in other words, like Brian and I were talking about how this is sort of similar to Reddit and subreddits. But it's not often the case that there's kind of like, you know, if someone does a cannonball into a pool, then like, you know, the splash kind of goes into like the neighbor's pool, which is what a retweet from a community would be, essentially. So do you see this as being new and different as far as community

architectures go? Is it conventional in some ways? Like, I guess I'm, you know, we are trying to read the tea leaves a little bit, but there's a lot of behavioral norms that get designed in from this, these early, I guess, example communities. And so what are you sort of thinking about that context collapse or potential for context collapse and for broadcasting what was previously narrowcasted content? There's a bunch of interesting questions in there. One, I think, I guess one thing I'll say is like architecturally, we think it's very, the way we've built the product, I think is very interesting because it allows for the depth

of interaction that you. would get in a sort of siloed community while still allowing for the fluidity and the sort of singular universe of Twitter today by virtue of having the sort of like quote tweet mechanic and letting people dive in, pull content out. And, you know, that is, you know, if we're making platform comparisons, that's harder to achieve with these other platforms that are more sort of deeply rooted in enabling communities to thrive. So, you know, we think that's interesting. But again, time will tell based on how people use the product. Ultimately, we can intellectualize this only so much.

We have to put it in the hands of customers as to see how it's used. Right, right. But I think that there's, just given how I'm sure we all use Twitter, there's something to that that I think is very fascinating. It has the best of both worlds, right? Like, Twitter is very magical and it's fluidity today, but it doesn't allow for that depth, or at least the sort of like safe conversation space to exist for people to go deep, you know,

on some shared interest. Ironically, I think, like, actually absent the community as product spaces is a really awesome rendition of this that's expressed in a very different mechanical way. Like, these spaces are micro-communities, right? Like, so much depth of conversation happens. But they're also ephemeral, which is different.

Totally. That dimension obviously changes the equation entirely because of its form factor is very different. It has to be synchronous versus asynchronous. There's a whole lot there that makes it very unique, but fundamentally it allows for sort of depth of expression that's a lot harder to achieve through sort of asynchronous back and forth tweets. And I think communities, the product enables that same sort of expression through a very different

format. But again, and I don't mean this as a cop out, like a lot of this, we just need to see how people use it. And we want to lean into its strengths and accentuate it to be even better in that regard. And the things that make it sort of not work well, we want to see if we can make it and improve and this is just a starting point. And in terms of feedback, I mean, given like, you know, the narrow launch, the small number of groups, it's not available for everybody to join. Is there a way for people to provide feedback

that's useful? Or is it sort of like, let's just wait. You guys have your small petri dishes. You're going to see, you know, if the bacteria grows and if then, you know, whether this is like worth releasing to the crowd or are there ways that you want people to interact with this now or shortly? And do you have a sense for how quickly you will actually be expanding the number of people who can join these communities? Well, so joining communities right now, anyone can join. It's invite only in the sense that moderators need to accept invitations, but we're not governing that. The thing that we're focusing on scaling is community creation. Right now, that's like we've got a governor on that

as we sort of build the right capabilities. Right now people have to go through a Google form and request a community. And like, are you actively soliciting new groups and formats in different people? And if so, who are you specifically looking for for that purpose? And I'll pin the tweet to the invitation link. Yeah, the team is definitely, you know, accepting invitations and we're, you know, people are welcome to obviously apply. But again, that's a very temporary, like our goal ultimately is to make, just like you can create a list or start space, like you don't have to apply to start a space to talk about whatever you want. The goal is to make that self-service as well.

So ultimately, that's the main thing we're focused on from a expansion standpoint. But joining, as those new communities come to exist, people are able to join them or request to be joined. And the invitation model is also just a feature we're working on. Right now, it's invite only. We're going to add a feature that lets moderators make them just open invitation or not opt, not a require acceptance.

Ultimately, like all of this in the future will be moderator controlled. Got it. Remy, you got one more question? So I'm going to toss this question to you, although I recognize that this may be more of a social team question. Were slash our Twitter-run communities part of the question? part of the conversation. You mean like Twitter owned? Yeah, like the way that Twitter run,

like Twitter media or like Twitter sports. Like Twitter run communities. Like official communities. Well, I can tell you that one of the most fun communities we've been using internally as like our dog fooding or beta testing is like we have a community for Twitter employees,

which is a private community right now. We sort of hack that one because we don't actually support private communities, but we've been using the product ourselves through the lens of the Twitter community. It's actually kind of like, it's a really interesting and powerful. Chris can probably appreciate this since he worked at Twitter,

but imagine having Twitter for your company. It's like having an internal Slack, but with the mechanics of Twitter. It's been really fun and a helpful way for us to use the product. So it's not exactly answering our question because it's not like an official exposed public one, but, you know, we will, we're philosophically open to using the community's product in the same way that Twitter the

company uses the rest of the Twitter product, whether it's us tweeting or posting, you know, starting spaces and hosting conversations about, you know, the company updates or whatever it might be. Like in the same way, we'll totally consider using communities in different ways. That's just not been our focus right now. Like our focus has been empowering people on Twitter to use the product because that's ultimately what matters. As we get further along, I'm sure we'll We'll try lots of things in terms of how we can make use of the product on our own. For now, it's just been the internal version that I mentioned, which has been tremendously useful because we can use the product ourselves every day. I mean, dog fooding is obviously so essential, so that's pretty awesome.

Are you noticing any new behavior amongst the folks who are using the internal employees-only community? I mean, that would be a great question for the team. My personal answer is like, absolutely. it satisfies one of the original goals, which was like to give people a, you know, give people a safer space to talk about things that are shared, you know, things that are, things interested they share with others. And obviously, because it's a somewhat contrived example that's very clear because it's a company. And of course, like, you need to have an internal communication space. Like we all know that from Slack and otherwise. But yeah, narrow casting as a capability, I think is going to be. a game changer. And I've certainly felt that way using the product. And I'm really excited to see how people end up using it in the more proper context, which isn't like an internal dog food. But I think it's very much enabled people to feel like they can tweet without being as concerned about it being broadcasted to all their followers. Like that I think is a core

limitation, frankly, of Twitter that holds some people back from tweeting. Like some people that actually, it doesn't hold them back whatsoever because they're so comfortable expressing themselves in the public record, which is awesome. But I think that's, not everyone feels that way. I would resonate with what you just said came on, just putting that out there. In which direction around me?

Like, you feel comfortable talking on the public record? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I definitely self-censored a decent amount on, like, when I think, have thoughts, I'm like, oh, I should put this on Twitter. Maybe I won't put this on Twitter. Yeah, no, and I think that's very natural, right? Like speaking, like standing on a stool, shouting in public and having that thing last on the internet forever is kind of scary. So I think,

and it's nevertheless quite powerful, like Twitter, you know, I'm obviously biased, but it's an incredible service that exists in the world off the back of that very simple and powerful medium. But yet, if we want to make more people feel comfortable talking in public, we have to adapt and evolve the form factors and mechanics to allow more people to, have the control to feel comfortable with that. Not everyone feels comfortable with the extreme. And so one of the things that I want to, I guess, a tension or a seam that I see here is between group DMs

and the DM product, just direct messaging in general on Twitter, based on what you just said, and this narrowcasting. Because the smallest stage is the one where everyone is known and everyone is contained within a private space. And so the tension, it feels like, you know, if there's like some sliders or toggles that move in one direction or the it would be like a really amazing DM product. But that isn't the direction that it feels like you guys are going in.

And I don't know who's running DMs, but whatever. Clearly there's a lot of energy and excitement around communities. How do you see those two areas or features interacting? It's a great question. You know, I think of it as a spectrum. Like there are really valuable use cases for private conversation. There are really valuable use cases for public conversation and then there are valuable use cases that are in between and that's that in

between is really that's the itch that we're scratching in terms of figuring out what that wants to be and I think ultimately like Twitter's purpose is about serving public conversation like that is our differentiator yeah that is our sort of reason for being and so a lot of these um the the spirit of our exploration of the spectrum ultimately is about strengthening public conversation but we're not so religious about it that we don't recognize that private conversation and semi-public conversation can be very powerful bridges to public conversation. And so that's sort of, that's kind of how we think about it, right? It's a spectrum and we have to make sure that we're offering graduation paths in both directions. Like sometimes you actually want to take a piece of

content that's public and talk about it with a group of people in private. Like that's just like a very natural human thing to do. And if we don't offer capabilities like that, people are just going to take content off of our platform and go to iMessage or Facebook or whatever it might be. And so that, you know, that exploration of the spectrum, I think, is where the interesting, where the magic lies. You know, also to your point, it's like you, it's almost like you're building a nice funnel. It's like, all right, play in this little sandbox, then playing this bigger sandbox, and then now you're at the beach. At the same time, one of the things that we've struggled with for a generation is to reflect some of the nuances

and the ways in which, you know, humans communicate through a broad spectrum of different, you know, context and cues and sense of space and kind of mutual awareness. So I think, you know, the design and feature set that communities has launched with, I think is interesting because it's not purely derivative of what else is out there. You know, there isn't this type of narrow casting that is to a small subset of people, but it is not automatic. a broadcast channel that has infinite reach. And so some of the problems and the negative dynamics have been about, obviously, looking at the incentive structures for why and how people post. And when you give people a megaphone, those that have a message that they want to bring to the world and they have no shame about it can actually be quite negative and

antisocial. So this dynamic is really interesting. It's sort of a modest, you know, like garden hose relative to the common fire hose. that I think a lot of people either don't know how to wield effectively or wield it so effectively that they sort of like obliterate, you know, a whole society or culture or, you know, democracy. So it's going to be very interesting, I think, to watch how these dynamics do evolve and unfold. And I think it's going to be fascinating to, well, and hopefully, you know, Kavon, you and your team can share some of these learnings and insights so that we get an insight into the things that you push back on and the things that you say no to. because there's going to be so many people that come with a set of norms and expectations about, you know, the privilege of reach that they should have with different social features and products that one of the opportunities that Twitter has is to define a new, you know, safer space for a different type of expression that currently really doesn't have a home on the social web. So I think that's, I don't know, pretty exciting.

Yeah, it's interesting. Totally everything you said resonates with me. And I think there's a few demonstrations. dimensions to it. One is what is the sort of scaffolding that we're providing people when they're trying to talk? Like, is this stage public? Is it private? Is it semi-public? Who can respond? How much control is there? Like, that's the sort of dimension you're seeing us really push on with communities. Then there's another dimension, which is what is the form factor for that conversation to unfold? you know, tweets are a very specific form factor. It's short form, it's short form text-based expression,

which is one very powerful form of expression, and really has been Twitter's bread and butter, but you've obviously seen us trying to expand that quite a bit as well, right? Supporting voice, supporting media through projects like fleets, supporting long-form thought expression, which we're doing through our acquisition of review. So I think that sort of pushing that envelope on giving people,

new form factors is really important. And then the third dimension is incentives. You mentioned earlier, Chris, but there's a lot about the incentives of our platform that dictate what types of discourse unfold and what types of discourse can't unfold. And especially how that intertwines with the formats on the platform has a really big impact on what types of conversations can occur or can't occur. So I think it's that interplay between all those is really, really important. And that's kind of like a lot of what you're seeing.

seeing us launch is tugging on one or all of those dimensions. You know, I had this really, I had several conversations at this event that I was at over this weekend about, you know, social media, big tech, you know, and its impact on culture. And one of the things that I came away with that I haven't quite articulated before or really, I think, put in the same, you know, spatial dimension in my mind was that there are a set of choice architectures that social networks and platforms, develop and design. And then they roll out to their user base. And then on the other hand, there are incentive structures. And what I realize is that there's a lot of frustration when you

are subject to choice architectures that you didn't vote for or you didn't choose, and they're imposed upon you. And then there's incentive structures that get people to act or behave a certain way within these social environments that also can privilege or enhance certain behaviors and and so on. And once I started to realize that either you're subject to or the creator of both of those different pressures in a space, it started to make a lot more sense, you know, one, why democracy or representative democracy is actually important because at least then you have a sense of say in how your life is dictated and determined. But we live in a world now where, you know, we choose products to use based on kind of market dynamics, you know, the best product

ideally wins. But we're at a place now where that actually isn't quite, I don't know, working. So anyways, not to get to philosophical or high level, but I think it would be really valuable. And I would, I guess, invite you and like the team and everyone who's working on this stuff to share more of your learnings and more of what you're finding is leading to. And I know you do this and you have a whole initiative around healthy conversations, but to share the results of that. Because there are a lot of people who are working on, you know, whether it's Dow's in the crypto space or other types of social architectures and products that could benefit from the insights that you'll be learning throughout this process. So it just, it seems like we need to

understand a little bit more of this and then socialize some of those, those learnings. Yeah, it's a, it's a good question. We've always, you know, tried to be super transparent with our work, sometimes potentially to the annoyance of our customers who are like, It's hard to separate the signal from the noise. Right. But one of my favorite examples of this that one of our projects is really embracing is we have a project called Birdwatch, which is basically an attempt to create a crowdsourced, a crowdsourced solution to misleading information, sort of like Wikipedia, but for labeling and annotating

misleading information on Twitter. And the product itself is very interesting. I would encourage you all if you haven't heard of it to go to the birdwatch. You can find it at Twitter.com slash I slash birdwatch, I think is how to get it. Yeah, and I thought it was birdwatch. Twitter.com, but maybe you're right. Anyway, just Google it.

You can find it. But the product itself is fascinating in its own right, but one of the very intentional things the team has done is they're being very transparent around the product itself. The product is open source. All of the data that we're collecting from the product is available for people to learn from. The good, the bad, the ugly, like, you can imagine building a crowdsource platform like this for labeling misleading information. Like, one of the difficulties is creating a system of incentives that ensures that

ecosystem of misleading information annotations are actually healthy and not like a total dumpster fire. And the entire from A to Z product experience and results set from the community is entirely public, which I think has been really awesome just in terms of our own learning. And we have so many researchers that are leveraging the data set. of helping advise us and criticizing and complimenting and everything in between. So I think that's all a long way of saying, like, we're very much trying to embrace the spirit of transparency, and we'll certainly take that into account for all of our work.

By the way, we were both right. Birdwatch.com does redirect to Twitter.com slash I slash birdwatch. So people can find it that way. There you go. Brian, anything else you want to add? No, we can shut it down and thank Kavon if you'd like. I was bringing to the table a segment to close with. If you want to experiment with it, we can.

But otherwise, if you think that the conversation... Drop it on us. All right. You want to know what it is? And Kavan, Kvon, thank you. So you can dip out at any time. here's how I thought we would end this time. Yeah, appreciate it.

This is things that are in my queue that I might not be able to use this week. I've got three things. Are you interested in that at all? Does that sound good, or we can just cut it out right now? I mean, I'm down. I'm down. Let's go. Okay.

I'm going to do these real quick. And jump in if you've got anything that you want to say about it. But I said today I let off with the Coinbase and the SEC thing about how Coinbase wants to do this lending program. And they say that the SEC is going to threatening to sue them if they do it. And Coinbase's argument, and I don't have any skin in this game, was that the SEC hasn't told them why they can't do it.

Apparently they have. Some people have been pointing out that the SEC is basically pointing to like the original like 1933 law of the SEC like paragraph one where it basically read the fucking manual well you know again I have no skin in this game a lot of people smarter than me were like they don't need to tell you because it's the paragraph one of the law that you should know so I found that interesting I probably won't sell up on that but number two I would love to follow up on this but I probably won't, which is that

Substack is apparently has a $30 million fund to entice big comic book creators to their platform. Which, by the way, Hamish of Substack tweeted subsequently that he's like, well, that's news to me. At the same time,

this makes a ton of sense. I thought he was quoted in that article. He is quoted in the article, but then I saw a tweet later where he's like, well, maybe he's quibbling about the $30 million or whatever. I'm going to birdwatch that tweet of his and say, uh-uh, you're quoted in his article. Well, what's interesting to me about it is, so, you know, coming from the podcast space, a lot of podcast companies, the way that they've sort of made their business models work,

is to turn their podcasts into TV shows and movies and things like that. I would call these metaverses, actually. That's kind of like what I'm going with. I would, you know, this general trend, by the way, just to jump in here on this Marvel one, or whatever, the comic book artist or writer thing, you know, one of the quotes that, it's in this article, and I will pin the tweet so you can confine this. I'm going to do the Coinbase one first, and we'll do the sub-stack one second. So those are up in the nest. One of the quotes was this question about, well, what are publishers good for anymore? And I think that is what's happening. We are in the middle of reconsidering our institutions

and the function that they serve. And distribution is no longer the hard part. And it seems like the hard part is actually engagement and connection. And what, you know, James Timian, Tinian, who's one of the authors that's mentioned and a bunch of other folks. And, you know, I'm a big comic book nerd and I'm familiar with a lot of these names and I have hundreds of their physical comics. You know, they create these metaverses, these universes of characters and they kind of match, you know, and interact all these different things together. where where I think this is going is in some ways maybe looking at what's happening with fanfic, you know, what happened with actually what we were talking about last week, loot and NFTs, and creating these participatory content universes where, oh my God, get this, I just blew my own mind.

What if imagine open source, now maybe this is already happening, but I'm applying words to it that I think is relevant. What if there was like a benevolent dictator of these metaverses that created these characters in which their attributes are actually forged as NFTs, and then the community can go and actually build on top of those basic fundamental units of character development. And it allows downstream little collaborations and creative groups to come together, and the attributes of the Superman NFT are sort of set in stone, and so on and so forth.

So that allows for more of a conductor role over this content to exist, and they've been building these universes for Marvel and DC for some time. And so Substack gets to be the context in which those creators are producing and sharing that IP. And as long as they're building up the momentum of the Substack platform, it all works out. Right. Because the main point that I wanted to point out is that they're supposedly allowing, if they do have all of this money to get these comics creators to come over, they're saying, we'll take our 10% of revenue generated on the platform, but you own the IP. So that's actually different than, again, like some of the models and podcasting where it's like,

well, we'll sell this podcast to Netflix and they'll create a Julia Roberts, whatever, out of it. So essentially, you could be a Marvel or DC comic creator and create a new IP on Substack, own the IP, sell it to the movie studios and whatnot. So they're not doing the thing where they're like, well, we also want a piece of that. The behavior is different, right?

And so if we talk about disruptive technology, it would be foolish to not understand that behavior is technology in the sense that over time people in industry figured out how to do things repeatedly and in sort of

whittled it down to an art or a science. Technology is just the application of scientific innovation. And so if the behavior was to become a studio or an IP holding licensing firm, like a Disney or whatever, then the role of the publisher or the licensor or whatever was to get a bunch of creative people, own all the stuff that they produce, and then hoard out for the rest of existence while the creators make Didley Squad. Whereas what the subsect founders have talked about, you know, which is, I suppose, in some ways, somewhat resistant to that former model is saying,

we want to enable creators to make a living doing what they're doing. And because we're now doing this at internet scale, owning IP is no longer the thing that's really valuable. What's valuable is the engagement. It's the conversations. It's, you know, what's happening between fan and creator and whether fans at scale are willing to pay to have those relationships. So that to me seems like the dynamic that's boiling up here. The other thing that I would be thinking about is whether and when and how Substack evolves possibly beyond text.

We know that Substack already allows producers to do podcasts, but there's no reason why Substack needs to limit itself to only email newsletters indefinitely. Certainly that's a great place to start, but Amazon started with books, and Amazon is no longer just a book retailer. So once they have the creators on the platform,

and they have this positive, sentiment, that's disruptive to the existing sort of creator platforms that existed, you know, 50 or 100 years ago that demanded all of that blood, sweat, and tears, and left those artists and creators kind of without, well, I mean, I'm sure there's some licensing proceeds that they get, but nonetheless, a greater sort of, you know, payday at front and a longer-term relationship going forward. Okay, last one. And this can be really quick, because, you know, this is neither here or there.

but so Apple event on Tuesday it's probably going to be a snoozer although we think that the Apple watch Why do you say that? Because it seems like we'll get a screen refresh for the phones and like, you know, we'll get better chips and batteries and things. The same thing is normal. Right, right. And the watch will have, will look different for the first time. I think that that's the most interesting thing to me is like if you get one of these new watches, you should be able to buy site. be like, oh, that's one of those new watches or whatever.

But, okay, this is super meta. Okay. But because it is so boring, we, you know, and this is, this is meta and behind the scenes stuff, and this is something that I would never cover because, like, we don't necessarily cover rumors because, you know, unless it really feels like it's going to happen. The whole Apple rumor industrial complex exploded this afternoon with huge rumors about huge changes to the iPhone, but not the iPhone 13, which is coming on Tuesday.

All of these rumors exploded with renders and things for the iPhone 14, which will be next year, where they're claiming they're going to go to a titanium frame, that it's going to be thicker, that the phone bump, or the camera bump is going to go away, which I guess you would have to make the phone thicker to do that, that the notch is going to go away, all of these things. And again, I'm not saying that there's any comment that we have on this, but I just found it fascinating that, because like any other industry, if something's boring, you still have to, you still have to pay the bills.

So it was hilarious to me that all of these rumor sites exploded this afternoon, not about what's happening on Tuesday, but about the iPhone 13th, but about next year. Right, right, right, right. Because it's so boring that they had to gin up all of these renders about what could happen next. Anyway, you know, I would love to, I suppose, you know, bookmark this and come back to it and find out if this was just a big sort of, you know, campaign to like gin up interest and to make the most of it. And it's just a commercial, you know, thing. And it is, you know, fake news. Good point. And by the way, if any of these things happen, if like the camera bump goes away on Tuesday, then, hey, you know, be. We owe people huge claim chat or apologies for Claims, we'll birdwatch this this

episode. But that is funny. Do you think that we're going to get the MacBook Pros? Oh, no. I'm 100% believing at this point we're going to get three Apple events this fall and we're just going to get the watch and the phone on Tuesday. I think that we will get the Mac Pros. I think we'll get the iPad update sometime after that and then we'll get the Mac pros as the last thing of the year. I just can't wait.

I just can't wait. Me neither. All right. Well, this was another excellent episode of the TechMeme Ride Home Experience. Thanks for everyone who came up today and added questions or sent me DMs with your questions. That is a very nice narrow casting way of participating in the show. So if you guys want to do that in the future, feel free to do so. We will be here, I believe, next week.

And we will talk to you then. Night, everyone. Thanks guys. Ciao.