This week, Elon Musk revealed that he has purchased a 9% stake in Twitter, and has joined the company's board of directors. Media coverage has focused on Musk's pro-free-speech views, which will probably shape how he tries to influence Twitter. But there are also many other ways that we might hope to tweak Twitter for the long-term benefit of humanity!
Purchasing a prestigious, tastemaking institution (like a social media site, newspaper, university, or scientific journal), has repeatedly been proposed as an "EA megaproject". The common theme is:
1. We could buy influence over the "commanding heights of culture", then use that influence to either:
2a. Directly promote the effective-altruist worldview, like by publishing EA-flavored newspaper editorials.
2b. Generally reform and improve the rationality/functioning of those institutions, like by improving the practices of a scientific journal. (As a neutral public platform, Twitter seems best suited for this approach, rather than direct EA promotion.)
Elon Musk seems sympathetic to effective altruism, so with him on Twitter's board, we could consider Step 1 of a Twitter Megaproject partially accomplished, and get started on brainstorming specific potential reforms that Twitter could make. Personally, I think it would be cool for Twitter to add features that familiarize people with decisionmaking mechanisms like prediction markets and approval voting. But I'm sure there are other great ideas out there -- I know there have been several rationalist efforts (including this very Forum!) to design social media sites that promote especially thoughtful, productive discussion. What's your take on what Twitter could do for the long-term betterment of civilization?
Community notes seem like a genuinely helpful improvement on the margin -- but coming back to this post a year later, I would say that on net I am disappointed. (Disclaimer -- I don't use twitter much myself, so I can't evaluate people's claims of whether twitter's culture has noticeably changed in a more free-speech direction or etc. From my point of view just occasionally reading others' tweets, I don't notice any change.)
During the lead-up to the purchase, people were speculating about all kinds of ways that Twitter could try to change its structure & business model, like this big idea that it could split apart the database from the user-interface, then allow multiple user-interfaces (vanilla Twitter plus third-party alternatives) to compete and use the database in different ways, including doing the federated censorship that Larks mentioned in his comment. The database would almost become the social version of what blockchains are for financial transactions -- a kind of central repository of everything that everyone's saying, which is then used and filtered and presented in many different ways.
But instead, the biggest change so far has been the introduction of a subscription model. Maybe this is just Step 1 of a larger process (gotta start by stabilizing the company and making it profitable)... but it seems like there is no larger vision for big changes/experiments like this. With a year of hindsight, it seems like Elon's biggest concerns were just the sometimes aggressively left-wing moderation/norms of the site, and the way that the bluecheck system favored certain groups like journalists. It seems like now he's fixed those perceived problems, but it hasn't resulted in a transformative improvement to the platform, and there are simply no more steps in the plan.
So, that's unfortunate. But I am still optimistic that Twitter is interested in experimenting and trying new things -- even if there isn't a concrete vision, I guess I am still optimistic that Twitter will eventually find its way to some of these interesting ideas via small-scale experimentation and iteration.