If you want to find a person with ambition, desire and ability to create a utopia on this planet, elon musk, the Iron Man of Silicon Valley, is undoubtedly the first choice.
This technology madman has brought cutting-edge technology projects such as Tesla and SpaceX into reality, so he is extremely rich. Now his new battlefield is social network: the privatization proposal that the world’s richest man spent more than 40 billion US dollars to acquire Twitter has been approved by the company’s board of directors. Musk said in the acquisition announcement that freedom of speech is the foundation of democracy, and Twitter is a digital town square where people discuss issues that are crucial to the future of mankind. Twitter has great potential-I look forward to unlocking it with the company and the user community.
Aside from political and financial conspiracy theories, many blockchain practitioners believe that Musk’s privatization of Twitter may become a change.A utopian experiment to set things right and return to the right development path of centralization.
Taking this as a starting point, a more free and democratic Web3 version of the online speech platform (protocol) will be established. This is exactly what Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, has been trying to promote but failed repeatedly-he only owns more than 2% of the shares and has no voting control.
In this fairy tale with a clear distinction between good and evil, Dorsey is a frustrated idealist, the board of directors of Twitter is undoubtedly the spokesman of greedy capitalists on Wall Street, and Musk is a white knight who saves people from fire and water. Even Dorsey himself publicly stated that "taking it back from Wall Street is the right first step. 」In another version of the story, an oligarch grabs the world’s largest speech tool, and the danger behind it is obvious.
Reality is far more complicated than story. But no matter what kind of narrative, the importance of Twitter to the next generation Internet (Web3) is self-evident: not only because it is the largest and most controversial speech square, but also because it has the decentralized gene since its inception.
"Just created my Twitter. On March 21st, 2006, at 11: 50am, Dorsey posted the first official tweet in their oversimplified office. At this time, there were many strange things around the early employees in the office: hackers, anti-government, caravan vagrants …
The main founders are also full of free and loose colors. evan williams created the new concept of Blogger (he contributed a lot to the popularity of Blog) and devoted himself to promoting computers so that anyone can have his own newspaper; Jack Dorsey was wearing a blue explosive head and a nose ring. He had previously proved his ability by invading a company’s system to get a job. Biz Stone, on the other hand, gave up millions of dollars in salary and stock at Google in exchange for a "freer" entrepreneurial life. He is also an extreme animal lover. He once made the biggest fire in his career in order to prevent his colleagues from killing rats.
As you can imagine, Twitter’s management in this atmosphere was chaotic and disorderly in the early days. After that, it did not usher in explosive growth, and another "new creature" Facebook was the darling of the Web2 era:
By January 2006, less than two years after Facebook was founded, its users had exceeded 6 million. Viacom, an American media giant, offered $750 million to buy Facebook, while Yahoo offered $900 million.
Twitter is stuck with a seemingly simple question: how to explain itself to people.
Everyone has a different answer: "It is a network lacking sociality. ""It replaced text messages. ""It’s a new email. ""It’s a micro blog. "It is used to update your status. 」
Even though several founders didn’t figure out how to answer this question, Dorsey and Evan still disagree. Dorsey thinks Twitter is a place to tell others "what I’m doing", while Evan thinks Twitter’s role should be a way to share news, not status: Twitter is an information transmission network, not a social network.
Until mid-June 2007, when the number of Twitter users had exceeded 1 million and the first acquisition intention was ushered in, the above problems were still unresolved. Investors and news media are trying to interpret Twitter in their eyes, and even Yahoo, the acquirer, is quite confused about this. In Brickhouse, Yahoo’s business incubator, after a series of greetings and introductions, Bradley Horowitz, the person in charge at that time, couldn’t help asking the young entrepreneurs on the other side of the desk: "So, it is a social network? 」
This time, Dorsey broke the silence. "I think Twitter is a public utility," he said. "It’s an Internet broadcasting system. Then, he began to describe his vision for Twitter and pointed out that its status is equivalent to electricity.
It is conceivable that Bradley looked puzzled when he heard these answers, especially the idea that social media companies are a public utility. After the meeting, Bradley said goodbye to the founders one by one and told Evan, "We’ll be in touch."
Yahoo didn’t pay for this set of rhetoric. Soon after, they expressed their willingness to pay $12 million for Twitter-far below the expectations of Dorsey and others-and told Twitter that Yahoo could easily master the technology needed to set up Twitter because it was only "a simple messaging service" and "a few engineers could complete it within a week. If Twitter is not sold, then Yahoo will plan to build and release a competitive product.
There is no doubt that the three founders of Twitter rejected Yahoo’s proposal. In their view, this ironic acquisition did not undermine the confidence of the company, but promoted the team spirit. At least at that moment, "Twitter is nothing" had a consistent answer:
It is not a "message service" that Web1 bosses can take in at will, and it is also far from the classic case of "social network" Facebook in the Web2 era-for example, the tendency of decentralization defines itself as an Internet broadcasting system, and everyone can speak; For example, the original intention of opening up, greatly opening up various API interfaces, developers can call the data on the platform at will (Fred Wilson, one of Twitter investors, even thinks this is a problem); Compared with its background of emphasizing freedom and publicity.
It can be said that the above genes of Twitter almost perfectly coincide with the core requirement of the Web3 era-giving users the right to control their own data. Unfortunately, the word Web3 was not put forward by Gavin Wood (Gavin Woods), co-founder of Ethereum, until 2014.
Next, these genes that are unique to the times will influence the development direction of Twitter for many years to come, and also make it pay the price.
As time went on, Twitter began to attract enthusiastic investors. In early May 2008, the company’s valuation soared to 60 million dollars, and then it increased to 70 million dollars in the following days. Finally, when the news finally spread, the company’s worth had reached 80 million.
At the same time, chaos also spread within the company: after months of painful pulling and quarreling, Dorsey, who had been CEO of Twitter for less than seven months, was considered to have limited management ability, and was ousted by his former friend, major shareholder, co-founder Evan (holding 70% of the company’s shares) and investors. Evan personally served as CEO. Although Dorsey didn’t leave the company, he became an "invisible man" with no real power on the board of directors and a mascot who cooperated with the company’s good image in front of the media, although he didn’t want to cooperate with such a role.
Desperate and angry, Dorsey almost jumped to his arch-rival, Facebook, but finally he found what he really wanted: he co-founded Squirrel, a payment tool, with his old friend Jim Mckelvey, and later renamed it Square. At the same time, he also has a sideline-waiting for the opportunity to take revenge on Evan and the board of directors.
The line of sight goes back to Evan, the new CEO of Twitter. On February 13th, 2009, Evan took over Twitter completely. Although the company still has less than 30 full-time employees (some freelancers), Twitter is still developing rapidly, with more and more celebrities joining, and the number of users has increased by 900% within one year. In addition to the operational pressure brought by a large number of users, Evan has to deal with round after round of takeover offers.
These include technology giant Google Microsoft, famous artists, billionaires, celebrities, and even presidential candidate Al Gore. Of course, the most important opponent is Zuckerberg, who runs Facebook. In June 2010, Zuckerberg met with Twitter CEO Evan and others at his home, and once again made an invitation to buy. Twitter still chose to refuse and made clear the difference:
"People log on to Facebook to browse other people’s personal homepages, which accounts for most of the traffic on the website. News supply and information flow are only used as a springboard to browse other people’s personal homepages.Twitter has exactly the opposite experience. Information flow and news account for 90% of the traffic on the website, while the personal homepage only accounts for 10%.
In Nick Billton’s book "Incubating Twitter: A Wild Journey from Wild to IPO", the difference between Twitter and Facebook is not only the difference between social platforms and information networks (showing their personal satisfaction VS information transparency and freedom), but also they have very different moral standards:
"When Evan founded Blogger ten years ago, he established a firm belief in providing blog services. At that time, the goal of Twitter was already established: to provide people with a microphone and let them speak their minds … In the past, when government officials knocked on the door of Twitter for various reasons and asked for user information, the managers of Twitter support team would refuse," Without a search warrant, I can’t. Such an attitude has become a firm belief of Twitter for many years. Like DNA, it makes it a different kind of company in Silicon Valley.
Twitter finally resisted the court’s order to extract Twitter released by protesters in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Twitter also bravely faced the political persecution of WikiLeaks online supporters by the judicial department.
Completely different from Facebook, Twitter finally allows users to choose not to be tracked while using the service. Facebook, on the other hand, takes a completely different approach to free speech and tracking, which usually infringes on people’s privacy, and sometimes even deletes content that violates strict terms of service. Twitter is as open as a public swimming pool. 」
Contrary to the rapid expansion of every aspect of the company, the number of employees in the company is growing slowly, and the business income is still zero. Although he tried some methods, such as cutting costs and establishing close relationships with important partners, Evan still suffered the same treatment as Dorsey: the board of directors and early investors began to question whether Evan could lead Twitter to a new stage, and finally decided to oust him from the CEO position.
Nick Billton revealed in his book that Dorsey played a disgraceful role in this process, just as he thought he had been stabbed in the back by his friend, and he also betrayed his friend. It was he who actively contacted and lobbied important members of the board of directors, and finally got revenge by kicking Evan out of Twitter.
However, Dorsey did not immediately enjoy the sweetness brought by revenge, and it was still a long five years before he got his former CEO position again.
Let’s fast-forward to July 2015. When Dorsey took over as interim CEO from Dick Costolo, Twitter’s share price rose. People are expecting another story of Jobs returning to Apple to turn the tide, but at this time, the face of Twitter has changed a lot from five years ago.
In November 2013, Twitter was listed on the New York Stock Exchange and officially became a listed company. The management team’s control over the company was significantly weakened, and shareholders’ requirements for Twitter’s development speed and performance requirements were more urgent.
From 2010 to 2015, despite the stumbling, Twitter has changed from no revenue channel at all to creating revenue through advertising. To this end, the company continuously tightened the previous open API policy, banned third-party clients UberTwitter and Twidroyd in 2011, and banned the development interface of user data for third-party application developers in 2014, strictly restricting the tokens used for login. This incident upset Dorsey. At the end of 2021, he even tweeted that "this is the worst thing we have ever done", and argued that he was "not running the company at that time" and said that "the company has been trying to reopen it completely. 」
All the above behaviors have seriously damaged Twitter’s consistently open genes and public image, and at the same time, it has also attracted many criticisms, making Costello waver and limp on the balance beam of not annoying users and selling more advertisements. Not only are the growth of active users worrying, but the commercial income has never met the expectations of investors.
On the other hand, Facebook has no moral burden in extracting user data to expand the scale of advertising. In 2015, the scale of advertising realization exceeded $17 billion. At that time, a company had to do mobile advertising, and Twitter would only be considered after Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Snapchat.
There are two problems in front of Dorsey. First, the activity brought by the worsening community environment is declining, and the platform is full of lies, violence, political manipulation and zombie accounts; The second is to give back to shareholders’ demand for making money and find a stable growth business income model. He also has a deep understanding of this: "We must carry out a very difficult restructuring of this company. 」
One of the key points of the reorganization is the healthy reform of the Twitter community and the rectification of extreme speech network violence. In the last quarter of 2017, Twitter cleared 58 million accounts within three months. By 2018, the number of accounts closed in May and June alone exceeded 70 million. Twitter under Dorset often plays the role of a platform to defend the bottom line of freedom of speech, but it always has two sides: when they act actively, users complain that Twitter is too much in charge; When he wants to give up, the government and the law have the responsibility to ask them to intervene.
Efforts to increase advertising revenue are still trapped in the past genes: limiting API to keep users and data in its own hands can maximize commercial benefits, but it will also damage the reputation established by Twitter; Adhering to the original intention of opening up has made the commercialization process far behind the expectations of shareholders. Even Dorsey, who entered the second palace, did not find the key to solve the contradiction at that time.
Twitter is still limping. Although its advertising revenue keeps growing at the same pace, its speed has been greatly improved by Facebook, and it also faces competition from many rivals such as Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest. Dorsey was once again caught in the infighting of Twitter investors and almost relived the nightmare that was driven away more than ten years ago.
After the storm, although Dorsey was able to stay in office, it was even more difficult to fully control Twitter.
Mike Masnick’s famous article "Protocol, Not Platform: On the Technical Methods to Realize Freedom of Speech" published on August 21st, 2019 triggered a great discussion in the American scientific and intellectual circles, and it seems that Dorsey found a new way to solve the problem-the solution of the ——Web 3 version, and returned the censorship right to the users. He not only forwarded it the first time, but also announced a few months later that he would invest to set up a related independent team.
Dorsey also mentioned in the tweet that Twitter was like a set of protocols in the early years, but later it took another road, gradually became centralized and developed into a platform.
Soon after, Dorsey set up a team called "Bluesky" within Twitter to study the technical standards of social media decentralization. Try to build an open source and decentralized community platform, and gradually try to implement decentralization on a highly centralized community platform. The leader of the Blue Sky team is the successor (resigned) after Dorsey left Twitter.
But business problems remain to be solved:The agreement does not make money, how to maintain the company’s income? We don’t know what Dorsey really thinks, but in reality, cryptocurrency with decentralized agreement has become a possible path.So you can see that in his last few years as CEO, Dorsey almost aggressively launched a series of measures to benefit Web3 and cryptocurrency on Twitter:
He launched Twitter Space, allowing a large number of Web3 practitioners to communicate online in this space; He was also the first to launch an NFT product released by the Internet giant, so that Twitter users’ avatars can be displayed as NFT and certified; It also supports all people in the encryption circle to have a Twitter account, and every encryption project will register an account on Twitter and post a link in it. ……
Dorsey himself has become one of the most important advocates of Bitcoin. He not only praised Bitcoin as the future of cryptocurrency many times in public, but also actively promoted the integration of lightning network, set up a Bitcoin DeFi developer platform, built a Bitcoin cold wallet and built a legal currency version of Bitcoin decentralized exchange, which showed Dorsey’s yearning for a decentralized world.
Suji Yan, founder of Mask Network, is a senior entrepreneur in the field of Web3 and cryptocurrency, and one of the few early members of Bluesky.According to his close observation, Dorsey was under unprecedented internal pressure, and almost predicted that his time as CEO was running out, so that he did not hesitate to "do something big" before leaving his job. 」
In the last period of Twitter, Dorsey simply used Twitter to do a series of decentralization experiments. After he left Twitter last year, as the helm of the US version of Alipay "Square", he directly changed his name to "Block" and made it fully Web3-based. Recently, he sent a message to "repent" that Twitter violated its original intention and led to the centralization of the Internet, and he felt guilty. Until the acquisition of Twitter by Musk, Dorsey was one of the most active people, and even called him the "only trust solution" to solve the Twitter problem.
Although Musk has not mentioned how to transform Twitter, it can be seen from his previous remarks that he is interested in adding cryptocurrency payment to Twitter and binding cryptocurrency with Twitter’s advertising business. Sam Bankman-fried, CEO of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, gave Musk some suggestions on "Web 3 transformation" on Twitter, including chain encryption of tweets, monetization of tweets and charging for each tweet, and advertising on the user interface. Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, another exchange, thinks that Twitter is expected to become a distributed protocol over time-this is consistent with Dorsey’s original idea of Twitter, and there are rumors that Dorsey will return.
The past of Twitter decentralization has come to an end here, and the next road to Web3 will be completed under the strong influence of Musk. Whether he is an angel or a devil, a brand-new Twitter will appear soon. I hope it can fly in the sky like a free North American mountain bluebird, like its Logo that has been used since 2012, instead of being kept in an iron cage by oligarchs.
Nick Billton, Incubating Twitter: A Wild Journey from Wild to IPO.
This article comes from WeChat official account Geek Park (ID: geekpark) on WeChat. Author: Matt, editor: Jingyu, published by 36Kr with authorization.
