Author | Matt
Edit | Jingyu
If you want to find a person on this planet who has both ambition, desire and ability to create utopias, "Silicon Valley Iron Man" Elon Musk is undoubtedly the first choice.
The tech maniac, who single-handedly pulled cutting-edge tech projects like Tesla and SpaceX into reality and made him rich, now his new battleground is social networking: the world's richest man has agreed to take Twitter private for more than $40 billion. Musk said in the takeover announcement that free speech is the foundation of democracy, and Twitter is a digital town square where people discuss issues that are vital to the future of humanity, and Twitter has great potential — and I look forward to unlocking it with the company and the user community.
Musk's Twitter. (Source: Visual China)
Political and financial conspiracy theories aside, many blockchain practitioners believe that Musk's privatization of Twitter may turn into a change, a utopian experiment to put things right and go back to the right path of centralized development.
With this as a starting point, a more liberal and democratic web3 version of the online speech platform (protocol) will be established. That's exactly what former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been pushing for but has repeatedly failed — he has just over 2 percent of the shares and no voting control.
In this fairy tale of good and evil, Dorsey is a depressed idealist, Twitter's board of directors is undoubtedly the spokesman for the greedy capitalists on Wall Street, Musk is the white knight who saves people from fire and water, and even Dorsey himself has publicly stated that "taking it back from Wall Street is the right first step." In another version of the story, an oligarchic figure grabs the world's largest instrument of speech, and the danger behind it is obvious.
Reality is far more complex than the story. But whatever the narrative, Twitter's importance to the next generation of the Internet (Web3) is self-evident: not only because it is the largest and most controversial forum for speech, but also because of the decentralized genes it has retained since its inception.
The DNA of rebellion
"Just created my Twitter." On March 21, 2006, at 11:50 a.m., Dorsey posted his first official tweet in their overly succinct office, where the early employees were all around: hackers, anti-governmentists, motorhome homeless people...
The main founders were also free-spirited, with Evan Williams creating the new concept of Blogger (he was instrumental in blog popularity) to push computers to give anyone a chance to own their newspaper; Jack Dorsey, who was wearing a blue exploding head and nose ring, had previously gained a job by hacking into a company's systems to prove his abilities; Biz Stone gave up millions of dollars in salary and stock at Google in exchange for a "more free" entrepreneurial life. He was also an extreme animal lover, and he had the biggest fire of his career to stop his colleagues from killing rats.
Dorsey's early years of styling. (Source: Twitter)
It is conceivable that Twitter's early management chaos and disorder in this atmosphere did not usher in explosive growth for a period of time after that, and another "new creature" Facebook was the darling of the Web2 era:
By January 2006, less than two years after Facebook's founding, it had more than 6 million users, with American media giant Viacom bidding $750 million for Facebook and Yahoo for $900 million.
Twitter is stuck in a seemingly simple question: how to explain itself to people.
Everyone has a different answer: "It's a network that lacks sociality." "It replaces text messaging." "It's a new email." "It's a microblog." "It's there to update your status."
Even if several founders haven't figured out how to answer the question, Dorsey and Evan disagree, with Dorsey seeing Twitter as a place to tell people "what I'm doing, and Evan arguing that Twitter's role should be a way to share news, not status: Twitter is a network of messaging, not a social network.
By mid-June 2007, when Twitter had more than 1 million users and was looking for the first acquisition, the issues remained unresolved. Investors and the news media are trying to interpret what they see as Twitter, and even the acquirer Yahoo is quite confused about it. In Yahoo's startup incubator, Brickhouse, Bradley Horowitz ( now Google's vice president of products ) , after a series of greetings and introductions , couldn't resist asking young entrepreneurs on the other side of the desk, "So it's a social network?"
This time Dorsey broke the silence, "I think Twitter is a public utility," he said, "an Internet broadcasting system." He then began to describe his vision for Twitter, noting that its status was equivalent to that of "electricity."
It is conceivable that Bradley heard these answers with a puzzled look on his face, especially the idea that social media companies are a public enterprise. The meeting ended with Bradley saying goodbye to the founders one by one and telling Evan that "we'll connect again.".
Twitter office at 164 South Park, San Francisco, California, March 2008. (Shot by Biz)
Yahoo didn't pay for that rhetoric, and soon after, they offered to pay Twitter $12 million — far less than Dorsey and others expected — and told Twitter that Yahoo could easily master the technology needed to build Twitter because it was "a simple messaging service" and "a few engineers could do it in a week." If Twitter isn't sold, Yahoo plans to build and release a competitive product.
Twitter's three founders unquestionably rejected Yahoo's offer, and the acquisition, which they considered rather ironic, did not undermine the company's confidence, but rather boosted community spirit, and at least for that moment, there was a unanimous answer to "Twitter is not":
It is not a "messaging service" that The Web1 mogul can pocket at will, and it is also far from the classic case of the Web2 era, "social network" Facebook - such as the tendency to decentralize, defining itself as an Internet broadcasting system, where everyone can speak; such as 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 the Twitter investors, even thinks this is a problem) ; and to emphasize the background of freedom and publicness.
It can be said that Twitter's above genes are almost perfectly in line with the core requirements of the Web3 era - to give users the right to control their own data. Unfortunately, the term Web3 wasn't until 2014, when Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood came up.
Next, these genes will influence the direction of Twitter for many years to come, and it will pay a price.
Very different ethical codes
Over time, Twitter began to attract avid investors, and the company's valuation soared to $60 million in early May 2008, and then to 70 million in the days that followed. Finally, by the time the news finally spread, the company was worth $80 million.
At the same time, chaos spread within the company: After months of bitter tugging and bickering, Dorsey, who had been Twitter's CEO for less than seven months, was deemed to have limited management skills and was ousted by his former friend, major shareholder, co-founder Evan (who owns 70% of the company) and investors. Evan himself served as CEO, and although Dorsey did not leave the company, he became an "invisible person" 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 was not very willing to cooperate with such a role.
Disheartened and furious, Dorsey nearly jumped ship to his nemesis Facebook, but then he finally found what he really wanted: He co-founded Squirrel, a payments tool with his old friend Jim Mckelvey, which was later renamed Square. He also has a side hustle – bide his time to take revenge on Evan and the board.
In early 2009, the three Founders of Twitter lost their CEO positions at an awards ceremony, from left to right, dorsey, Evan, and Biz. (Source: flickr)
Looking back at Twitter's new CEO Evan, on February 13, 2009, Evan completely took over Twitter at this time, although the company's full-time employees are still less than 30 (there are some freelancers), Twitter is still growing rapidly, more and more celebrities join, users increased by 900% in a year, in addition to facing the operational pressure of a large number of users, Evan also has to deal with round after round of acquisition offers.
These include tech giant Google and Microsoft, well-known entertainers, billionaires, celebrities, and even presidential candidate Al Gore, but 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 offered to buy. Twitter still chose to refuse and made their difference clear:
"People log on to Facebook to view other people's profiles, which accounts for the vast majority of the site's traffic, and news supplies and feeds are only used as a springboard to browse other people's profiles. Twitter has the opposite experience. Feeds and news account for 90% of a website's traffic, while profiles account for only 10%."
In Nick Beatleton's book Incubating Twitter: The Wild Journey from Wild to IPO, Twitter and Facebook differ not only between social platforms and information networks (showing oneself personal gratification vs information transparency and freedom), but also very different ethical principles:
"When Evan started Blogger ten years ago, he established a strong belief in providing blogging services, and twitter's goal was already established: to provide people with a microphone to speak their hearts... In the past, when government officials knocked on Twitter's doors and asked for user information for a variety of reasons, the administrators of Twitter's support team would refuse, "No, no warrant." Such an attitude became a firm belief on Twitter for years. It's like DNA, making it a different type of company in Silicon Valley.
Twitter eventually confronted a court order to extract Twitter issued by protesters in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Twitter also bravely confronted the justice department's political persecution of WikiLeaks online advocates.
Completely different from Facebook, Twitter ultimately allows users to choose not to be tracked while using the service. Facebook takes a completely different approach to free speech and tracking, which often violates people's privacy rights, and they sometimes even remove content that violates strict terms of service. Twitter is open like a public swimming pool."
In contrast to the rapid expansion of every aspect of the company, the number of employees in the company has grown slowly, and business revenue remains zero. Despite trying some things, such as cutting costs and forging close relationships with key partners, Evan still suffered the same treatment as Dorsey: The board and early investors began to question Evan's ability to lead Twitter into the next phase, and eventually decided to oust him from the CEO position.
Nick Beaton reveals in his book that Dorsey played a disgraceful role in the process, just as he thought he had been stabbed in the back by a friend, and he also betrayed his own friend, and it was he who actively contacted and lobbied key members of the board of directors, and it was he who kicked Evan out of Twitter and finally took revenge.
However, Dorsey did not immediately enjoy the sweetness of revenge, and it is still a long 5 years before he once again gets the former CEO position.
Limp walking
We fast-forward to July 2015, when Dorsey took over the interim CEO from Dick Costolo, Twitter's stock price rose in response, and people were looking forward to another story of Jobs returning to Apple to turn the tide, but the face of Twitter has changed a lot from 5 years ago.
In November 2013, Twitter was listed on the New York Stock Exchange and officially became a public company, and 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 its stumbling blocks, Twitter went from having no revenue channel at all to generating revenue through advertising. To this end, the company has continuously tightened its previous open API policy, blocking third-party clients UberTwitter and Twidroyd in 2011, and blocking development interfaces for user data for third-party application developers in 2014, strictly restricting tokens used for login.
Dorsey was haunted by the incident, tweeting at the end of 2021 that "it was the worst thing we've ever done," arguing that he was "not running the company at the time" and saying that "the company has been trying to reopen it completely."
The three founders of Twitter's listing scene, from left to right, are Dorsey, Biz, Evan, and it is Evan who has lost the CEO position this time. (Source: Visual China)
All of the above actions have seriously damaged Twitter's always open genes and public image, but also attracted a lot of criticism, so that Costello swayed and limped on the balance beam of not annoying users and selling more ads, not only the growth of active users was worrying, but the commercial revenue never met the expectations of investors.
Facebook, on the other hand, has little ethical baggage in extracting user data to scale ads, with ads monetizing more than $17 billion in 2015. The situation was that a company would do mobile advertising and only consider Twitter after Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Snapchat.
Dorsey has two problems ahead of him, one is the decline in activity brought about by the deteriorating community environment, and the platform is full of lies, violence, political manipulation and zombie accounts; the other is to give back to shareholders' demand for money and find a stable growth model of commercial income. And he knows this very well: "We have to do a very difficult restructuring of this company."
One of the key points of the restructuring is the health reform of the Twitter community, the rectification of extreme speech online violence, etc., Twitter cleaned up 58 million accounts in the last quarter of 2017 in three months, and by 2018, the number of accounts closed in May and June alone exceeded 70 million. Dorsey's Twitter often plays a platform role in defending the bottom line of free speech, but it is always unpopular: when they act aggressively, users complain that Twitter is too much control; when he wants to let go, the government and the law have a responsibility to require them to intervene.
Efforts to boost advertising revenue remain stuck in the dna of the past: restricting APIs to keep users and data in their own hands maximizes commercial gains, but it also hurts Twitter's reputation; and insisting on openness has left the commercialization process far behind shareholder expectations. Even Dorsey, who entered the palace for the second time, did not find the key to cracking the contradiction at that time.
Twitter is still limping, and while ad revenue has grown in tandem, it has been thrown out of speed by Facebook and is facing competition from multiple rivals such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest. Once again, Dorsey is caught up in the infighting among Twitter investors, nearly reliving the nightmare of being driven away more than a decade ago.
Leave and return
After the storm, although Dorsey was able to stay in office, it was more difficult to fully control Twitter.
Mike Masnick's famous article published on August 21, 2019, "Protocols Rather Than Platforms: On The Technical Approach to Free Speech," sparked a big discussion in the American scientific and intellectual circles, and seems to have led Dorsey to find a new way to solve the problem - the Web 3 version of the solution, putting censorship back in the hands of users. Not only did he forward it at the first time, but a few months later he also announced that he would fund the establishment of a related independent team.
Dorsey also mentioned in his tweet that in the early years Twitter was very much like a set of protocols, but then it took a different path, gradually becoming centralized and developing into a platform.
Soon after, Dorsey formed a team within Twitter called Bluesky to study technical standards for social media decentralization. Try to build an open source, decentralized social platform, and gradually try to decentralize on a highly centralized social platform. The leader of the Blue Sky team is Dorsey's successor (who has left) after leaving Twitter.
But the business problem remains to be solved: the agreement does not make money, how to maintain the company's revenue? We don't know what Dorsey really thinks, but in reality cryptocurrencies with decentralized protocols have become the path possible. So you can see that in dorsey's final years as CEO, he launched a series of measures in favor of Web3 and cryptocurrencies on Twitter almost quite aggressively:
He launched Twitter Space, where a large number of Web3 practitioners communicate online; he was also the first to launch an NFT product released by an Internet giant, so that Twitter's user avatars can be displayed as NFTs and be certified; he also supports that all crypto circles have a Twitter account, and every crypto project will register an account on Twitter and post links in it...
Dorsey himself has become one of the most important advocates of Bitcoin, not only praising Bitcoin as the future of cryptocurrency in public, but also actively promoting the integration of the Lightning Network, establishing a Bitcoin DeFi developer platform, building a Bitcoin cold wallet, and building a fiat version of Bitcoin decentralized exchange, showing Dorsey's yearning for a decentralized world.
Dorsey became one of Bitcoin's most important standard-bearers. (Source: Visual China)
Mask Network founder Suji Yan, a veteran entrepreneur in the Web3 and cryptocurrency space and one of the few early members of Bluesky, was closely observed that Dorsey was under unprecedented internal pressure and almost anticipated his time as CEO to "do something big before leaving."
In the last period of Twitter, Dorcy used Twitter to do a series of decentralized experiments, and after he left Twitter last year, as the helmsman of the American version of Alipay "Square", he directly changed its name to "Block", fully Web3. Recently, he posted a "confession" that Twitter had led to the centralization of the Internet against its original intentions, and he felt guilty. Until Musk's acquisition of Twitter, Dorsey was one of the most active people to drum up and shout for, and even called him the "only trust solution" to solve the Problem of Twitter.
Dorsey tweeted: Taking Twitter back from Wall Street was the right first step. (Source: Twitter)
Although Musk has not yet mentioned how to transform Twitter, combined with some of his previous remarks, it can be seen that he is interested in adding cryptocurrency payments to Twitter and tying cryptocurrencies to Twitter's advertising business.
Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, offered Musk some "Web 3 revamp" suggestions on Twitter, including chain-encrypting tweets, monetizing tweets and charging for each tweet, and the user interface to hang ads. Brian Armstrong, CEO of another exchange, Coinbase, believes that Twitter is expected to become a distributed protocol over time — in line with Dorsey's original vision of Twitter, which is rumored to be back.
Twitter's decentralization has come to an end here, and the next road to Web3 will be completed under the strong influence of Musk. Whether he's an angel or a devil, a new Twitter will soon emerge. Hopefully, it will be like a free North American mountain blue parrod, flying in the sky like its 2012 logo, rather than being kept in an iron cage by an oligarch.
Reference: Nick Bilton, "Incubating Twitter: The Wild Journey from Wild to IPO"