š§¬ Gene's weekly š§¬ - #50: I quit Twitter
You may have seen my announcement on Twitter, but in case you havenāt:
I decided to quit Twitter, entirely.
Iām sure people who read that probably wondered what was going on with Gene. Is he ok? Is Gene depressed? āHeāll be backā. Why?! or.. so what? š
The short answer, is that I am fine, nothing is wrong with me. This was a long time coming. In fact, I feel very good about this decision and more upbeat than ever!
The longer answer is something Iād like to cover below š, because I feel like I didnāt give it a proper explanation in my cryptic tweets that lead up to this moment.
The thing about Twitterā¦
Before I bash on Twitter, I want to say that itās has actually been a great experience using it for years. Despite the ownership drama, the people behind the scenes did a great job for the most part. Yes, they did some questionable things (old leadership), but overall the platform was doing good. I believe much of the controversy over Twitter files is overblown. People just love drama so even the most innocent action or comment becomes a finger-pointing āI TOLD YOU!ā event.
The circle of people I kept are great people - many admirable, honest, funny and enjoyable characters.
I think Twitter is a great tool for bringing people together, discovering and learning new things and meeting cool people.
However, Twitter has itās issues. Many of which I have know about for years, and some I have started noticing more recently.
Negativity - outside the startup twittersphere, the cesspool is large and seems to be growing ever larger. While getting access to worldwide news is empowering, perhaps it is not wise to keep people hooked on world news 24/7? Every little thing which naturally occurs is broadcasted to everyone in the world real time, so now I have to care about some thing that happened in some country which has zero impact on me. Turn it off! Ok, fine, did that, but it still seeps into my feed. I quit ānewsā years ago and was able to stay away from it for the longest time, but somehow it keeps seeping into my feed through recommended tweets.
Twitter is a chore - Twitter in many ways is a chore. To grow X, post Y. Schedule, re-schedule, sign up for this tool, that one, the other. āAudience buildingā. The whole thing has become a mess. People tweeting about their follower number going upā¦ Cāmon! Ok, I get it, you are excited, I donāt blame you ā but take a step back for a moment, no, take 10 steps back and look at what youāre doing. I did, and I didnāt like what I saw. The constant āleveling upā for what? To make a sale? 10, 100? To get the word out about my latest startup? Who is benefiting here? The 97% lurking or the 3% posting? I think the answer is obvious. Twitter progression has become so bad that people are now sitting down for HOURS to schedule tweets before they go on vacation because if they donāt, the algorithm drops them like a rock and they wonāt get the same level of engagement they had before. Twitter is doing this to me, to you, to everyone. People obsess over consistency and share their āI never missed a dayā graphs. I donāt know about you, but I find this sad. This is not the human progression I have imagined and have been thinking about for a while.
Twitter is unhealthy - Doom-scrolling, likes, replies, engagement, notificationsā¦ take a look at how many hours you spend on Twitter and tell me thatās OK. I have witnessed new users go from fine to depressed and then helplessly wonder why they feel so. Youāre getting a constant stream of dopamine rush with every reaction - how do you think itās going to affect you? Yeahā¦ Twitter feeds on addiction. Each of us is addicted. Step away and you lose the same level of engagement you once had. Twitter literally enables addiction through their algorithm.
Twitter is slowwwww - the pace of feature progression has been incredibly slow. Even with Elon at the helm, things are basically crawling. A bookmarking feature is considered a huge announcement. BOOKMARKING. I know social networks get their value from network effects - the interactions between users, but it is not an excuse for not innovating in the space. Even with new anticipated features like Twitter coins, it is difficult to justify supporting a platform that has all the capacity to do maximum good but refuses to use the available technology to do so.
Twitter is old internet. Itās hard for me to put this in a paragraph, and you have to be old enough to understand it - the internet went from a wonderful, chaotic thing to a corporate-driven, boring, stale, monetization machine full of ads. The pioneers who built the original internet likely never imagined how centralized things would become. One company to do X. One company to do Y. A monopoly on everything. Gate-kept entry, available only for $8. My beef is not with Twitter specifically, but with the entire slew of value-extracting companies. Yes, theyāve empowered creators, put wonderful tools into our hands, but things have come full circle and those who benefit are mostly those at the top. Rent-seeking, constantly, VC-fueled gambling vehicles to grow at all costs and extract the most value to make a tiny few super rich. This is not what the early internet stood for. Twitter cannot change this. Elon is not going to throw $44 Billion down the drain.
The future is built at the protocol level
Perhaps the biggest issue with Twitter and other social media platforms is that they are all built at the app level - meaning, thereās the app and thatās it. You canāt use any other app to access it. One company controls it and all of your data, and regularly sells it, loses it, gets hacked. If you say something wrong, or do something bad one time, you get de-platformed. People whisper about de-platforming but end up going business as usual because āitāll never happen to meā. Until it does.
A new, better architecture has been developed recently and it spans beyond one company and one app. Itās called Nostr.
While the website calls Nostr a ādecentralized social networkā, itās a bit misleading. Nostr is not an app, a company, a service, it is a protocol. Much like the protocol on which you are reading this, Nostr is open to everyone to build on top of. Anyone can build an app that communicates at the protocol level, but does very different things. So, to call it a social network is very narrow thinking. Nostr could be used by podcasts, music listening platforms, payment systems, even existing social networks (like Twitter!)
The vast majority of startup Twitter, many of my friends including, think Nostr is an app - a poor clone of Twitter. Theyāll say, itās the network effects that matter! Or.. āwhy do you care about decentralization?ā. What they donāt realize is that this is a global protocol that enables anyone to build an app that connects to it. And it doesnāt even have to be a social network! And the world will build.
What makes Nostr REALLY powerful, is the ability to integrate instant payments with super low fees across multiple apps on top of the social layer.
Just today, I sent $200 equivalent in zaps (lightning layer payments) to total strangers online - just for fun. They got my payments instantly within seconds. Iām only playing a game, but content creators have the ability to monetize anything on Nostr. Said something that someone found valuable? Zap! ā” 20 cents, $1, 10$, 100, 1000? You decide. Wish to sell something Stripe has objections to because of their āmoral valuesā? No problem. Zap. Done.
Lightning on Nostr is a creator economy dream - one they have never realized could be possible, until now.
I think many people have accustomed to treat everything termed ādecentralizedā as a fad, scam, that dirty thing associated with ācryptoā. Nostr is none of those things. It has nothing to do with ācryptoā or āweb 3ā. It uses cryptographic signatures (key pair of a public and private key) to sign transactions and publish notes. That is it. Itās a bunch of json files signed by your private key. The same cryptography that goes into securing the web.
That being said, it is still very early in the āproductā development cycle:
Things still look ugly
There are many bugs
Itās very niche - you probably wonāt find too many people who enjoy the same subjects unless you bring them over.
Spam is an issue for now, so newcomers will think itās nothing but spam (connecting with people right away takes care of this for the most part)
Mostly early adopter types - but also early winners!
DMs are not encrypted (yet)
A lot of bitcoiners in the space - which is an instant āNo thanks!ā to many people. I understand this.
With all the issues, I am still confident that THIS is the future, and is the reason why I donāt see a point in participating on Twitter. Adapt and thrive - I must go where the future leads. This is what gets me really excited about Nostr:
One simple payment system without gatekeepers - a truly global economy is possible. Payments can be made even over SMS and fax machines. You can zap people every second if you like, in near real time.
Interoperability - use any client to connect. You are no longer tied to one app. Donāt like the feature of one? Use another.
Enables global competition. Companies will compete to provide the best experiences. Whereas incumbents donāt need to do this - leaving us with poor, outdated experiences.
You are your own boss - your keys, your life, your money. Nobody can tell you otherwise. No company, no government, no person can tell you what you can and cannot say or how you can and cannot act. I know many people donāt care about this, but I do - as you get older and have kids you tend to think about what kind of world you want them to live in. No de-platform risk. No āI think weāll revoke your APIā business risk.
Removes the middle man. No more rent-seeking businesses. Your money is your money. The social layer enables people to quickly communicate and exchange value directly with one another. The payments are final, unlike with banks or credit cards where transactions must be settled on the back end which often take weeks and frequently get reversed.
Improves signal in society. We can now get paid for value provided vs. companies collecting and selling our data. Value is rewarded with value (value4value model).
Puts you in charge, not the algorithm. Although some clients may choose to implement sorting algorithms, you always have a choice to use one without. That means instead of tweeting at 10,000 people and only having 400 see your content, you will send notes to 10,000 people and all 10,000 will see them.
People are nice and already report being happier than on Twitter.
Development is moving at incredible speed. One of the clients I am working on put out a call for a Japanese translation. The next morning it was complete. 2 hours later rolled out. The pace at which features are shipped is incredible. Twitter will look incredibly slow once you witness what people are building on Nostr and how fast.
China already banned the iOS client. If China hates it, you know itās amazing!
I am not the only person excited about it. Jack Dorsey donated 250k to developers and is hanging out with us frequently. We joke that Jack is Nostrās greeter. You have to be there to understand. Edward Snowden joined too. People are slowly discovering it, but many are apprehensive because they see it as another Mastadon or some other app.
Nostr is unlike Mastadon - it has no gatekeepers and ultimate overlords who decide your fate on the server. It is ran through relays (private servers) and anyone can spin up a relay to back up their content. It gets more interesting as you dive into it, but Iāll keep it at that.
Iām not asking you to leave Twitter
No matter what I say here, the vast majority of people reading this will think āok, whateverā. āCome back when thereās something that actually worksā.
Thatās fine. I am not here to sway anyone to leave Twitter or follow me to this new mysterious place. I am driven by my own curiosity and the belief that all social networks will have to adopt this model to survive, or else they will not be able to compete. I know this is a bold statement, but I truly believe it.
I could be wrong.
You can follow, and we can have a great time, or not - up to you. Of course, Iād love to connect with you there. I have a few accounts, an original I created - an anon account. And a more recent one which I will use to talk about the typical things I enjoy - startups, design, technology.
I hope this makes sense. Iām not sad, or crazy or ignorant of what goes into building a global āsocial networkā. I know the challenges and whatās ahead. Iāve considered it deeply and decided this is the most fun and exciting thing to work on. The opportunities to interconnect the world without walled gardens, with instant and cheap payments is truly immense - with many rewards, financial and otherwise and Iām not about to miss that.
Or maybe Iām a fool ;) Weāll find out.
I will probably no longer write about Tweets, and I suspect many will unsubscribe. I may or may not take up writing about Nostr developments, but I will not spam you without asking to sign up for a new list.
Let me know if you have any questions, Iād be happy to answer them š¤
Take care š
Gene