twitter

A conversation with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey can be incredibly disorienting. Not because he’s particularly clever or thought-provoking, but because he sounds like he should be. He takes long pauses before he speaks. He furrows his brow, setting you up for a considered response from the man many have called a genius. The words themselves sound like they should probably mean something, too. Dorsey is just hard enough to follow that it’s easy to assume that any confusion is your own fault, and that if you just listen a little more or think a little harder, whatever he’s saying will finally start to make sense.

Whether Dorsey does this all deliberately or not, the reason his impassioned defenses of Twitter sound like gibberish is because they are.

Ashley Feinberg @s Jack.

Wo-oo-oo-ow, lol.

Internally, employees have long raised questions about whether Twitter was a media company — a broadcast platform that should be governed by content standards and practices similar to a a television network — or a piece of the internet’s infrastructure, like an ISP, that should remain open and free.

“If Twitter is the pulse of the planet, then you’re in the realm of Verizon,” one former senior employee said. “And you don’t tell Verizon that they have to police the words and topics coming in over their phone lines. I think part of what exacerbated the abuse issue for so long is that there’s an absence of a clear thesis from Twitter.”

Inside the “honeypot for assholes”.

This. Right here; this is the problem.

Let’s be clear: proprietary publishing platforms, like Twitter, are not infrastructure. In fact, their walled-garden existence is antithetical to every principle of internet infrastructure, primarily interoperability and open standards. The fact that anyone can even float the idea that something like Twitter could possibly construe “infrastructure” just goes to show how far up its own ass most of tech current is.

I should point out that this article is old, and pre-dates Twitter’s more recent bannings and other anti-harassment measures. The fact that Twitter only started doing this after its brand became so toxic Disney pulled out of sale talks is pretty much Silicon Valley in a nutshell.