Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think you can think of writing on the internet as a beacon, as a way to signal yourself to other like-minded people. These pieces of yourself that you put out on the internet, and they allow you to create this that serendipity engine where like-minded people can find you.

00:00:26 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac. But this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGrenigan.

00:00:39 - Speaker 1: Hey Adam.

00:00:40 - Speaker 2: And joined today by Francesco Di Lorenzo of Typefully.

00:00:44 - Speaker 1: Hi, I’m Mark. Thanks for having me. Hi.

00:00:47 - Speaker 2: And I understand you’ve been learning Portuguese.

00:00:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I moved to Portugal, that’s been almost a year. I haven’t tried to learn a new language in a while. It has been humbly. And a real challenge.

00:01:00 - Speaker 2: And your native language is Italian, correct?

00:01:03 - Speaker 1: Italian, because they are very similar languages.

00:01:07 - Speaker 2: It’s a little less of a jump than, I don’t know, learning Japanese or something, I would imagine.

00:01:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely.

00:01:14 - Speaker 2: Well, certainly I can speak to the challenges of immigrant life and obviously there’s the surface things like I don’t know, the food’s different or the, you know, the trains are organized differently, but for sure the language, particularly because that’s so important for official things, right? Working with your bank, filing your taxes, interacting with authorities, and indeed you have a far greater amount of this. Official administrative trivia as an immigrant than you do as a person that was native to the place. So, yeah, for me at least, the language has been a cornerstone, both challenge but also thing to invest in in my immigrant journey.

00:01:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, but more than that, I think it’s even, it’s very important to fit in in a place, you know, just live there, go with your day, only talking with experts like you. So this has been a big motivator for me in trying to learn it.

00:02:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. The reason you go to a place is because you want to be part of it, to integrate, I think is.

Even the official word for it, and that doesn’t necessarily mean adopting every custom, but I do think there is a degree to which if you’re an English speaker, either as a first or a second language.

You can get pretty far with that, particularly if you’re in tech spheres, you’re in big city, where you have young people that, you know, everyone probably learned English from when they were pretty young, etc. You really can get by with that for a long time if you want, but I think there’s virtue, let’s say, in learning the local language, even aside from the utility. Absolutely. And tell us a little bit about you and about Typefully.

00:02:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m a software engineer by trade, turned in the actor turned CEO of a small company. We make Tali, which started as a small side project to write Twitter, but now as the project and the company scales, we are scaling our ambition with it and are trying to build the general purpose writing up for the internet for creators.

00:03:19 - Speaker 2: And you also come a little bit out of the, you mentioned indie hacker, but also the calm fund world of companies starting small, trying to get to revenue quickly, not necessarily targeting hypergrowth, and folks interested in that can listen to our podcast episode with Tyler from Calm, but you mentioned scaling your ambitions. Was this something where you see a path to the bigger team and the bigger opportunity because of the response to the product?

00:03:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we subscribe to the company mentality and basically we’re trying to build a small team of individual contributors, and each one of us, even the two founders, we work every day on the product, trying to improve it. And yeah, we see this pattern that all great products, most of them are built by very small focused teams. Partly started by very small focused teams, so we won’t keep working this way for as long as we can.

00:04:18 - Speaker 2: And you describe typefully, at least in the moment, as a way to write better tweets and build your Twitter audience. Tell us what does the product do today, and then maybe give us a little hint of what the bigger vision is.

00:04:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. It started as a way to write Twitter trends, right when Twitter threads were starting to become a thing, not right now that they’re been turning into the cringe territory.

So it started that way as a way, an easy way better to interface than the one you have on Twitter.com to write trends.

But from there, it turned into a way to allow Twitter creators to manage their presence with their schedule content, see their analytics to understand what’s working and what’s not, and manage multiple accounts with ease, even in a team context.

So you can create a team and work on Twitter accounts together. And this is where we started in a way where we are right now, but we are at a bit of an inflection point.

So, where we stand today, our vision for Stifle is to create this tool to empower creators to write on the internet and own their own audience by using each available platform to their own advantage.

So starting from Twitter, which is our favorite platform, we’re expanding our platforms like LinkedIn, Soon, Mastodon. And many others. We want to make it to like a general purpose tool where you can iterate on your ideas, and all of them in one place and work on them with your team, refine them with AI and publish them whatever you want.

00:05:58 - Speaker 2: And one of the reasons I found the early pitch compelling when you first launched it was I think, yeah, the Twitter threads maybe is sort of an inflection point because before that, OK, Twitter has this like really simple box for typing what was once called the status update, but you know, now it’s just the text, and when it was a really short amount of text and it was just one chunk, right, you do one tweet at a time, I don’t know, the equivalent of just a text area in your web browser or the equivalent of that on the phone.

It’s totally fine. Then, if you are going to write longer form content, there may be media there, and then you get the threads, and now it turns into almost like a small blog post or something like that, and now I start to feel uncomfortable when I’m building out this thread. I go, wait a minute, like this is actually a piece of writing. I’m investing in it, like I do with any piece of writing and it feels like a very weird thing to be just doing this in this little pop up text area box. It’s like clearly not a dedicated writing tool. And so it just feels a very natural thing to say, let’s make a, yeah, I don’t know if you want to think of it as a word processor, that’s not quite right, but there are a lot of dedicated text tools that exist for other types of writing we want to do in our lives, and that can be a first class thing, managing that over time and making the writing experience good and having multiple drafts, collaborating with other people. And really something like Twitter is a publishing platform. The little text area they give you for typing your text, just increasingly to me doesn’t feel quite up to the job of at least the way that some folks uh use Twitter.

00:07:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, also because in a way it’s a completely different form of writing, this idea of atomic atomic writing, writing these short snippets that somehow are connected together, but they are their own thing. We have found that many users, many people love to write that way also when they’re not writing for Twitter. So I think by, in a way, by chance, We stumbled on a really interesting idea, novel way of writing. That’s helpful even when you are not targeting Twitter.

00:08:08 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is writing on the internet, and I think that speaks very directly to or rather is inspired by the vision you just outlined there for typefully, and it’s a huge topic, of course. There’s where you write, there’s why you would want to write in the first place, there’s the way in which we even construct the words and speak is different from maybe a lot of classic style of writing which you would find in a book or a homework essay or something like that.

But maybe we could start with the where piece of things, the medium or the channels.

We’ve spoken about Twitter a little bit already, and I’d certainly love to dig in on that, especially since there’s both a lot of, it’s called drama happening there right now and you’re building a business on that, and I do think it is really unique one.

But if we go back in time a little bit, you know, the first thing that comes to mind for me is blogging things like, yeah, or even something like LiveJournal, but like I had a WordPress blog decades ago, that sort of thing. Do you think of that as being the genesis for writing on the internet?

00:09:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, especially considering like the history of the people that founded Twitter, that’s for sure playing the parts that idea right there.

00:09:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s a good point, right? Ed Williams had founded Blogger, which was certainly not the first blogging platform, but was a significant early player.

00:09:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.

00:09:29 - Speaker 2: Well, I certainly found that early blogosphere, whatever you want to call that, late 90s, early 2000s to be a pretty unique place.

This idea of combining publishing to a potentially infinitely large audience with the informality of, hey, I’m 15 years old and I’m just writing how I feel about like my favorite pop song into my live journal. Uh it’s like quite an interesting combination.

I think historically, when you look at pre-internet writing, To even get that channel to be able to speak to a larger audience, you’re publishing something in a magazine or a newspaper or a book, to even get access to that channel, you have to be a professional, you have to be building up your career, all that sort of thing, and then individuals will do things like writing letters to their friends and maybe essays for school, but I feel like that’s one of the things that comes to mind right away as being core to the writing on the internet is the potentially reaching. This huge audience, but being completely informal and casual, it’s quite a unique combination.

00:10:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, you can see the whole evolution of writing on the internet, things getting easier and easier with the next video, one after the other, starting from blogging. In a way, I’m still very attached to blogging.

Makes me really nostalgic when I stumble on a really good blog. I try to keep one myself, but yeah, I think blogging is still going today.

And we see many of our users keeping personal blogs and repurposing the same content also on Twitter and medium.

In a way, a block is this platform you own that nobody can take away from you, and that’s reassuring. It’s very common today to see creators still owning a blog with an attached newsletter as a way to own their audience.

Many people are in a way using social media to attract people to a platform they own. And that’s I think the role of blogs and newsletters play today.

00:11:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah that makes sense. I think of our friend and a multiple guest on the podcast, Jeffrey Litt as being very good at this. He tweets and posts to his mastodon things that essentially are sort of summaries or sort of like a few key takeaways from articles that he posts on his personal website, and then in turn, he also has an email newsletter that he sends out that either contains or links back to that same kind of content, but a platform like Twitter ends up being a place to publish and find new people through. You know, the viral algorithm or just the ease of sharing there, but you know that if you want to, like you said, build an audience, you need to ultimately bring that to something that is a little more under your control and less in the hands of a platform whose needs and goals may change over time. Indeed, we spoke about that in depth in our platforms episode where we spoke to someone who’d, you know, built a business on Slack and saw ways that changes in the platform can Hurt your business. So, there’s a similar thing, I think, for someone who’s a content creator on the internet, whether you’re doing it kind of casually or to support your career or actually professionally as in like, you monetize, but in the end, I think that over the very long term, you can’t be completely dependent on one platform, you gotta kind of take control of your own destiny more.

00:12:53 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, and we’ve seen this a lot from our users since we started as a Twitter only platform. People have been asking us from day one to expand to other platforms, and we were like these Twitter creators, really, they’re paying when Twitter changed the timeline algorithm and they saw like their tweets reach 10% of their followers. And I think that was a wake-up call for many of them. They started to diversify, maybe create a newsletter, maybe start posting the same content to LinkedIn as well, to Mastodon. And that’s, I think where we might fit in in the helping with that. And make it easier.

00:13:39 - Speaker 2: Let’s zoom in on, yeah, Twitter really specifically for the moment because obviously you know quite a lot about the dynamics there, building your business on it and having your users and customers be on that platform. I don’t know. I guess it’s hard to summarize like what is it that makes Twitter special or unique compared to, yeah, blogs or Facebook or LinkedIn, but how do you think about Twitter’s role in the world both historically and maybe going forward with changes that are happening there now?

00:14:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think what Twitter brought to the table is reach, like being able to write a simple idea with amplification that the algorithmic timeline gives you. I think allowed many people to build enormous audiences and basically, it created a whole generation of writers. How we. But more than that, I think the thing you can do on Twitter that you cannot do on any other platform is this dynamic groups of complete strangers with the kind of similar interests get to slowly know each other. Day after day, And eventually, maybe they end up collaborating on something because you go from a mention to at the end and then to maybe a call. And I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of Twitter, this ability to create these close connections with the complete strangers on the internet and being able to then explore this more. Yeah.

In a way, Twitter made it easier to share, easier to consume content, and with much hated algorithmic timeline, it made it possible for people to build huge audiences very quickly. And this changed the things quite a bit for writing on the internet. In a way, these creators building huge audiences, and this is a way to look at it, these people with hundreds of thousands of followers. And another way, the one I like the most actually is this other way to use the tool where you don’t care about reaching a huge audience, but you follow a small niche of people that have your same interests. And yeah, there is this dynamic that only happens on Twitter where you have a group of strangers that slowly gets to know each other and You go from a tweet to a mention to at the end to a call, and then you can end up collaborating on projects and I think it can take your career and your life in very interesting directions.

And a fun and I thought on that is that my co-founder and I met that way I started collaborating on projects that way a few years ago, and then also the whole team was hired through Twitter. We had this same dynamic that I just described.

00:16:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that is a really special thing and fairly unique to Twitter as far as I know. I, you know, I think of Twitter as a place to go to connect with my field, and part of that is about generating specific opportunities.

For example, I source most of the guests that we’re likely to have on the podcast here through that, and I’ve also been invited on podcasts myself through that platform, but Even nothing as pragmatic as that. I just want to know what’s going on slash be inspired by other people doing interesting design work and HCI research and so on, and just feel connected to that in a lightweight way, much more lightweight than, for example, going to a conference and exactly as you said, it can also not sure what you call that escalate, but you sort of get to know someone so to speak, through these casual interactions in replies.

And that can turn into some really interesting kind of call them like business friendships or industry friendships and eventually potentially even collaborations. Yeah, I feel like that is a truly unique and special thing that as far as I know, really, or for me anyway, is only really happened on Twitter.

00:17:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I also think Twitter is a very interesting social network.

Actually, several of the most important changes or events in my life were basically sourced through Twitter, so I’m quite thankful for the platform actually.

And it is an interesting question of why it ended up, where it did. I think there’s some interesting mechanical choices that they’ve made that we alluded to, asymmetric following a combination of an algorithmic timeline plus the option to purely self-select your timeline, the small bite size pieces, obviously, but when it did, it ended up being the social network of ideas. And as much as we live in a multimedia age, the ideas that are still really important, and it is a place where people go, including world leaders, top people in various fields to discuss and connect, so it remains very important for sure.

00:18:36 - Speaker 2: So we mentioned these different mediums for places you can publish on the internet like blogs, medium, Substack, LinkedIn. What is the nature of writing for Twitter specifically or maybe this microblogging format if you want to give it a more general purpose term, especially that you’ve seen Francesca through your users, like, what is so unique about writing for Twitter that makes it that a specialized tool is needed or desirable or there’s something different from, you know, why not just compose your tweets in Google Docs, for example?

00:19:07 - Speaker 1: I think the, the special thing about Twitter is, no matter what you want to write about, you can build a small audience around that in a way that you couldn’t as easily with blogging, and you can’t on LinkedIn, which is a place much more focused like on business, and we are seeing creators create content really on as many topics as you can see. Of course, it’s mostly tech, but we see people really covering all topics you can think about.

00:19:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s a way in which Twitter.

Enables and supports that to happen gradually and organically. I’ll give an analogy, which is the discussion that we had about hiring, where the status quo on hiring is, it’s all or nothing. You either, you know, don’t know the company or you sign up to spend the next 4 years of your life there. And one of our ideas with hiring at Mu and Inc and which is you want to be this gradual organic, incremental process where you slowly ramp up the level of commitment and interaction. And you get the same thing on Twitter where If you go back to the world of blogging, it’s a very heavy weight to interact with, say, the world leader in a field via blogs. Like you couldn’t really get them to write on your blog, they probably wouldn’t even bother to read a blog that you wrote, it’s a whole heavyweight thing. There’s kind of no way to get started. Whereas with Twitter, obviously the pieces of content are small, but there are also these built-in mechanisms like asymmetric following and being able to reply and quote tweet where it’s natural for, say, the world expert and the person who’s interested in the topic to meet and if there’s Uh, mutual interests based on these little bits that people are admitting, they can increase the commitment by following each other or by quote tweeting or replying and so on. So I think that’s kind of mechanically why Twitter ends up being so interesting in that respect.

00:20:53 - Speaker 2: the gradual escalation of interaction rather than having such huge discrete stepping points such as being hired by a company or even writing a whole long form blog post, whereas you can read someone’s one sentence reply and then tap like and it’s this incredibly lightweight interaction and that over time that can grow into something more.

00:21:16 - Speaker 1: And also this uh dynamic where everything is public and a reply or a quote tweet has the same dignity of the original tweet itself. I think it adds pressure and actually makes people interact even if maybe the power dynamic in the real world or in a blogging contacts will be different.

00:21:39 - Speaker 2: Now, how do you think about the current, yeah, change in management and drama, upheaval, whatever you want to call that. There’s obviously the element of you as a person who is both a reader and a writer on that platform and how you feel about that, but also more critically now you have a business that’s based on it, and I know you said you’re diversifying a little bit, but do you see the current changes as being something that’s a A bump in the road, but not something to worry about that much, or is this a significant kind of concern for your business right now?

00:22:10 - Speaker 1: It is a significant concern.

We were always kind of partially aware of uh platform risk, but overnight, we were intensely aware of it, especially because the new relationship like that, the new management established with the third party developers by shutting down third party clients, making unannounced changes to the API. We are still waiting on the pricing of the Twitter API.

And yeah, uh, it has been a roller coaster in our internal chat. We are all tread on the Twitter situation, as we like to call it.

But apart from that, from the business side, zooming out, I think that Twitter needed a change. It was a stagnating as a product. I was optimistic on initially about the way things would have gone with this acquisition. But where we’re sitting right now, I think whatever you think of Elon Musk, I think it’s a bit unfortunate to have the public town square of the internet as he likes to call Twitter. Be in such a tight spot where we don’t know if it will be there in a month and uh we don’t know how it will be changed. What are your thoughts on that?

00:23:33 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s interesting. You could say that even separately from whether you agree with any particular change that’s happening now or in the future with the platform, the instability itself and the unpredictability of it is itself a problem, and people have talked about some of these larger social networks as being almost like telecom.

Infrastructure that it’s actually very important for public life and for how society understands itself and how we decide who to vote for and things like that, and obviously they’re in the hands of companies, in some cases publicly traded companies, but still companies with their own business goals and management can change and that sort of thing. And I’m not sure if I quite agree with the level of thinking that, you know, we should be regulating the big social networks the same way we do electricity providers, for example, but I think that that argument comes from that source of saying that we want these things to be stable and steady and reliable now because they are important enough for the world or for our society. Obviously important for your business as well.

00:24:37 - Speaker 3: Well, I’ll throw in my two cents, which is that I think the acquisition was an enormous positive. I think it’s gonna prove to be a positive of world historical proportions, and I think it’s gonna be very messy, and a lot of people are going to be upset. And I think actually the third party situation is one of the weaker aspects of how it’s progressing, but I think it will end up being good.

00:24:55 - Speaker 2: What is it that leaves you? Obviously the general vibe has not been positive. What leaves you optimistic in the longer term.

00:25:03 - Speaker 3: Well, I don’t know, speak for yourself on that. I think some people have been quite unhappy about it, but some people have been positive about it, so.

As for why, well, I kind of don’t want to go on a whole rant here. I’m reminded of the meme, please elaborate on that. No. But I’ll throw a little nugget in there, which is, if nothing else, it is a move that separates Twitter from what had been a very homogenous and further homogenizing set of practices and people and things around all the social networks.

Basically, they were all being, I would almost use the word co-opted into a single approach or ideology. And if for no other reason than to have some different Approaches out there, I think it’s a good thing. I think there’s a lot more to it. But yeah, I’m glad he’s doing something different with the network.

00:25:53 - Speaker 1: I guess the answer there and what really concerns me is what we do we lose it by tweaking the Twitter we knew, we end up breaking it. What replaces Twitter in that case? That’s something that has been, like, in my mind a lot these past few months.

00:26:14 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I do feel that it’s not just the current change in management that has created some instability and some changes that essentially for as long as it has existed, Twitter has had this really special thing that makes it unique. It makes it the social network of ideas, exactly as you said, Mark, it’s always been the social network of choice for me, far and above the other options that are out.

There, but I think there’s always been a little bit of a struggle to find exact, I mean, obviously you talk to the business aspects and the business model, you can talk about the strange element of there’s this really outsized impact, right, journalists and politicians and all these sorts of things.

Use it, it’s more likely to be quoted on the news or whatever, but then when you look at actually the total active users, it’s a fraction of the size of something like Facebook.

And I kind of feel like even the people who made it and or or the different people who have made it over the years, quite a lot of contributed obviously, don’t even fully We know what they have because almost no one can really define it.

What makes Twitter Twitter exactly. There’s some combination of elements and you can point to UI things and you can point to the people who are on it and cultural conventions have emerged, but it’s hard to kind of like pin down precisely here’s what it is in the form of here’s how we can make it better, here’s how we can duplicate it potentially if we wanted to do that, if someone wanted to clone it. And it actually creates a weird kind of instability. So I guess I would say I feel some empathy for the creators of the product, which is, I think it’s hard to double down on what works about it, because what works about it is so mysterious in some way.

00:27:50 - Speaker 3: One other thing that I’ll mention about Twitter that I think is very important is pseudonymy.

It is something that Twitter does support very well, and I think most of the platforms don’t.

Facebook has the real name policy, for example.

I think this is incredibly important in a world where the information environment is so, let’s say, contested, where it actually becomes extremely risky and dangerous and in many cases, governments would like it to be impossible to speak in ways that are You know, contrary to the interests, but in terms of things that you think are true, and I think Twitter by supporting pseudo enemy in combination with these mechanical aspects that we talked about, makes it the natural home for what I call like information synthesizers. I actually have a tweet about this that we can link to, but basically, The best place that I’ve found for synthesis on complex topics that are contentious is literally Cartoon Abbey Twitter accounts. Because the information environment is so contested, if you stick a real face on it, you face an enormous amount of real world pressure of various types, so much so that basically people can’t have honest discussions or analysis in my mind about these things. So I hope that Twitter continues to support that. There’s been some back and forth I’ve seen from Musk about whether he, you know, basically continue to allow that on the platform, but I think it’s very important.

00:29:10 - Speaker 2: I think even reaching back to Friendster, which might have been the first social network that I ever participated in, and people started creating non-people accounts, you know, what today we might call bots or brand accounts, anything that’s not a person, and I think the platform basically got mad about that, I was trying to crack down on it, but that’s a huge feature to me. There is the ability for a person to create multiple accounts so they can, like you said, Talk about contentious topics and firewall that from other things that they might want to talk about, but also the ability to have bots and the ability to have companies represented or other kinds of organizations that a Twitter account is a channel or is a persistent identity for broadcasting about some set of things that you may want to say and the mapping from there to a person.

Doesn’t need to be 1 to 1 in any way. I think that’s a big feature, but of course it’s also something that creates problems in many ways, and so it’s sort of maybe always in the platform makers' interest to basically have less of that or remove the anonymity.

00:30:18 - Speaker 1: In a way, it’s what made this bot problem a bit intractable, the fact that the platform supports actively supports these pseudonymous accounts that you can’t really identify.

00:30:31 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I, I think it’s easy to combine several things that are going on here.

There’s synonymous human users, there’s bots in the sense of computers, there’s potential foreign interference, there’s companies, honestly, going back to our discussion of the positives and negatives of the acquisition.

I think the reason they had such trouble with bots is they just didn’t deal with it effectively.

Like you had all these tweets like wherever you mention cryptocurrencies, you have a bunch of like super obvious bots in the replies. They didn’t even write a rule that’s like, you know, someone replies within 10 seconds with a free BTC or whatever, you know, it’s a bot.

Anyways, I do think it makes it more challenging, somewhat for the platform, but the people who it becomes very challenging for as governments and other people who want to enforce basically speech regulations. So that’s, I think the ultimate reason why it becomes. Very difficult, at least outside the US to support that long term, but we’ll see if Musk can keep it alive.

00:31:19 - Speaker 2: Another feature I think is really unique to Twitter are quote tweets. I know these can be contentious. There’s a lot of people that feel that that is related to negative elements in the platform. For me, I find them pretty positive in the sense that you can essentially make a new top level post referencing another post.

And when speaking to my audience, for example, I can include a note that’s why I think this is important, this is why I’m passing it along.

Maybe this is the digital equivalent of when your grandparents clip out a newspaper article for you and they put a little post-it on it saying why they think you would be interested in it specifically.

I actually think that’s a very powerful thing and similarly, I like consuming quote tweets more than retweets because a person I’ve chosen to follow, so therefore I’m interested in their voice or the way they think about the world or has said this is interesting and here’s why, whereas a retweet is without that context. But yeah, how do you think about tweet in terms of how your users use it and how you use it yourself?

00:32:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, in a way, it’s an evolution of the idea of the link of the blog post. And again, I think a common theme of this discussion, it’s a very uh fast for us to quickly add the comment and iterate on an idea. So conceptually it’s a beautiful thing, where there has been trouble is a, the where, where it took the platform. Especially with political discourse and tribalism. I think it really changed the platform for the worst in a way. Which is also the reason why some new platforms that are becoming popular today like Matodon explicitly decided not to include this feature.

00:33:07 - Speaker 3: Yeah, quote tweets are interesting because they’ve been so transformative to the platform and even internet cultural generally.

But of course, there’s nothing new about quoting another piece of media.

We’ve had this forever, but it’s so powerful on Twitter, that is, you can do it so quickly, especially now there’s a first class quote tweet button, and critically, there’s first class tracking in both directions. You can see.

You know, obviously you can click through to the underlying quote tweet and the profile for it, but people can see all the quote tweets for a given tweet. You can see all the mentions and quote tweets that you have against your content, and so on.

So there’s, like we were saying earlier with comments and discussion, generally, there’s this encouragement to gradually build up a network among the participants that people can crawl in various directions.

Yeah, I agree it’s really cut both ways. Although one thing I did back when I was tweeting was I adopted a strict no negative vibes rule.

So I, I found that I just like felt bad whenever I would dunk on something or, you know, just admit bad vibes on Twitter. So I said, OK, no more dunking. And also I’m just gonna stop following all people who are basically chronic dunkers.

It actually really improved my experience with the platform, so just one idea people to try out.

00:34:20 - Speaker 1: If everyone did that, Twitter would have a completely different vibe. And I think it’s also the appeal of these new platforms popping up, like Matoor where people are signing up. It’s all good vibes, posting about uplifting stuff. Uh, some others sometimes dunking on Twitter, of course, over there. But yeah, I try to tweet the same. Yeah.

00:34:44 - Speaker 3: And speaking of implications of quote tweets, I think there’s the first order bad vibes of, you know, you just get someone dunking on a tweet and kind of feels negative, but there’s also important second order effects where it makes content on Twitter very susceptible to pylons and witch hunts.

Almost to the point where it’s hard to have open discussion of contentious ideas because the ideas on Twitter are so susceptible to this kind of, you know, basically attack, which is why you see a lot of people operating in the most contentious ideological spaces going private, and then you have some protection from poetry grades in that world.

This is actually why I think podcasting is so important, because podcasting is like the polar opposite in terms of susceptibility to dunking. It’s actually a huge amount of work to dunk on a podcast, you got to like, you know, listen to the podcast first and then transcribe it, I guess. And then how do you even do the dunk? Do you like replay it? Or do you copy the transcript into your tweet? And then it’s kind of hard for people to like follow it to the source. So that’s a big reason why I think podcasts have become a really important medium for Discussing contentious or disfavored ideas.

00:35:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, in a way, it’s what we lost when we switched to this really condensed format. It left no no space for nuances.

And I have a somehow funny, somehow tragic story about this, like a friend of mine a couple of days ago, and you may have seen this around on Twitter. I shared this tweet where it basically said, it was a very controversial tweet.

My friend only has a couple 1000 followers. And basically this tweet, it was saying that. You shouldn’t hire an engineer if his GitA contribution graphs looks like this, and it was a picture of the GitA contribution graph with only one colored the dot. And this was super inflammatory. The tweet got like 10 million views. Everyone caught red tweeting him. And uh, I, to this day, I still see people stop tweeting that tweet. It has been, I think, 3 days. At the beginning, this was really, really fun because, yeah, OK, you make like a down the take and you get some meat. But out of context, people don’t know him. It has been really hard for you, like you even received some hundreds of emails. So I think this is the darker side of this amplification we were talking about.

00:37:11 - Speaker 2: Here I definitely have to reference the book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which covers a lot of cases of people who have exactly that scenario.

It sounds like what your friend experienced there was bad, but it can get much, much worse for sure, and they document a bunch of cases of this and actually an interesting case of this public shaming.

In the modern era, but maybe a little bit before, certainly a little bit before Twitter was the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and she has a great TED Talk about that experience of being shamed by all these strangers who don’t know you and make a bunch of assumptions about your character and who you are based on this one really tiny little fragment of information they have about you.

It’s quite a powerful thing to read and hear these stories, and I hope would cause folks to think twice before joining the Dunk brigade.

Now, you mentioned Mastodon a couple of times. I’ve been using that for a few months and kind of enjoying it as a, I don’t quite call it a Twitter alternative, but it is a similar type of kind of microblogging format, it has a lot of the same. Affordances, you might say, although the quote tweet is not one of them, for the reasons you said, you mentioned potentially want to support that in your product. Have you been using Mastodon? What do you think of it? Do you think it is a viable Twitter alternative or just another new type of social network? What’s your take on all that?

00:38:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve been using it as well, both for personal interest and also because of title, we want to support it eventually.

I think it’s an interesting place to be right now, and we are not seeing the same problem that we see on Twitter, but I had my doubts on why is that.

I think there is not really a core difference there.

I think with scale, we could actually see the same problems, and case in point, I think they are actually thinking of implementing the quote tweet button. I’ve seen some discussions on some its. So I think we might actually end up in a very similar place if Mastodon blows up and many people end up moving there.

Another interesting thing about Mastodon is that You have this, yeah, it’s decentralized, but the server admin of your master the instance owns you basically. It can ban you. They can do whatever they want with your account. So in a way, I think some of the problems we see on Twitter have the potential of being amplified on master them.

But then there is also the positive side. I’ve seen many people asking their own distance, and that’s super cool. I want to do that myself. And in a way, we go full circle and it becomes much more similar to a blog than to a social media profile. Something you want, something you control, and something you can do whatever you want with.

And of course, like, I think that my biggest concern with it, why I think uh right now it’s not a viable alternative. Is the user experience and usability gap that you have with it, even signing up and following a user from another server than yours. It’s really difficult and takes some time to understand. Yeah, with this much friction, I’m not sure how far the platform can get. There are many smart developers working on improving this, but I don’t buy the narrative that everyone should move or will move to Malona should just ditch Twitter. That’s not happening right now.

00:40:48 - Speaker 2: Yeah maybe a pro and a con is those elements that make it more like old school blogging, you know, setting up your own blog, even if it’s installing WordPress, configuring your RSS feed, configuring your RSS reader, managing your reader, all of that is. is you kind of have to be a power user, if not a full-on developer, and that on one hand, filters the kind of people that can be part of it and maybe that’s part of what people are enjoying about Mastodon right now is the feeling that it is smaller and it is more limited.

But in the long run, to me that’s a downside, something being accessible to everyone and you don’t necessarily want to fuss with configuring your own blog, for example, is a huge benefit to these social networks where anyone can join.

It’s pretty low friction to get started and you can build up over time and obviously social networks have value the more people that are on them. And so there’s a natural well, network effect. So, yeah, that’s an interesting thing. A lot of the qualities that maybe people are drawn to about Mastodon and the Fedive verse broadly, me included, are actually things that in the long run are really strikes against it.

00:41:58 - Speaker 1: Yes.

Another point on this is that using it, like, uh, very intensely for a couple of weeks, I actually ended up missing some of the most controversial features of Twitter, like, for example, the algorithmic timeline, which many people like to wait on and use the chronological timeline or even Twitter list.

But the algorithmic timeline is really good to discover new people, get discovered by new people. And we didn’t touch on all uh bubble issue, ending up in your bubble without being able to break out of it, always reading the same things I mean your opinion confirmed.

I think that’s even worse without the algorithmic timeline. I think you end up like in this local maximum, yeah, your timeline doesn’t get more interesting and there is no novelty there, and it’s very hard to discover new people to follow.

And form those connections we were talking about before. And this has been a challenge for me on Matoon and also the reason why I kind of stopped the actively using it. Don’t know about you guys.

00:43:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, my experience is the algorithm makes your feed lively.

It helps you discover new things. You don’t have to do the hard work of, for example, curating lists or whatever.

Of course you want to pick who you follow and unfollow. That’s important, but it’s not a super active thing you need to do. You can kind of count on the platform to surface potentially interesting content to you and if the algorithm is.

Well done. I actually would reference YouTube as having actually an incredible algorithm, and it suggests really interesting things that are totally relevant to me all the time and very rarely suggests something that I don’t like or find unhelpful.

And actually that’s a lot better than managing my own playlist of things to watch or I have a fixed set of subscriptions that and maybe starting to get a little stale. I want something new, but I’m sort of too lazy to go like search for it. I just want something to watch. And so having the computer do that work for you.

To me, the big challenge with the algorithm is always the extent to which they’re optimizing for the goals of the business and the platform, the extent they’re optimizing for my goals as a user.

And again, I feel YouTube, at least for me, and maybe others have different experience, gets this pretty right in the sense that it mostly shows me videos that I want to watch, and I feel I have gotten good value from my time from the things that it surfaces to me, whereas the Twitter algorithm has I don’t know, changed this way and that way over the years, but sometimes it just surfaces the weirdest, just clickbait stuff. I’m just so uninterested in. And I just have no idea how I can think based on my history of likes and interactions over the 13 years I’ve been using the platform or longer actually that I would like that, and I assume some of the answer may be the other of them isn’t perfect or could be improved, but I think some of the answer is sometimes they want to surface things that are valuable for them to show to me or to Twitter’s business rather than as valuable for me in the sense of the kind of meaning I’m searching for when I read writing on the internet.

00:45:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is why I really like that idea that Musk talked about a while ago. The idea of open-sourcing their own timeline algorithm, and in a way also allowing people to customize it, choose the algorithm the best aligned with their goals. And what makes me really excited about these new platforms like Mastodon. And even more with more decentralized ones like forecaster is that this, this actually becomes possible. Like there are services that allow you to get a completely different view on your timeline of the people you follow. And I think this is uh really powerful if we get to fix the usability issues.

00:45:54 - Speaker 2: Now one area that’s very interesting to me is we’re talking here about writing, but I think one of the benefits of these many different channels we’ve talked about blogs, Twitter, and so on is they’re really multimedia, right? The text is kind of the baseline thing, you know, a tweet is mainly text, a blog post is mainly text.

But especially as computers and browsers and phones and things have gotten more powerful, media, especially multimedia, has become more and more a piece of it, right? So, I mean, Twitter certainly when I scroll through my timeline, probably the majority of tweets are either an image, multiple images, a video, or a link, and of course links get these rich previews here, these unfurl cards that also make them, yeah, sort of a multimedia component.

And this is also true in yeah, publishing a web article, for example. So one interesting thing there is, you know, I could switch, the research lab that Mark and I have been a part of does these long pieces that in another world or another life or something could be and sometimes are turned into academic. that are PDFs, but if you look at, for example, a lot of the recent publishing that switches does heavy, heavy use of video or in some cases interactive elements that are built into the page and you just, you know, you could never do that in those traditional formats. And that’s something unique to the internet and part of what makes the internet special.

But yeah, how do you think about or how to both of you think about the role of writing and text generally. In a world where not only do you have something like Instagram or TikTok, which are obviously, you know, images and videos kind of first and writing and text only second, but even on a place like Twitter, Mastodon, or a blog post. That increasingly multimedia is a huge part of it. Is that a trend that’s going to go on indefinitely to the point where eventually we just don’t have all that much writing on the internet, or is this a yes and kind of situation? The media only enhances the writing, it doesn’t replace it.

00:47:57 - Speaker 3: Well, I think this is a largely a done deal already.

I bet if you looked at the brain hours invested in online media consumption, it would be overwhelmingly images and video.

I think we’re kind of in a weird part of the internet where we spend a lot of time on these niche platforms like Twitter, where there’s still a lot of text, but most people are watching YouTube and TikTok all day, right? And that’s still on Instagram. It just is what it is.

Now, it’s not to say that those totally supplant or replace texts, especially given the importance of texts for conveying ideas on platforms like Twitter. But I think this ship has already sailed.

The one thing I would say though is that I think that the specific type of medium, you know, text versus image versus video versus the combination. I think it’s actually a less important bit than the How the rest of the information ecology works, you know, for example, whether there’s an algorithmic timeline, how that works, what the signals that are fed into that timeline, the mechanics around following and comments and retweets.

You’ll notice that as we’ve talked today about writing on the internet, we’ve mostly been talking about these mechanics, right? We haven’t been talking about, you know, how to write a topic sentence or whatever. It’s really important how these mechanics work. So I think that’s actually the highest order bit and then below that is the type of media, but yeah, in that case, I do think it’s video and images.

00:49:13 - Speaker 2: Although maybe I’ll add on to that that there is a co-opting also of the video and image format, quite a lot of the images, at least in my Twitter timeline, are screenshots of text, and this is also the case when you look through Instagram or Instagram stories, you have these text annotations.

Snapchat has a version of this, which is adding little text captions and emojis and things that support or enhance, you know, annotate and describe what’s going on.

In the video or in the image is actually an important part of it as well. So perhaps these two things just end up weaving together in different ways and even the person who is a video platform content creator for them writing on the internet is how do you craft that perfect annotation. The right emoji and the right tone when you have such a small amount of space, right? OK, I can do 5 words. I’m not going to use any capitalization or punctuation, and I get 2 emojis. How do I convey exactly the right message in this moment?

00:50:12 - Speaker 3: Another interesting thing about text versus, especially video, is that I think most of the internet out there that isn’t.

Kind of owned or reputationally ascribed to an entity has become a bit of a wasteland.

Like, I don’t know if you guys use Google or other search engines these days, but most of the results are terrible, and that’s because it’s just easy to generate SEO garbage, and indeed that’s what most of the results are these days. And the only repris from that are one on platforms like Twitter and Substack and email newsletters, where you can accrue reputational capital, and there are platform facilities for basically leveraging that over time, you know, email subscription or followers on Twitter and so on, or a video where there’s a lot more proof of work. It’s actually quite hard to generate the equivalent of SEO garbage on YouTube, although people are certainly trying. And so that kind of is a dual of your comment Adam about these other media types having a lot of text embedded. I think even in the case of video, I mean a lot of times I listened to YouTube, I’m not watching the video, I’m just listening to the audio, right? Because it’s basically a script that’s being read to you, but it’s a lot harder to generate fake content on that platform.

00:51:20 - Speaker 1: I think the new AI developments we’re seeing, which right now are mostly focused on text, will soon come for that as well and maybe change the game there too.

But I agree that, yeah, most of the stuff I see on Google these days is garbage. That’s why people are appending like Reddit or YouTube to most of their queries. And it’s also why I think Google is in a very tight spot and Stuff like GPT maybe could replace it, providing better results. But going back to media, I think, uh, so Adam was saying, like, I think text and media have a place together.

Even on Twitter itself, we see that the best tweets, the most engaging ones are the ones with media. And I don’t know if you noticed, but in the app, or on the Twitter app, if you open a video, you kind of get In this mode where if you scroll down, you go to the next video.

They’re trying to be TikTok. And I think that’s not the way to do it, but for sure, I think they will try to do more of this. They were talking about long form video, the Twitter app itself.

I’m really positive about this and curious to see where they take it, because, yeah, every time people have had a new medium to express themselves. It enrich the discussion and if you pair this with the dynamics, we already have on Twitter, I think it’s a really interesting development.

00:52:53 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I recall that we said a lot of the things that are unique and magical about Twitter. It’s not just that they have these 120 or 240 character text entities, it’s all these mechanics. And you know, a lot of the interesting stuff like you guys were saying that we’re already seeing on Twitter is, is that these different media types. So even if the world were to move strongly in that direction, there’s still going to be a lot of value in Twitter.

00:53:14 - Speaker 2: Well, there’s a place to end. I’d love to just ask the simple question, why do we want to write on the internet?

00:53:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you can think of writing on the internet as a beacon, as a way to signal yourself to other like-minded people.

And there is this interesting word that I came to know by reading a blog post from a friend of mine, a friend of mine on the internet, that discovered him through his writing.

And it’s this concept of friend catchers.

And friend cultures are these small bits, could be projects, could be tweets, could be blog posts, these pieces of yourself that you put out on the internet, and they allow you to create this that serendipity engine where like-minded people can find you.

You can discuss idea, you can form friendships.

And I think ultimately, this is why you should write on the internet.

00:54:14 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, that has been huge, you know, I talk about things like meeting guests for this podcast, but also just making connections with interesting people that yeah, become friends or or somehow add value to my life, but I also think of that as being something that works really well for me as someone who is not only an introvert, but has Very weird niche interests. So finding others who have those weird interests and connecting over that is for me, that’s the way that I want to, yeah, make friends, find potential new collaborators and so forth. And the best way to do that is is more of the exactly the metaphor you described this beacon that you put out to the world, and I’m also searching for the beacons that others put out, and that is, let’s call it a comfortable or certainly more fun way to do it than other more conventional approaches.

00:55:06 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I can say from experience on both sides of this that it’s unreasonably effective. The truth is there’s a dark world out there in terms of contents, and even putting just one piece of writing on the internet, it could literally be a single tweet, can do a huge world of good for you and your work and your career, so it’s worth investing in.

00:55:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I hadn’t seen this friend catchers article before, but I was just skimming it briefly here.

I like this one sentence, Friend catchers are small, contain less essays or apps that solve resonant, emotional, relevant, tractable, and underserved problems.

I like that a lot.

If you think about putting up that blog post that is the one time that you tried to install XYZ and hit a problem and You found the solutions, so you wrote a little blog post about it, and one of the person in the world has that exact same problem, Google for it, finds your blog posts, and yet it’s resonant because not just that you offered them a solution, but you both had the same problem.

You’re trying to do something similar in your life, and that can be the basis for connection.

Well, maybe it’s a place to end.

Francesco, I find myself wanting to go back to something you mentioned at the very beginning when you’re talking about the overall vision for Tightfully, which was this kind of allowing creators to own their audience, right? We know that these platforms are great for reaching new people and they’re a great place to start, but then over the longer term, you get a little trapped there in some cases. How do you think about that problem and what are you going to try to do to solve it?

00:56:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, as you said, I think the way people writing on the internet today should think about these platforms is as tools.

To use to build an audience, to get their ideas out there, form connections, but they should not be relying on them because as we have seen, the timeline algorithm can change on a we follow our count, YouTube subscribers means nothing.

So what we are trying to do. I help people along the way of the journey starting by allowing them to build that audience. What we focus more and more nexttily is building tools that make it easy for individual creators to more easily publish the content to more platforms and actually retain and own personally the connections, the followers they get and the content they publish. And if you want to build a career on the internet, I think you should be thinking hard about that.

00:57:50 - Speaker 2: So this is something like, if I only publish in one place, medium, Instagram, Twitter, whatever it is, and I just essentially put it there and that’s it. For example, I don’t even have the archive of my past posts. If I wanted to recreate those someplace else, I wouldn’t be able to do that. Is that the kind of thing you’re thinking about, or does it go beyond that?

00:58:13 - Speaker 1: It’s more along the lines of the fact that you could be banned from a platform. You have no button to DM all your followers on Twitter. You don’t really own your audience. If you don’t have an email address or a way to directly contact them. And this is huge if you want to really use these tools and do interesting things with them.

00:58:41 - Speaker 2: Indeed, and I think that was certainly part of the picture for Substack is that you have that email list that you can export at any time.

And of course email is the original Fettiverse, right? This is a federated system for as much as Gmail has a pretty substantial chunk of the market.

The reality is there are many choices for email servers.

It’s something that can’t be controlled by one single single entity and Yeah, it just gives you more control and more stability over the long term, which again matters if your audience matters to you, if it’s actually your business because you’re yeah, creator that monetizes your content, but also if you’re someone that just has spent a long time building these connections, maybe it’s relevant to your career at some level, and yeah, it’s important to you and you don’t want that to be something that completely depends on the whims of a company who again has their own motivations that are often aligned with yours, hopefully, but not always.

Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. Join us in Discord to discuss this episode with me, Mark, and our community, the links in the show notes, and you can follow us on Twitter at museAppHQ. And Francesco, thanks for helping us be more thoughtful about writing on the internet. It’s something we’ve been doing for a long time. Platforms come and go, but I think writing on the internet is something that’s here to stay.

01:00:00 - Speaker 1: Thanks guys.