(2021-03-09) Twitter Is Reinventing Itself

Twitter is reinventing itself. Twitter recently announced that it’s going to be building a lot of new things into its product: there’s Twitter Spaces, which is a live audio feature very similar to the red-hot Clubhouse app. There are Twitter Fleets, which look like Snap and Instagram Stories. Twitter just acquired Revue, which is a newsletter product similar to Substack. And it also announced something called Super Follows, which will let people pay creators on Twitter for special content.

On today’s episode of Decoder, I talk with Kayvon Beykpour, the head of consumer product at Twitter.

We had a few high-level areas of our product strategy that we’re focused on

One is health: how do we protect the health of the public conversation? The other is conversations: how do we incentivize people and create the tools and capabilities to inspire people to start and participate in conversations on the platform? And the other is what we call interests: how do we connect people to the people and content that they’re interested in?

Within “interest,” for example, last year we launched a product called Topics... there now are over 100 million people that have followed topics.

Spaces, which again is very connected to our work in conversations

Super Follows

let me try to recast the three areas of focus that you’re describing.

One of the things that [Twitter CEO] Jack Dorsey really emphasized when he came back to the company, was morphing our product development process to respect the “jobs to be done” framework a lot more.

what are our customers trying to hire us for? What are they firing us for? And how do we build product solutions that have those dimensions in mind?

Take something like Fleets, for example. We didn’t start it from the standpoint of, let’s copy Stories. We started it from the standpoint of “why are people not tweeting?” It turns out that some of the reasons they’re not tweeting is they don’t feel safe.

A lot of people are terrified to tweet

Fleets felt like one — of many — but one product solution that can address some slice of that problem statement. It’s ephemeral, and it takes away the public replies. It takes away all the engagements.

With Spaces, it’s interesting because... fundamentally, I think people for the last 15 years have been using Twitter to talk

And this is particularly a special and passionate area for me because it’s not too different from how we were approaching Periscope. The interesting thing is that when we started Periscope, our goal was to build the closest thing to teleportation, like, [to] see through someone else’s eyes. What we found is that 99 percent of the usage was not someone broadcasting what’s happening on the streets of Istanbul during a protest. It’s people hanging out and talking.

What were the top three things that you had to do in your role as head of consumer product, to get to this velocity of product development and feature announcement?

when I joined the company, one of the first things that I felt was a reticence and an uneasiness around taking big bets. And I think there’s a lot of reasons for that. It’s hard to pinpoint one... (Thinking in Bets)

And really, unwinding that, I think, has been the biggest unlock that we’ve had as a company. Today, when we contemplate solving more ambitious customer problems and in turn, postulating more ambitious product solutions, we don’t get the “no, but” as much.

three years ago, any idea you would come up with, there was just a lot of pessimism around — that’s going to take a long time to build. Which is true, we’ve got a lot of infrastructure debt to work through. And also like: that’ll never ship, that would never get approved, our customers will freak out.

one of the most amazing things about Twitter. We get the gift of feedback on a minute-by-minute basis. And that includes getting shit from our customers when we get it wrong. And that can make it very intimidating and scary for teams to build stuff. Because God forbid, “rest in peace, Twitter” trends. And we’ve had a lot of launches end with #RestInPeaceTwitter trending

Aside from that, hiring. Any leader’s job is to hire a great team. And we’ve really reshaped our leadership bench, across not just product, but design and research and engineering.

we think that the potential is so much higher than what the product is today. The product is obviously extremely important and plays a critical role in the world, but there’s still so much potential. I think it takes a collective team to have that irrational passion, to go through a lot of the slog that sometimes you have to go through to get there.

One of the things I always think about is leadership timelines. I’ll give a really silly example. If you’re a news writer at The Verge, your decision-making timeline is 30 minutes... You’re describing a two-year-plus process to reboot a product culture. Is that the right timeline?

I generally am an impatient person. I think it’s one of my best and worst qualities... when you talk about speed, our ability to identify a problem we want to solve, and actually ship a product solution — which I think is, ultimately, the right end-to-end timestamp to look at — there’s a lot more than just culture and process and people. It’s also infrastructure and technology

making a huge, multibillion-dollar commitment in leveraging public cloud solutions through AWS [Amazon Web Services] and GCP [Google Cloud Platform]. This is its own multi-year journey that I think, fundamentally, will help us unlock even more velocity

I think my expectation of [the] time horizon is constantly modulating. In areas of culture and people, we need to move as quickly as possible, and in areas of execution where we have clarity in our strategy, we’re trying to think in weeks, not months or quarters. And then in other areas of a sort of broad scale re-architecture, for lack of a better word, we do have to think in years

I think probably the biggest point of evolution for me has been knowing when not to be involved in a decision

I think ultimately the highest-leverage thing I can do besides hiring is prioritization.

Deciding what we think is a high-ROI bet versus what we think is a low-ROI bet is ultimately the most impactful thing we can do, because it’s the thing we have the most control over.

Ultimately the measure of success we look at, to understand whether we’re helping or hurting the service, is growing daily active usage. That’s a very lagging indicator. So internally we look at, are we solving customer problems? And we have specific metrics that tell us whether we’re helping or hurting customer problems in specific dimensions.

The return part is basically, how much impact are we having against the metrics that matter most? And how do we — and this is the hard part — how do we compare unlike metrics together?

energy and momentum is infectious, right? As you see the company and other teams build quickly and you see customers noticing that, it inspires and motivates everyone else to want to live up to that. And so we’ve seen a bunch of that, I think, and we’re seeing it right now with Spaces.

[you] bought Revue, which is a newsletter platform. You are doing Super Follows, which will let people pay for tweets from a certain — do you call them creators?

We’re still looking for a name that perhaps is more all-encompassing, but creators works

Super Follows will let your biggest fans subscribe to you and get access to exclusive content, which could be tweets, could be DMs. It could be subscriber-only Spaces. It could be subscriber-only newsletters. It could be subscriber-only Fleets.

If the best people on Twitter, or the most interesting people on Twitter, have this incentive to keep people from seeing their stuff, that affects the value of the service as a whole. So how are you thinking about that balance?

I actually think that there will continue to be an incentive for creators to sort of juggle — which, everyone’s juggle and formula is going to be a little bit different — but juggle what content they create and make available for all, and what content they create just for those subscribers

And, by the way, a lot of super fans, they just want to support their favorite creators. You see this with Patreon.

I’m guessing the vast majority of people that are interacting with Twitter are doing it with an app on iOS or Android. If you want to enable a payment inside of an app on those platforms, you have to give a cut to Apple or Google. (app-store)

the important piece of context here is, we are not... for Super Follows, our goal is not for Twitter to make money. Our goal is for creators to make money

The way I would think of this in the context of Super Follows where we’re building this layer that didn’t exist before — even if that $10 comes down to $7 because of a 30 percent fee, that’s still $7 more than you’ve been able to make on Twitter than before.

We’re not in the business of getting around platform rules.

we don’t want to innovate around the payment flow. We want to innovate around letting creators make money from their audience. So that’s why this isn’t a big thing for us

Let’s talk about Spaces for a second.

the beginning of when we knew audio was special was, we had this feature in Periscope, which we called Hydra — internally, I don’t think we actually ever even called it that externally — but basically when you’re live, you can pull in guests and have a zero-latency live conversation with them while everyone else watches. Casey has used this many times. I’ve been a guest in his Hydra broadcasts and fundamentally, the infrastructure that powers that is literally what Spaces is, just with a new skin

I’m sort of kicking myself now because when we released that feature two and a half years ago, we were like, “Wow, this is way more interesting than any other Periscope broadcast,”

At the time, we were going through stuff and live video was not a focus.

Fast forward to about a year ago, we really started investing in audio

The first product that they built was what we call voice tweets.

Around the same time, they were thinking about the sort of conversational experience, and this is when audio really started heating up and Clubhouse was getting a lot of traction. So we had a long and winding road to refocus back on the sort of multi-person conversational format for audio. But the team that’s building Spaces now has had their heart in this for quite some time. Obviously, hindsight is 20-20.

It’s quite intentionally not a highly-produced sort of editing environment. Anything live, I believe, is going to immediately put you on that side of the spectrum

99 percent of these Spaces... are 10-person rooms, less; people just hanging out and talking about their interests, whatever it might be.

The way you build a product experience for that use case is very different than the way you build a product experience for the massive space where there’s an interview happening or a panel discussion with a ton of listeners. We think both will happen on Twitter

that’s something that we kind of fucked up with Periscope. We had the same dynamic where both of those archetypes existed, but we didn’t make any one of them particularly great

One of the challenges with Spaces, with all these social audio products, is moderation. So when you open Spaces right now, it tells you, “someone reports this, we’re going to record it.”

I think there’s a couple of layers of this. One, just as a baseline, we have our policy and enforcement apparatus that needs to be well-integrated here

The second layer, and I believe the most important one, is actually building native product features and native functionality imbued into the product that helps all of the actors within this conversation: the hosts, the speakers, the delegated admins that the host might have, and the listeners, be able to take part in optimizing for health. This sort of decentralization

The host should be able to decide who’s in, who’s out. The host should be able to empower some of their speakers or their listeners to be able to aid in the moderation process

we also would be kidding ourselves if we thought we could be the police officers for all live audio conversations happening globally at any given point in time.

A lot of what’s tricky about the health space is that what people deem as healthy or unhealthy is very subjective. You might be really bothered by something that I am not bothered by.

I think one of the challenges with Twitter is that who owns the space — using the term space loosely here — has been very amorphous in the past, and you’ve seen us actually try and make this way more intentional, where you own your conversational space

Do you have plans to let people broadcast their archive recordings?

We’re not religious about it being fundamentally ephemeral. We’re starting that way because we think it’s simpler and we need to focus

I think most people don’t want to listen to a 67-minute recorded conversation that serendipitously evolved based on who came in the room.

obviously the host should be able to save it and do whatever they want. Maybe you host a Space, you save it, then want to go edit it. You should be able to do that.

I also think that the notion of letting the audience pick sound bites and share them as clips could be really, really powerful

consent is really important.

Do you think of Clubhouse as the competitor here?

I don’t think social audio is going to be winner-takes-all.

I think for us, this is fundamentally Twitter. People have been coming to Twitter to talk about what’s happening for 15 years. It’s imperative that we build this into the product in a way that feels super natural

All these new products you’re building — one big theme here is you want really interesting people to use Twitter (interestingness)

How are you thinking about bringing along the existing user base to use all those new tools and new opportunities versus who you want to go out and get? Because that it seems like it might be richer, to go get some new people to use Twitter in new ways.

I think that we hope that with a lot of the capabilities that we’re building, it will inspire and motivate our existing customers to use them. Frankly, a lot of the work that we’ve done in the last year and a half has been sort of in that vein

I think what we’re disproportionately doing more of now, that we haven’t really taken on in the past, is introducing use cases that can attract new customers.

Revue is a good example of this. You could hack Twitter to be a good longform publishing tool; threads and tweetstorms are kind of a good example of this. But largely, if you want to publish longform content, you would go elsewhere.

We have almost 200 million people who use Twitter every single day

we believe that Twitter can serve billions of people every single day.

There’s been a couple interesting moves toward decentralization, from Twitter’s perspective, in content moderation and in the platform itself. You launched Birdwatch, which is a community moderation system. How’s that going?

Birdwatch is a decentralized moderation tool, so basically a community of people can annotate tweets and enforce them either against our policies or against policies that we may not have. They can provide annotations around why tweets may be misleading and explain why.

Annotating tweets looks like labels — something you rolled out during the election. Lots of conversation back and forth over whether they’re really effective.

one of our forms of labels also disables engagements, so if a tweet is particularly egregious and violates some of our policies, we not only label it, but we disable engagements around it so that it cannot be amplified

You’re building a sort of Wikipedia backend of labels that people participate in?

I think that’s a very apt analogy

you also run TweetDeck, you also support third-party clients. There has been some work in the background at Twitter to decentralize the entire platform in some way

we haven’t given TweetDeck a lot of love recently. That’s about to change; we’ve been working on a pretty big overhaul from the ground up of TweetDeck, and it’s something that we’re excited to share publicly sometime this year

We also, over the last five years, I think, haven’t given a lot of love to our developer ecosystem. A bunch of reasons for that, some missteps that we’d taken in the past, then also sort of prioritization. We are also changing that. (API)

We hope we’ll allow developers to build really awesome stuff around the Twitter ecosystem.

Are you going to let third-party clients access Spaces?

will at some point. It’s not an active priority today, and that’s mostly just focus

Not just on the creating a Space side, but I think there’s lots of really amazing developer tools I can imagine around managing a Space, particularly large Spaces, I can imagine whole control centers being built around it. Complex moderation capabilities that people get through a web dashboard that Twitter might not have in its native tools or analytics

You’re moving fast; it’s hard to open up to developers. There has been some talk about decentralizing Twitter entirely, having it as a protocol. There was just a white paper. Is that real?

It is real... This is an area that we are investing in and the way we’re investing in it is, sort of sharing our ambition and belief that Bluesky, which is what we’re calling this ambition for a protocol layer, is something that we do want to create. And it’s something that we hope that Twitter can become a client of in the future. And we want to help build a structure and apparatus and hire the lead to be able to create this protocol. There’s still a lot of questions and work, and it’s super early. This is not something that will be in place in the next year or two.

Am I getting an edit button?

I want to be able to fix typos on my tweets. I routinely tweet the wrong link, this is a common thing that I do, and I have to delete and start over. So I would just like to be able to edit a tweet in a 60-second window.

Yeah. I think that’s a very reasonable ask, and I think you should be able to do that at some point, for sure.

Confirmed?

Not confirmed.