The vision of Twitter CEO's social network: Decentralized network is the original intention, and the advent of blockchain rekindled the "hope" in my heart

On December 11, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of social network Twitter, published a series of tweets, expressing the future development of social networks. To this end, Dorsey announced that Twitter will fund a small five-person independent research team to create an open decentralized standard for social networks, and Twitter wants to be the implementer of this standard. Dorsey said that when Twitter was founded, it had an open mind and wanted to become a decentralized Internet standard like SMTP. But the reality was cruel, and eventually Twitter went central. The advent of blockchain technology allowed Dorsey to see that the original vision was expected to be realized.

Here is a translation of Jack Dorsey's series of tweets :

Twitter is funding a small, independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop open and decentralized standards for social media, with the goal of eventually making Twitter a client of that standard.

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Early Twitter was so open that many people saw its potential to become a decentralized Internet standard like SMTP (email protocol). However, for various reasons (all reasonable at the time), we took a different approach and gradually moved to a centralized Twitter. But a lot has changed over the years …

First of all, we are facing new challenges, and centralized solutions are struggling. For example, without putting too much burden on people, it is unlikely that in the long run, centralized implementation of global policies to address misuse and misleading information.

Second, the value of social media is shifting from content hosting and deletion to a recommendation algorithm that guides people's attention. However, unfortunately, these algorithms are usually proprietary algorithms, and no alternative algorithm can be selected or constructed.

Third, existing social media incentives often lead people to focus on content and conversations that cause controversy and outrage, rather than health-promoting and health-promoting conversations.

Finally, the advent of new technologies has made decentralized approaches more feasible. The blockchain points out a series of decentralized solutions for open and persistent hosting, governance, and even monetization. Although much work remains to be done, the basic principles already exist.

Square (a payment company founded by Dorsey) is doing this for Bitcoin through Square Crypto. For social media, we want the team to find an existing decentralized standard to help them move forward, otherwise create a standard from scratch. This is the only direction we will provide on Twitter.

Why is this standard good for Twitter? It will allow us to access and participate in a wider range of public conversations, and work to build open recommendation algorithms that promote healthy conversations, and force us to be more innovative than in the past.

There are many challenges to accomplishing this, and Twitter will be happy to be a customer of the standard. This is why the work must be done transparently and openly, and not led by any private company, a move that promotes the principles of openness and decentralization of the Internet.

We hope that this team will not only set a decentralized standard for social media, but also build an open community around it, including companies and organizations, researchers, civil society leaders, and all those who have positive and negative effects on the consequences people.

This will not happen overnight. It will take many years to develop a complete, scalable and usable decentralized standard for social media, which will pave the way for solving the above challenges. Our commitment is to fund this work until this goal is achieved. So which team is Jack Dorsey talking about? In fact, it is the external research team Bluesky, which currently has no members. Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal's task is to find a leader for the project, who will form a team of up to five people. The only tweet on the Bluesky Twitter account was to repost the message that Dorsey had just announced-"lo", which is usually used for the first messages sent on the Internet.

Even if Bluesky is able to achieve results, it may take years to see the impact. But this is an unusual direction for social networks in 2019-at least it is expected to raise some interesting questions about how the Internet without a "garden wall" will work.

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