How to Gradually Exit Twitter

This article is the reason I refer to Balaji Srinivasan by his url, [[balajis.com]], it is also the reason he uses his url as his twitter name.

As always, he is interested by the future of technology. In this case, it is particularly about the future of communication. Although twitter has done extremely well, and Balaji himself is clear he has personally benefitted tremendously from it, there are going to be better forms of communication in the future.

Here are some ideas from the article:

• "I may be wrong about this, but I don't think a 'better Twitter' starts with a service which is simply a clone of Twitter except with a different community. I think it starts with a community of independent (and independently monetizable) domains that we network together in novel ways, to build decentralized media."
• "The long-term step is to start addressing the issues with Twitter by knitting these individual domains together into an open source decentralized media ecosystem. That means addressing:"
  • Security by encouraging people to post from their own domains
  • Community by building a network around multiple domains
  • Authentication by combining domains with digital signatures
  • Distribution via memberships and email lists
  • Incentives by baking in monetization and economic alignment from the beginning
  • Mobs by recommending pseudonymity by default
  • Culture by encouraging physical norms of civility

Benefits of Decentralization

Balaji is keen on people owning their own content. From newsletters to blogs, people will increasingly take advantage of posting content to their own domain names so they are not at the mercy of centralized products, like medium and twitter. He's even put a bounty out for a tool that can export twitter followers to new platforms, like substack, ghost, Locals, etc.

• In the link for the bounty, Balaji lays out the constraints twitter puts on creators and why it will be beneficial for users to move their followers to direct consumption of content they own

My Linked Notes

• balajiscom
  

  I refer to balajis.com by his domain name because of his thoughts on [[How to Gradually Exit Twitter]], which could be called something like "The Future of Twitter-like Online Interaction"

• 2021-01-17
  

  My favorite note from Balaji so far is [[How to Gradually Exit Twitter]].

• idea-queue
  

  Choose a platform and convert my [[Weekly Review]]s into a newsletter. I would like to submit it to this form from [[How to Gradually Exit Twitter]]

One last thing

If you liked these notes, hit me on Twitter!