Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey Laments Twitter Becoming a Company, Wishes it Were More Like Email

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey engaged in a thread on the social media platform yesterday where he lamented it becoming a company.

Dorsey said instead that he wishes it were more like email, as he referenced that he would like to see it as a “protocol.”

The conversation began when a Twitter user asked, “@Jack wondering what was your intent on Twitter and has it turned out the way you wanted?”

“It feels a bit skewed leftward right now,” the user pointed out and wondered, “How do we straighten it?”

“It seems an inordinate amount of rightward leaning Twitter users are being banned or kicked off. It can’t be good for MDAU (monetizable daily active users),” the user explained.

Dorsey responded, “The biggest issue and my biggest regret is that it became a company.”

From there, poet Jane Wong jumped in and inquired, “In what form did you wish Twitter to become?”

“I thought about this sometimes. But if Twitter was funded/run by state, it might give the state more leverage to exert control If Twitter was a NGO, how would Twitter’s scale today be financially feasible,” Wong suggested.

Dorsey replied, “A protocol. Def can’t be owned by a state, or company. Becomes clearer every day.”

The New York Post noted that if it were a protocol, Twitter would operate much like email, which is not controlled by one centralized entity, and people using different email providers are able to communicate with one another.

Previous Twitter employee April King then told Dorsey, “I’m not sure the engineering exists to make something of Twitter’s scale work properly as an open protocol. XMPP and IRC certainly can’t make it work, I’d like to see something that can sync this many messages and with this much data, openly.”

“Of course there is. Bitcoin has proven otherwise. As has http, smtp, html, etc.,” Dorsey responded back.

Current Twitter Product Director Jameel Gbajabiamila then told Dorsey that “This is a naive statement” in a six-part response outlining why he disagrees.

Dorsey told Gbajabiamila, “Not naive at all. Gmail dominates email ui, but doesn’t control email.”

The biggest issue and my biggest regret is that it became a company.

— jack (@jack) August 25, 2022