Social Media

Jack Dorsey’s ‘chaotic’ interview proves Twitter will never be the place for deep conversations


Yesterday, Recode cofounder Kara Swisher conducted a 90-minute interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, on Twitter. Dorsey was the one who suggested the format, saying that a live conversation tool, “might be a feature we want to build,” and that he wanted to see how it worked with Twitter’s current format. If he learned anything from yesterday, hopefully it will be that that’s the last time anyone should try to conduct a long, substantive interview on Twitter. The interview was “super chaotic” to follow, as Swisher put it.

I’ll admit that as a reporter, I have a natural aversion to trying to do a Q&A with someone via text. There’s a more significant lag time compared to if you talk to someone over the phone, in person, or via video. That makes it a challenge to get an interviewee to respond to follow up questions, or to pin the person down on specifics if they avoid directly answering your question. That’s much of what the #karajack conversation boiled down to:

Another big issue with the chat was that it was near impossible to follow the conversation in real time, because of the way Twitter threads tweets. If Swisher or Dorsey forgot to reply directly in the conversation, it would omit the tweet from the thread.  If users wanted to follow the conversation using the #karajack hashtag, that wouldn’t help much either — because the hashtag would serve up tweets from both Dorsey and Swisher, as well as other people who were tweeting about the conversation. That seemed to be Dorsey’s biggest takeaway from the conversation — that substantive tweet threads are too hard to follow.

Even if Twitter did fix threading, I don’t think that it would make the service a better place for deep conversations. Twitter was built on brevity — first allowing for users to only send 140 character-long tweets, then expanding that to 280. That makes Twitter a great place for people to ask for feedback on a thought that’s not fully formed yet, to test out a bunch of different tweets and see what their followers respond to, or to get a bunch of people involved in a single conversation with minimal effort.

Twitter shouldn’t be thinking about how to make a very specific format like this — a 90 minute conversation between two high-profile people — work. And while Twitter does have someone genuine UX issues to fix, I think the biggest issue the company needs to think about right now is what is stopping people from Tweeting and joining in on conversations, no matter how lengthy or substantive they are. To that end, I see three big issues standing in the way:

Twitter needs to do a better job of enforcing its terms of service and kicking people off for repeated harassment

Twitter could create the most visually appealing, easiest-to-follow threads, and many people still wouldn’t use Twitter for an anything-goes style Q&As like Swisher and Dorsey participated in. Why? Because of the fact that the more you tweet and the more high-profile of a user you become, the greater the potential is for bad-faith users to come across your account, see something they don’t like, and tweet death threats, hate speech, and other vile things at you. Twitter needs to be more proactive about kicking people off who repeatedly violate its rules, and give users a better way appeal content moderations that Twitter seems to have gotten wrong. That’s the only way to get people more comfortable about participating in a live conversation tool that Dorsey seems to want to build.

It needs to give users more control over who can join the conversations

Right now, Twitter users have two options — they can either make their account public, and anyone on the service can view their tweets, or they can make their account private, and only their followers can see their tweets. There’s no other options. What if, for a Q&A like the one Swisher and Dorsey conducted, Twitter users had to sign up ahead of time to join the conversation, and Twitter only limited the Q&A to a certain number of users? Or, if Twitter users following the Q&A had a question for one of the participants, could only tweet at them a certain number of times? Or, if Twitter just gave users a feature like Instagram’s “close friends” list where they could send some Tweets only to a select number of followers?

Twitter needs to understand that for some users, the most appealing conversations are the ones that take place among a select audience. Right now, the platform is too noisy for some, thanks to Twitter’s reputation as a place for people to go scream at one another repeatedly.

Give users a better way to find new conversations, and segment them off from the rest of their home feed

As mentioned above, Twitter’s marquee #hashtag feature is not a good way to try and follow along with conversations in real-time. Trying to follow conversations in your home feed is no help either, because Twitter still serves up tweets unrelated to the conversation, or even tweets from people that you don’t follow but your followers have liked. What if Twitter created a feature akin to Reddit’s subreddits, where users could go to a certain portion of the website if they only wanted to have a conversation about one specific topic, like a football game or the Grammys, or Q&As with high-profile users like Dorsey? Again, I think that Twitter is too noisy right now for some users, and I think that giving them a place where to talk about one specific topic will do more for Twitter than simply fixing threading.





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