If I Were CEO of Twitter
What if the platform rose to this occasion?
Assuming Elon Musk doesn’t change his mind about stepping down as CEO of Twitter following his promise to abide by this week’s community-wide referendum on his reign, the social network may be in for a change in leadership and, hopefully, direction. Here’s what I would do if I were in charge.
First, I’d scrap the algorithm. The algorithm is all the programming that decides what ends up in a person’s feed, what posts to boost to whom, how to determine what is trending, and how to direct ads to whom. I wouldn’t change it, tweak it, or adjust it. Just scrap it. Then, Twitter would work like it did in the “old” days, with users simply receiving the Tweets of members they follow.
If the algorithm teams are good and want to stay, I’d ask them what they’d like to be working on instead. After witnessing the horrors of social media and its influence on society up close, how would they want to deploy their skills? I’d let them set up a skunkworks or an extended development hackathon and then make consensus decisions on what to build together. Then add a few product people to help figure out how to get these things to market.
I’d have the company accept responsibility for itself as a publishing platform.
