Twitter vs. X: Product Lessons For Startup Founders | The Breakdown
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How do you know if your users are getting value from your product? IT might be really easy just to say, well, if they're watching more content on twitter, that must be good. But yeah, me watching a bunch of this five videos, not what I actually want.

Your optimizing for a single metric to the exclusion of all other factors, you probably gna lead yourself down one to be rabbit holes. This is where I think found to do, have invented. They have the kind of moral authority, like I started this company. This is what I believe in. This is where we're going.

Welcome to a new series we're doing here at Y C. Looking at uh some of the most popular consumer products from across the internet and giving you our unvarnished thought time.

And I both have a bunch of experience building products that a lot of consumers have used. Um and we thought to be interesting to just kind of like dive vin and take apart some of the most popular products that you all probably use.

So to start with wagon to explore a twitter, what is IT now called X X X .

uh twitter versus .

x and what has happened over last year or two under new ownership? Let's uthman tics call IT. So should we start?

I think there's a ton of things we can talk about obviously here and and the timing is right. This is like a very perfect moment to talk about twitter. I'm sure a lot of people are using twitter these days. By far, the biggest change that I ve seen in twitter over the last year or so is this shift from a you know chronological ish feed of topics that you have expressed you want to follow to now kind of like more of a tiktok feed of stuff that you might be engaging with.

Yeah, and I really explicit. I used to see like twitter used to feel like a left leaning. I I know moderate to left leaning person. The content was sort of left leaning politics and now I just seem to get like magi after mag rally.

So if we know buying .

that content, I presumed IT always existed, but I I just never saw IT. And I I don't think i've engaged with that in a sense that sort of in perceptable, you know it's not like a button is change or the color scheme is change. But somehow the content has quietly moved uh, in a way that is becoming more .

and more evidence yeah on that topic particular to be fair, I think elan explicit said when you're using twitter, you should feel equally bad if you're on the far left or on the first right. If perhaps he is achieved that I don't know, but at least in my own usage of the product, i'm sure that my engagement is up and my happiness when I go and resume my life is lower.

Totally, totally, I absolutely agree. And now I see way more videos of, like some random fight in mexico city or someone get smacked in the face by something, or like random cat videos like, you know, IT gets the the dope mean hit going or something but I don't feel like I i've learned any theory pe like engaged with someone who's .

to me something so why does this happen? Why are they doing this?

Uh well, it's tRicky when a team and a product manager has a number to to um to work towards and in this case, like dwell time or engagement or number of minutes, each user uses a service like a well meaning product team in my experience, like tends to optimize and optimize and optimize for that single number almost without regard for you know harder to measure stuff like taste or like a quality or educational content or I don't know what do you think? Yes.

I you bring up that I think the critical point, which is how do you know if your users are getting value from your product IT might be really easy just to say, well, if they're watching more content on twitter, that must be good, but they are choosing to do IT. So of course it's good. But yes, me watching a bunch of this fight videos, not what I actually want, even though rooted in my lizard brain somewhere, i'm gonna keep .

watching them. When your business model is predicated on advertisers and selling like seconds of video role, sure, the more hours your users spend on the site, theoretically, you should be getting higher outspent. There are business models like google, famously, who aim to get you off the cite as quick as possible. You are getting value if you you did a search and the first that was so good, you click the first link, can you disappear right?

The counter argument that make to that is um if I am highly engaged in content that ultimately really don't like long term attention will be poor, right? And so eventually, even if your business model is ads and you're bedding me to spend a much time on the site, i'm gonna eventually stop using swish .

to something else over time. The quality of the service and the desirability goes on. You your best user, turn and go somewhere else.

So let's talk about um if you're going to go down a path like twitter has gone down, I should say x has gone down where you move to this algorithmic feed. And I just figured things out. Sometimes you'll get users that are in a bad state, like I was a few weeks ago where I just felt like every time I use twitter, IT was bad.

And yeah, I kept using IT. So I tweeted about IT and everybody said, oh, you you're doing IT wrong. You need to go and click the little dot button and say not interested in this, which I did and I was very effective. But like should the product designers make that more explicit?

Yeah, now is is probably a good time to actually dive into the twitter feed and take a look at IT. This is my twitter feed. dove.

Hope there's nothing to embracing. The first of the first item is this tweet from a guy cle mass mo. I. I actually do follow him.

His tweet generally pretty good, but a sand castle maker, I guess, know if we scroll down what do we got a some political stuff. We got some random soup. What is this? Um the thing I really notice is like a bunch of just like political videos.

S I am just not really interested in one percent of the world's population is White. The what is. You can like, why am I see so what you is if I have to go to these three little bottom? yes.

And if you click interested in this post, I will, I believe, eventually have stuff OK.

So I don't need to the new top .

up and like, no, but here's a great product design question like theyve now giving you .

many tools to potentially solve your problem.

In fact, we can maybe pull up the screen shot I found here. Um I was trying to like figure out what do I do and I came upon this redit thread. How do I stop twitter from showing me random bullshit in my feet? And this is basically like the instructions of product on how to use the product.

Yeah, when people need to like record long videos s telling other people how to use your product, you probably do something wrong. The question is, again, like how did we get here? Like why would these changes make?

I suspect a lot of IT is tapped down trying to drive more engagement. The question is, where does he go and have they thought through that? And so like it's perhaps useful to look at history and see the kind of the history of social networks and how this has played out for each of them.

And so if we started with like facebook less when facebook started, there was no news feed. IT was your personal wall. You could post content there.

We're aging ourselves now.

Probably the single biggest change that facebook, the product ever made IT for the Better was moving to this news feed. Or basically, anytime someone would module their wall, IT would show you the content that you had chosen to see. yes.

So instead having to go creep person.

put IT all there IT was content that you had already expressed that you wanted to see people followed to you right?

There was a ge up the time. Remember.

there are a protests outside the facebook office, but every single metric was way up yeah.

And that's probably indicative of any consumer product change. You change something that people are used to. You're going to get millions and millions of people screaming about IT, whether is good or bad. So anyway, facebook made this.

But then what happened then? Facebook are really popular and my mom joined and my sister joined and all these people that I don't really want to keep in touch with. And so the facebook news feed got a little deluded for me.

Um and then .

what happened? Instagram came along and I was a new network. Um IT was a different type of content, but I think the biggest difference is the network was different. And that was great. He was the people I wanted .

to follow you actually adopted again, rather than this broader expanded social group.

But but then what happened? Everybody else joined. I started following brands. IT was interesting for a while. Then in the drive for engagement, they just started putting more stuff in my feet that I didn't really want to watch. And now I open instagram and it's like approximate zero photos of my friends and just kind of random click bait.

Yeah, thank you. So goes from one of this tights, social community people you are seeing everyday, you're engaging with their their photos and then it's ort of broads out. How do we get from a small social network of my friends to this, like just engagement.

that, yes, in tiktok, the most recent one, I think, just skipped strict to the n game, the speed. Let's just show all the possible content in the world and let the algorithms figure out what the human .

brain wants to see. Yeah, IT fears like a deeply unsatisfying experience.

You do anti calory props. So, yeah, what what can people learn from this? I would say what I would try to encourage product builders to think about is, like, what problem are you really trying to solve in the world? If it's born IT like being bored, then tiktok maybe an awesome product to serve that. If the product trying to build is like connection between real people, then probably you need to very explicit, like fight against this urge to just drive more engagement totally.

And the sort of understanding that human communities are based around done buzz number, you know you can only you really know one hundred and fifty people. And so a social network that kind of constrained itself to that smaller group might be really, really interesting. But then you have to turn a different way to monetize because you're not getting as many eyeballs as many hours of viewer ship. Therefore, your ad revenue, you goes down and and shale, the pressure ultimately pushes you towards this election PC feed.

So you're in on what you to do.

I didn't know. I didn't know if he bought a as a commercial concern, really fluence or a win as a joke. I didn't really know.

yeah. I think if I were in charge, the number one thing I would do is I think the idea of an algorithmic feed where IT tries to sort the content, the universal content that you might want to see, sort IT per your interest, I think that is a tonal sense. The introduction of a lot of entropy content is what I would call IT content that, like, maybe I want to see, but very likely I don't want to see like the fist fights in the car crashes. I think that need to be done much more judiciously and much clear ways for users to get feedback about you.

As you said earlier, there are these ways to create twitter, and actually does to be pretty effectives. You spend five or ten minutes telling you what you like and you don't like, and your your feet gets Better. Another way I tried to see concurred this on top.

So you got obviously following time, which people, some people like IT, some people don't, there are these this kind of premade list. So when the ukraine war first broke out, I followed a set of a set of people who seem to be very well informed. And this is advertising free.

There's no random mexican fist fights. IT was a pretty high quality way um to learn about what was going on. The same with the U.

K. politics. So we just had election in the U. K.

Um so just to zoom in out, what you're basically doing is you're inherited the credibility of work other people have done. Take trust that's .

exactly on doing. But it's so hard to find the is less. I had to know you out. It's insane. These are so, so powerful. And the thing that I find twitter is still for all of the junk on IT the garbage, the click bait, the thing that I found the most valuable is when there truly is A A breaking news event in the attempted assassination. The trump, the first .

place is .

unbelievable. Like the ukraine war. U. K. Politics in those moments IT IT shines. But when there's nothing happening is just feeding you this like constant drifts of junk.

Why is IT so good at those things? I think IT is that IT is so easy for first party information owners to put content onto the platform. Yeah so we saw like during the association attempt, we saw a bunch of first hand videos that the Normal media organization would not have produced for us so quick. And I think IT is .

and I feel like community notes have done a relatively good job of calling out the stuff that's fake news verses real news, actually. So once that I think that's been a really positive change, maybe s let's touch some the other changes we've seen over last twelve months or so. The blue tick, that was a big, a big data. Simply.

I was, yes, I G I email the first to get IT. I got to take. And yet like the blue check IT was a signal of credibility, I think so that other people who saw posts that had that they knew like okay, this is at least somehow that IT it's not just a random ah doing .

something and now you can pay what like seven box of nine box a months or something. You might have Donald trumps parody account, but parody account always gets truncated. And then you see the bu tics. It's like Donald trump bu tics.

This must be real. Yes so I think they overloaded this idea um where they wanted to filter out bots and the only way do IT was to get them to pay money and that makes sense. And if they connect that to the blue check though, they now overload this term. And now I don't know if it's just a toilet your own is basement paying for twitter premium or an actual legit person that I should pay? tension.

I mean, people talk about editing twice, like the stroke, the or so. That's a of big non event.

If we just look at the side bar here on the screen of twitter, what are all those icons on the left?

My god ah you know, I don't think I click more .

than two or three of those I recently cut on the rock one which might.

is that on the crock?

What happens? This is a perfect example of like a product expanding beyond what I think .

the users think of IT as totally.

So this is basically ChatGPT inside of twitter ah, which to me doesn't make a whole lot of sense and i'm sure to any Normal person makes zero sense. I think this is this is a great example of probably the job of a founder or product leader, which is to clear the articulate to the entire team into the world what this product is for and what are you supposed to use IT, yes. And I like this is an example of IT deviating from that.

And I just worry, just not a great consumer product sense coming out of that. I I think I admire him in many, many ways. I mean, if you saw the recent a SpaceX landings, like catching the booster in in chopsticks s absolutely redial. But when IT comes to mass market consumer product, this does not seem super .

wealth thought out. And jeff baosteel ce said that like taste um is not transferable across domains. To me this is like a great example of that.

I would say you not like if I I drive a tesla, I think it's the best car that i've ever SAT in. But the taste and the decisions they made on that do not match what I see on twitter. And X, Y, test an old topic, what's with the name? Why did we change the name to X?

I don't think of, and ironically called IT x ever and I do not intend to change. It's just astonishing because twitter like got the verb you know like to tweet when your product gets the verb you want. Yeah like I googled IT with bump but an infected bumpy with monza in the U. K. People said like a monzon u money monzon me the money like we got the verb right?

Yeah bump has been shut down for now a decade um an apple just copied IT um so fourteen years later now you can hold you two iphones together and people literally call IT bumping. We and I hear that i'm so how how did we come up with our product names for me with bump? We built the product um and I showed IT to some friends and I said, what did you just do and they said we bumped our phones together and I said that that's IT.

Well that's one of the beauty of starting A A consumer internet company like relatively towards the start of the internet.

I mean, I think they are available .

exactly that remains. We could get mono 点 com。 Actually we have first called mondo document had these connotations of a world in a lot of european languages, mom, or window, or a means world, and its surface line for awesome.

Someone told me, you, we can just like to, and we can get the dot com. And then we got sued. This german company had a conflicting trademark, and so we had to change the name, and we went to a using us and like, we want, we like the end.

We ve got a new m logo, watched our new name be. And like, fourteen thousand people suggested different names. And so this was one of them, and it's stuck ever since.

But I think when you get something short and catch you, and you have the verb just like total insanity, to change, especially for something meaningless, is x right like that? The whole basis of that seems to be, elon musk is obsessed with the latter. X.

yes. And perhaps the most favorable view of IT would be he has in his mind this grand plan of a future product that is not twitter. Twitter maybe is some tiny piece of IT, but he's putting that on the world ahead of saying what that product is. And I think that .

makes no sense. Yeah, I mean, started pretty paypal. IT was IT was going to be an all encompassing online bank, right? And IT emerged and there was a big fight of what name they chose.

And they've been talks of mostly by elon IT. Seems like that twitter going to become a payments platform. So that's a view of this like twitter becomes the .

everything out yeah we must prefer if they showed where it's going and then have the name match what people perceive when they see that products yeah is seems like the site.

So if you're thinking about changing your name, how do you go about IT as a oundle?

Yeah a number one, if you think you need to the best time to do IT is now rather than later, uh, because there's less awareness in the world about your products. Yeah and then I think that my advice is just try to pick something that um people can easily say and when I say IT to you, you can type in into google ellet .

right yeah you don't have .

to ask how is that spelt thread yet never um and ideally, if you can pull that off, IT has something to do with what your product does.

And I think ultimately the best companies bring meaning to the name, often ruin the razi doesn't mean anything .

google didn't mean anything other I think yeah yeah amazon's a big river .

in the south amErica like you bring meaning to IT as long as you can say IT and spell IT. And I think I all about is how do you think all of these changes have impacted the revenue commercials at twitter?

right? Well, I don't have any insight information, but from what i've read, A A bunch of advertisers don't love the type of content that their ads might appear. Next student that you've pulled outside, I think add revenues down significant.

I don't know how the subscription revenue is doing. I'm sure it's okay, but probably not taking over. Um so probably the revenue metrics aren't great, but I bet the engagement metrics are off the church.

Yeah and that sort of the problem, right? When you give a team, especially the product, manage the singular number to optimize for just everything that goes out the window. You just it's like the informal sort of A I that talks with making paper clips to end up within the whole world in slave for this in the paper.

yeah. And so I do think that a lot of top down the ownership is really important in things like this, like when I work photos, I was kind of the user that we were designing the product for. And of course, there will be critics of that.

I was designing the product for how I wanted to use that. There are people who wanted to use IT in a different way, but at least IT had a consistent world view of what this product is for how you should do IT. And IT feels like maybe we're getting that from you on here. And what he wants twitter to be is just we're not ready for IT.

I wrap this all up to kind of summarize what we talked about. What advice would you give to a product founder who's starting out maybe hiring the first, second product manager scaling?

I think the number one thing is trying to articulate what is your product form and who supposed to use IT and what are the good states that the user might get into? And one of the states that maybe look good but are actually bad.

yeah. And can you wrap that up into a metric? Like is there always a metric .

euro to i'm not sure there is too honest thinking about my example twitter. I'm sure my time spent is up. I'm sure every engagement metric, number of likes, number of whatever is all up.

But if you asked me after I close the APP, how do you feel save? I would probably say, uh, I was a waste my time. Yeah, I wish been playing with my kids instead.

And this is kind of hesse, right to tell. Um consumer product founders, I think just we're not saying they shouldn't have metrics. Short metric should be part of your but if you're mindless, the optimizing for a single metric to the exclusion of all other factors, you're probably going to a lead yourself down one of the rabbit les, where you end up with a with an engagement .

form yeah I think this is where the role of the product leader is really important because you can just say we're building in this way. I might not be picking the optimal way to draw this product, but at least it's going to be consistent and have clear purpose.

And I having that kind of clear vision for what you want to product to be over time and and having having the authority is a founder to the kind of enforcement, right? This is where I think founder, I do have not found they have the kind of moral authority like I started this company. This is what I believe in. This is where we're going when you're .

saying that I think you have Steve jobs in in building the iphone and making decisions on what they were going to do in the iphone and what things they were explicit not going to do. Um some of those decisions in hindsight, I think they changed and they were probably wrong decisions, but he was the owner of that. And so there is really no debate, I think, inside of apple about what things they would do or what things they wouldn't do. I was just picked into the culture everyone .

knew like we're going to do in this way. And so I want to thank you for listening to our first and hopefully a long series of of product deep dives.

If you have a product that you would like us to dissect, let us know in the comments.

Yeah, thanks. watching.