Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and CEO of the company until a few days ago, has been very active this week on the social network, and not talking about it, but about the future of the web, which many are calling web3. Many tools are already being built for it, such as the Opera browser integrating Ethereum’s scaling platform, but Dorsey doesn’t believe in one of its big promises.
The former director has criticized the ideal that the web3 will be decentralized (unlike Web 2.0, centralized in the hands of large platforms and social networks), stating that we do not own the web3Rather, it is venture investors from large groups who own the decentralized platforms that are emerging.
This has sparked a very heated debate between the parties, in which Jack advocates truly decentralized positions and in the hands of the people. One of the criticisms it has received is that, being a Web 2.0 company, Twitter severely limited access to its API, on which a lot had been built and which had great power for the future. Jack has not hidden with his answer:
Worst thing we did. I wasn’t running company at the time. Company has worked hard and will continue to open back up completely.
– jack⚡️ (@jack) December 23, 2021
Responding to a comment about the API being “killed”, Jack says “it was the worst thing they did“It takes a bit of personal iron from him by arguing that he” did not run the company at the time, “and ends by adding that” the company has worked hard and will continue to open it up completely. “
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A decision that killed the ability of developers and many users
Twitter has never been a decentralized platform (competitors such as Mastodon came out in that task), although under Jack’s mandate there has been a lot of talk about the subject, even Dorsey saying that he wanted to turn the social network into a mere client that worked as part of an open protocol. This is how the former CEO spoke at that time:
“In the beginning, Twitter was so open that many saw the potential to become a decentralized Internet standard, such as the SMTP (email sending) protocol. For a whole host of reasons, all reasonable at the time, we took a different path and we increasingly centralize Twitter. But a lot has changed over the years. “
The closest it got to working that way was with its first API, which allowed great freedom to client developers and users and researchers who thoroughly utilized the platform. In fact, thanks to that API there came to be gems like Tweetbot, which is the client that I still use today, or Tweetie, an application that thanks to everything it contributed was bought by Twitter to take its base on iOS and macOS and end up turning it into an official application in the form of Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Mac.
It took away from users the possibility of enjoying a much better product than the website and official clients, in addition to being able to enjoy a parity of functions. In recent years, for example, it has been impossible to vote a poll outside of official tools.
If it was more open, Twitter would have been much better for users and developers
To developers, especially the little ones, took away their ability to earn a living from their apps, greatly limiting its capabilities and therefore its appeal to users. In addition, it limited both tokens to log in that developers had to switch to paying Twitter to use their API, which made the business model even more difficult.
Recently, all that has started to change, but it has been up to Jack that the return to a certain decentralization came sooner, and under his second term there has been a lot of slowness again. To this day, in addition, there is still no function parity between the API and what the company offers on its platform.