It looks like Twitter is making great progress on a reviewing feature that would add more context to Tweets. This is a great step towards making Twitter maximum fun.
Just a couple of hours after I posted '“Let’s make Twitter maximum fun!” How to have maximum free speech and great content for everyone on Twitter', Jason Calcanis and Molly Wood at This Week in Startups talked about a pilot Twitter feature on called Bird Watch. Hey, that sounds like a version of #6, “reviewing and meta reviewing” from my list of recommendations! Two hours from my wish to Twitter delivering! If only all my product ideas were executed so quickly! 😄
It turns out that Bird Watch was announced back in January, 2021 on Twitter’s blog. This was the first I’d heard of it though.
Here’s the discussion from This Week in Startups, including some leaked screen shots:
Who are you and what have you done with Twitter?
It sounds like a big step in the right direction and potentially very different than what Twitter has done before.
Twitter is relying on its users to help improve the quality of its content rather than relying on centralized decision making at Twitter HQ. I don’t know that we’ve seen this from them before. This seems much more likely to scale well. It also looks like it will be nuanced and have multiple points of view, unlike the single perspective that similar fact check and warning messages that Twitter provided in the past.
Rather than block or censor, they are attaching more context in the form of notes to content. This is something they also did before, but perhaps if it were done at scale, this would remove the desire to block content at all? Let better speech be the antidote to bad speech?
Follow-Up Questions
When will Bird Watch be released?
It turns out that you can actually use a pilot version of Bird Watch now. This is the consumption side of the picture — a site has a selection of tweets with notes attached. Calcanis and Wood showed what appears to be the user experience for a bird watcher, which appears to be only available if you’ve been selected to join the pilot. They go through screen shots of how someone does reviews and meta reviews.
How are the bird watchers being selected?
I imagine they want to avoid giving access to trolls, but if the selection is seen as biased, that might perpetuate some of the concerns about earlier content moderation decisions. If the thumb is on the scale in one direction, this could hurt trust. One potential solution: allow in more people (everyone?) as long as you also do #3 from from my list - “authenticate all humans.”
It looks like they are doing at least some of this! On the Bird Watch site there is a “join” link in the top right. As long as your account has a verified phone number and you agree to the terms of service you’ll get on the waiting list. I signed up. I guess I’ll see how long it takes to get added.
Their site also talks about challenges they’re working to overcome and how they want a diversity of perspectives.
Overall, looks like they’ve thought about this a lot!
What have they been doing for the past 16 months? I’m sure developing this feature in the best possible way is hard. There are lots of dynamics and ways to game the system, but like I said in my earlier piece, Slashdot did this 25 years ago or so. Jason and Molly compared this to both Reddit and Wikipedia, which have similar challenges to Twitter and have been handling them for years. Taking almost a year and a half to launch a new feature for most technology companies is a looooong time. It turns out the team at Twitter has been sharing some updates and it looks like they are being cautious:
You may be wondering: why are y’all taking this long to release this globally since the first beta? The short answer is: We want to ensure we’re getting it right gradually, so that Birdwatch can scale durably, reliably and self sustainably at scale.Hopefully this approach pays off and they will be successful.
What’s the focus? Misinformation or more than that?
Want to help build a new community-driven approach to tackling misleading information? Join us — sign up for Birdwatch! https://t.co/FSsqNznPy1It looks like it doesn’t have to be used for just misinformation. Maybe that was just the focus at first?
What’s Next?
So far I haven’t seen any hints about when this will exit pilot phase and be used more widely. It does already look potentially very useful. I would imagine these reviews, when combined with a customer feed (#5.2 on my list) would be a really powerful way to get the best tweets.