The Roundtable: Elon and the Algorithm
Among his many announced plans for Twitter, assuming he takes over the short form social media phenom, Elon Musk has promised to “open the algorithm.” But what does that mean, exactly, and what effect would it have on the average user?
Roundtable’s Rob Nelson sat down with a panel of crypto-disruptors to discuss what might happen if Elon Musk completes his planned takeover of Twitter and opens up the algorithm.
“One of the biggest problems is that nobody owns anything on Twitter,” says Justin Rezvani.
“We went from Wall Street owning all your followers and owning the relationship between [you and] your followers to one person, one billionaire now owns everything. So, in some ways we're bowing to the benevolence of him and saying please don't turn us off.”
“It's a much more challenging situation we've gotten ourselves into, because [of] the technical architecture of how Twitter is built,” adds Rezvani.
“You take a centralized identity, that's probably a Gmail account that you've gotten from Google. Use that to log into another centralized system, which is Twitter. And then that system allows for content to get disseminated across the web. I'm hopeful for it, but the whole platform would have to be re-architected, to think about how people can have ownership for the first time. You have to start from scratch and it's really hard.“
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Watch the full discussion below:
ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS:
Timothy Lewis, co-founder and CSO of TEA, Inc.
Jordan Fried, the founder of NFT.com
Justin Rezvani, chief executive officer of Zion
Caleb James DeLisle, the lead developer of PKT
