Jimmy Wales: evaluation

Transcript context

…Coupled with, as you were saying, recommender systems for the newsfeed and other contexts that don’t always optimize engagement, but optimize the long term mental wellbeing and balance and growth of a human being, but it’s a very difficult problem. It’s a difficult problem. Yeah. With WT Social, WikiTribune Social, we’re launching in a few months time a completely new system, new domain, and new lots of things, but the idea is to say let’s focus on trust. People can rate each other as trustworthy, rate content as trustworthy. You have to start from somewhere so it’ll start with a core base of our tiny community who, I think, are sensible, thoughtful people, want to recruit more, but to say, “You know what? Actually, let’s have that as a pretty strong element,” to say let’s not optimize based on what gets the most paid views in this session, let’s optimize on what the feedback from people is, this is meaningfully enhancing my life. Part of that is, and it’s probably not a good business model, but part of that is say, “Okay, we’re not going to pursue an advertising business model, but a membership model where you don’t have to be a member, but you can pay to be a member.” You maybe get some benefit from that, but in general, to say, actually the problem with… Actually, the division I would say is, and the analogy I would give is broadcast television funded by advertising gives you a different result than paying for HBO, paying for Netflix, paying for whatever. The reason is, if you think about it, what is your incentive as a TV producer? You’re going to make a comedy for ABC Network in the US, you basically say, “I want something that almost everybody will like and listen to,” so it tends to be a little blander, family-friendly, whatever. Whereas if you say, “Oh, actually,” I’m not going to use the HBO example, and an old example, you say, “You know what? Sopranos isn’t for everybody, Sex and the City isn’t for everybody, but between the two shows, we’ve got something for everybody that they’re willing to pay for,” so you can get edgier, higher quality in my own view content rather than saying it’s got to not offend anybody in the world. It’s got to be for everybody, which is really hard. Same thing here in a social network. If your business model is advertising, it’s going to drive you in one direction. If your business model is membership, I think it drives you in a different direction. Actually, and I’ve said this to Elon about Twitter Blue, which I think wasn’t rolled out well and so forth, but the piece of that that I like is to say, look, actually, if there’s a model where your revenue is coming from people who are willing to pay for the service, even if it’s only part of your revenue, if it’s a substantial part, that does change your broader incentives to say, actually, are people going to be willing to pay for something that’s actually just toxicity in their lives? Now, I’m not sure it’s been rolled out well, I’m not sure how it’s going, and maybe I’m wrong about that as a plausible business model, but I do think it’s interesting to think about, just in broad terms, business model drives outcomes in sometimes surprising ways unless you really pause to think about it. If we can just link on Twitter and Elon before… I would love to talk to you about the underlying business model, Wikipedia, which is this brilliant, bold move at the very beginning, but since you mentioned Twitter, what do you think works? What do you think is broken about Twitter?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.