A look at Twitter's internal support for decentralization, led by Parag Agrawal, seeking to give users control, avoid regulation, and open new revenue streams
New York TimesKate Conger
Context & Ripple Effects
Decentralization is the strategy Jack Dorsey handed off when he left: the profile of his successor describes Parag Agrawal as a Dorsey confidant who has driven big strategic initiatives and focused on crypto, making him the natural owner of a push to give users control of their data and identity. The stated logic is threefold — user empowerment, staying ahead of regulators, and revenue streams beyond the ad business that made Twitter vulnerable in the first place.
The timing matters because the company's independence was already in question: by spring, Agrawal told staff at an all-hands that Twitter was vulnerable to a takeover after years of underachievement, and by October he was running a shrinking business through Elon Musk's hostile bid. The decentralization agenda is best read as the incumbent management's attempt to restructure Twitter's moat before someone else restructured Twitter.
First-order effects
Users and developers gain a path to control their own data and social graph rather than renting them from Twitter, while Twitter itself gets a hedge against the regulatory scrutiny its centralized moderation decisions attract.
Second-order effects
Rival platforms face pressure to match portability and user control or be cast as walled gardens, and Twitter's ad-dependent model — roughly $4 billion in 2021 revenue per the SpaceX filing — gets a potential non-advertising complement that reduces its exposure to brand-safety cycles.
Third-order effects
If decentralization holds as a design principle, platform governance shifts from policy enforced at the center to protocol-level choices made at the endpoints — a structural answer to both regulators and takeover risk that outlives any single CEO.
The trend: Major social platforms are moving toward decentralized, user-controlled architectures as a way to defuse regulatory pressure and diversify beyond advertising, with Twitter under Agrawal as an early test case.
I wonder how much it's driven by bots. I mentioned crypto or NFTs a couple of times and since then I'm getting a lot of mentions by crypto/NFT bots https://twitter.com/...
@jwz I'm sure that's a factor for a lot of folks (though given recent regime change, that may or may not have shifted) but I'd guess the bigger motivation is to have a story to tell investors about how they're going to start to grow after years of relatively flat audience.
As an example of why my view is evolving, I just saw this Glitch app that lets you analyze the replies of a tweet. I'd helped build an entire app to do that kind of thing years ago, and it was pretty hard, but this is built right on top of supported APIs. https://t.co/bMp99iVZTJ
@anildash It is a 100% certainty that the motivation behind their talk of “decentralization” is: “what if we could just not *have* a Safety department, by making trolls and bots and abusers be someone else's problem?” Turning systemic problems into “personal choice” is so hot rig…
@anildash So long as they continue to have a cryptocurrency fetish, and continue to demonstrate no understanding of the difference between “distributed” and “decentralized”, I can't see this ending well.
@jwz I think those mistakes are real, but not universal amongst the team. Have spoken to folks who are far sharper thinkers on this stuff. (The platform API seems far more reasonable than some of the most fanciful bluesky stuff.)
Despite my long-stated criticism of Twitter's mishandling of their developer ecosystem, this time does feel different, and it will be interesting to watch how it plays out. I love that this piece has a long-term historical perspective on how the platform has actually evolved. htt…
Something @mala told me really stuck with me. We were talking about execs from open-source backgrounds, and he said, “They find the fact that the internet is dominated by a handful of tech giants as frustrating when they're one of the tech giants as when they're not.”