Twitter co-founder and Medium CEO Ev Williams said he got excited about the Web because he thought that with more information at our fingertips it would make people smarter. But the rising popularity of social media sites also created an environment where people have become wired to respond to short-term feedback such as the numbers of likes on a tweet or an Instagram post.
“We get hooked on that just like we get hooked on sugar,” he said on stage at Recode’s annual Code Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona.
When Williams looked at the cycle before Donald Trump was elected president, he doesn’t think people are becoming more intelligent. More information doesn’t make you smarter, he said, if people don’t know how to digest or contextualize it.
“I think part of it is just the limits of the human attention span,” he said.
Social media sites, including Twitter, have been trying to foster “healthier” conversations on their platforms in what can be a space filled with bullies and trolls. Studies have also linked social media to depression and anxiety.
To undo the unhealthy nature of instant feedback, Williams said that people need to build systems that don’t emphasize likes or followers. Photo-sharing site Instagram has been testing the ability for users to hide their “likes.”
The problem, Williams said, is that people have combined the idea of connecting with others with social competition. But that system can burn out users.
“That social competition at all times is exhausting emotionally,” he said.
Jack Dorsey (left) and Evan Williams (right) at the New York Stock Exchange for Twitter’s IPO in 2013. Williams says the two are getting along.
LAN/Corbis
Ev Williams is smoothing things over with fellow Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
Just two days after Dorsey was brought back for a second stint as Twitter’s CEO, Williams called him the “best choice” to lead the influential, but stagnant, social network. The appointment requires Dorsey to split his time between Twitter and Square, a mobile-payments company he started after he was ousted from Twitter seven years ago, a shakeup Williams reportedly had a hand in.
“No one would say this is ideal that we would want anyone’s time split. But it didn’t change the fact that we still thought, despite that, he was the best choice,” Williams said Wednesday about Dorsey’s return to the lead role at Twitter. His remark came during an interview with Bloomberg TV at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco.
Williams’ public vote of support for Dorsey, which he also expressed in a blog post on Monday after Dorsey was renamed CEO, indicates that the contentious relationship between the two is healing. They need to work closely together because Williams is a Twitter board member and the company’s biggest shareholder.
In 2008, Williams led a coup to remove Dorsey as CEO before assuming the role himself, according to “Hatching Twitter,” a 2013 book by New York Times reporter Nick Bilton. Dorsey wasn’t as committed to leading Twitter as he was to extracurricular activities such as fashion and yoga, Bilton wrote. Twitter declined to comment on the book.
Williams said Wednesday that his relationship with Dorsey has improved.
“It’s been better than it’s been in years,” Williams said. “We have come together through this process.”
During a later panel discussion, Williams also said the focus on Twitter’s user growth, which has stagnated at 316 million people, is overblown. The company has done a good job of driving revenue, he said, though he acknowledged the service wanted to rope in more users.
In July, Twitter reported $502 million in revenue, exceeding analysts’ projections of $480 million.
To lure more users, Twitter introduced on Tuesday a feature called Moments, which offers curated collections of tweets and discussions across the service.
