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An Open Letter to Jack

Dear Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter,

On March 1st, you outlined the challenges and anger facing your platform.

You opened a dialogue for better solutions including a request for proposals on how Twitter’s algorithms could monitor and encourage healthier public conversation. I have an answer for you.

My experimental university courses teach healthier online conversation. I run them entirely on the Web and social media. My students share assignments and critique across individual blogs and hold their class discussion on Twitter using pseudonyms and avatars.

For nearly a decade, my students and I have worked at small constructive conversations, amidst Twitter’s darker, more publicized interactions, by building something as simple as a writing course. No one has noticed—and that’s key.

Therein lies my best answer for you for how to save your platform: the tiny example of my interactive classrooms. You need to encourage the insignificant.

We run on what I refer to as our “gibberish hashtag,” because it only means something to my students and the course alumni and it gathers us together for the minor purposes of our class. Trolls don’t care about our conversation because we will never trend.

When I look at Twitter these days, I see national news and broad arguments. Everyone comments on the same headlines and hashtags with no practical result.

Armchair reporters tweet about happenings on the other side of the country. Manic curators retweet without adding any original thought. This one-way writing has no intention to converse, learn, or change. It’s advertising: look at how smart I am.

Yet we know, from the first 25 years of the Internet and our growing understanding of ideas and creativity that the biggest ideas begin viral in size. Twitter began as a small conversation. The hashtag started with one person.

To that end, I encourage each of my students to create one or more interactive voices—tailored selves for specific audiences. I use Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, and Wikipedia to encourage their use of clarity, passion, logic, and research.

Our small, self-directed class discussions create the constructive, healthier conversation I believe you seek. But there’s a problem.

On March 30th, your developers sent me an email announcing the end of the search timeline. This meant the Twitter feed on my course website would no longer display the real-time conversation of my students. They said the engineering costs for your basic search timelines were too expensive and to be discontinued.

The simple search for the gibberish hashtag that brings my small class conversations together would no longer work.

Your suggested alternatives—“a user timeline, list timeline, collection timeline, or likes timeline which will offer more fine-grained control over what Tweets show up on your webpage,” are too time-consuming for the growing number of teachers using Twitter to corral student conversation with similar hashtag searches.

Teachers like me make up one of the largest user groups on Twitter. Our potential to move Twitter in the right direction is too important. I’ve been working hard to encourage teacher use of gibberish hashtags, and now it seems futile.

I wonder how many teachers will be up in arms the first weeks of this September? If there aren’t many, you should consider this a loss and not a win for better conversation.