YouSaid · the spoken record

Jay Graber

lines on the record: 74
first: 2024-12-02
most recent: 2024-12-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, early on, we had a sort of discussion around downvotes and upvotes and downvotes, or like the like button. And early on, we actually put in down votes. And then we got so much user pushback that we were like, okay, also one of the critical problems we realized with the way that we put in down votes was it's all public. So because we have all these composable services, everything has to be public for every service to see it and operate off it. So that meant downvotes were public. People really didn't like that. And we recognized that, you know, it feels bad to see, oh, everyone can see all these people downvoted my thing. That was actually an important insight in the sense that social networks, part of the toxicity, I think comes from their only being positive feedback cycles. And so that means things only really get amplified. And when you really want to, you know, say this was a terrible post, you reply to it or repost it or something. And then that actually spreads it further. Whereas systems where you have downvotes mean there's this down regulation of things and you can express your”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say the latter more of it being Jack Dorsey. And yeah, Jack is, I think, a visionary who really wanted social to be on an open protocol. And he's been interested in lots of different decentralized protocols. He has sort of a big picture vision of like how he wants this to work. And then the specifics of how we built Blue Sky was very much the vision that I pitched and that the team has designed. So like the early team I hired, we were people with different experience and different decentralized social projects that came together and learned from the mistakes we've made in the past and built something that synthesized those insights.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One person who famously experienced a number of trials and tribulations through that scaling process is Jack Dorsey, who started the project with you. He's still on your board, I believe. Is he involved? Is he someone that you're bouncing off of or is he being Jack Dorsey on a cloud somewhere?”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Intelligence within the company of everyone here. We hired them because they're a smart person. What piece of the problem do they see, and how can we put together their insights into something that gets us to the best decision?”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm thinking a bit about that now. As you mentioned, we already have a lot of things we're working on and building towards, so I can't devote a ton of time to it, but trying to talk to people who've been there because I haven't before and learn from people who've worked at different scales of organizations and figure out what works and what doesn't work. So whenever I get the chance and I run into somebody who's running a different size of org, I'm very curious at this point, asking them about how they do things, how it works. I found it super helpful to just talk to people who are running orgs at similar stages and at slightly bigger stages and find how do they run meetings, what is their writing culture, like how's their decision making work? And right now I think I'm because we haven't got there yet, I'm still in a learning phase of figuring out what's probably going to work best when we get there. But I would like to keep some of the same principles of, you know, having collaboration. And I mean, the end goal is how do we get to the best answer and best harness collective intelligence? Like collective intelligence in terms of building an open protocol anyone can build on.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Few more questions on structure and how that works. You said you're 18 people on engineering, 18 on the other side of the company, 30, 40 people, I'm guessing. The way you're describing decisions works really well for that size team. I know that because I've long run a team about that size and I feel like I can have an idea, I can communicate it effectively. You jump up to the next size, 100 people or 500 people. You have to build a different kind of culture. Are you thinking about that now? Are you hopeful that you can just get to the next size? I've met founders and CEOs sort of who take both approaches that I would love to have that problem. I'll deal with it when I get there. But it seems like you're a little, you're thinking a little down the road. And especially that having decentralization in your brain, you might be thinking about that now. How do you plan to scale the culture there?”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, yeah. So basically have something that comes apart into lots of pieces like building blocks, like Legos, and then you can put those together and you know, maybe you only have like 10 little different types of Lego pieces. You have a lot of them, and then you can put them together into all sorts of different shapes. And so that means that you can build very different looking houses out of the same set of Lego blocks.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have a very collaborative approach, but as with a lot of things I do, I kind of take a hybrid approach between centralization and decentralization. Like I spent a long time working on decentralized technologies and I saw their limitations as well, but I also think that there's a lot of limitations to centralized systems. It just is a system property. It's true of human systems and technological systems. So first of all, I think I make decisions trying to base it around our long-term mission. So the public benefit corporation, we really take the mission seriously and we try to make sure that”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm really excited about that. I want to come back to that and talk about that in detail. I want to stick on the decoder question just for a couple more minutes here. You started this thing inside of Twitter. You fought to leave it. That's a big kind of decision to make the entire world of social networks, I think has flipped over since you spun up Blue Sky and began work in earnest on this project. It's an election year. You have big ideas about moderation. You have a team. You've got to raise money. That is an awful lot of decisions to make. How do you make decisions? What's your framework?”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It or client, and then that's what we're providing all this moderation, in house moderation for. And then this actually by the time that this podcast airs, you'll be able to go into the blue sky app and see the composable moderation because that's coming out this week.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We just hired Aaron Roderick's former Trust and Safety co-lead at Twitter and head of election integrity. He's come on to bring a lot more experienced leadership to this team and make sure that we're building a strong foundation for moderation on Blue Sky. But what you mentioned there is you definitely read about our approach. It's a hybrid approach between us running a foundation within the app, making sure that we have this really good service within the app. And having decentralized moderation, having just like the closest analogy here, and it actually works a lot like custom feeds, is the custom feeds we've built. So we provide some default algorithms and we develop an in-house algorithm, but we also allow anyone to build an algorithm. So there's about 40,000 custom algorithms out there and custom feeds. Some of them are very simple, some of them are very complex, and users can install them and switch between them. So moderation services are kind of like this, but because it's also a digital space that we've created, Blue Sky is, our moderation service is.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moderation side is the part that scales the fastest, right? If I look at Blue Sky and app protocol and what it's meant to enable, it's a way to rethink moderation probably most of all, right? If it's as simple as you don't like the moderators and you can take your account and leave, that's one idea. You have this idea about composable moderation where people could write their own moderation stacks or different kinds of filters or different kinds of algorithms. Right now, though, it's moderation just sort of scales with the user base. You just have to spend more time and money moderating how are you managing that against Blue Sky's growth?”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And so it's in the company. So we basically have, we're all working on it together. Everyone's very mission aligned that we've hired. It's something that right now we're just trying to show the benefits of this kind of an open ecosystem that people can build on and get users in the ecosystem. And then we're moving towards standardizing pieces of the protocol. So pieces that have become really stable, it's working well, like there hasn't been any needs for big changes recently. That's something that we're trying to move towards a standardization process because once something gets standardized, then it's kind of going to move a bit slower, but then that gives it more resilience.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are structured as a public benefit corporation, so that means we have a mission, it's to develop and drive adoption of large scale adoption of technologies for the open and public decentralized conversation. I think it might have mangled that a little bit. But yeah, the gist of it is for open public conversations on an open protocol. That's the mission that all of our stakeholders know, our investors, our board members, and we're able to pursue that and put any sort of profits back into that mission rather than having to put fiduciary duty first. But that doesn't mean we're prohibited from making a profit. So we are a company.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cooperate and compete framework is really interesting, right? This is most standards that have a big product on top of the standards have that kind of relationship, but they're usually managed by giant companies, or at least a handful of companies that are competing themselves. There might be a standards board involved. Right now for Blue Sky Net protocol, it's just Blue Sky, right? How is Blue Sky structured and how do you kind of contend with that, cooperate, compete dynamic inside the structure?”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They both cooperate and compete because part of our philosophy was that we want to get developers to build on the app protocol, but devs want there to be users to build for. And so if you get users into the ecosystem, in one building on either the interfaces for custom feeds or custom clients on Blue Sky can come in and now build for 5 million users. But also that protocol will be able to support other kinds of apps and then users will be able to move between them with the same identity and relationships. And then that will just make it a lot easier for other people to build. And so that was part of our idea was just build an app and then we get this positive feedback loop going of developers and users coming into the ecosystem.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we actually came at that front waist because earlier on we were calling this there was a lot of posts I wrote early on that are way more technical than the audience we're usually talking to these days but you know stuff about self-certifying data structures and authenticated transport these are all the design philosophy that we pulled into blue sky which borrowed from peer-to-peer networks but did this hybrid federated approach so that's the the wonky parts under the hood that most people don't think about anymore”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Blue Sky was originally just the name of this project within Twitter to build this decentralized protocol. This sort of symbolizes the fact that you can find people at their at handle username. And so we wanted this to someday be the last social identity you'll ever have to create because you can move it in between apps and services. You can take your identity and your relationships and your data with you. And so that's the underlying protocol layer. The goal is to make social apps work more like the web itself. Then Blue Sky is the app that we've built on top of the app protocol, both to show how it works and to develop the protocol actually through product-driven protocol development. You run into a lot more things once you're actually building on the thing that you intended to have developers build on.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shortly thereafter, the captain did change. So then we ended up in this position where we were able to keep going. And a lot of other circumstances, if we were within Twitter, I don't think the project would be alive anymore.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How we're going to build Blue Sky, which is essentially how we built it. So that's how I got involved. And then once I took lead, there was different options as to how we were going to structure Blue Sky. Sort of as a category of project within Twitter, it was very much like Birdwatch, which was what built community notes, sort of a skunk works project that was going to go off on its own and do this experimental way of doing things in a more open, like crowdsourced way, right? But I didn't want to be within Twitter because Twitter had moved very slowly to nominate me as lead in the first place. And there was just going to be a lot of challenges. And one of the things that I was hyper aware of was just the risks of centralization. Because, you know, one thing I always like to say is the captain can always sink the ship. Jack was the captain of Twitter at that time. But if the captain changes or if that support left, then I would lose institutional support for Blue Sky and I really wanted this project to exist. So I insisted we spin out as a separate company. And then that took about six months to figure out. But then we got set up as a separate company and then actually”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually pitched Twitter a lot on how I thought this guy should work. Very good. So the way that this worked is that Jack tweeted that and they created a Blue Sky Twitter account at the end of 2019. I got really excited. I was currently working on a social app of my own that was an alternative to Facebook events called Happening. And I'd been building on decentralized social protocols, playing around with them, doing a lot of research, published a lot of research on it. Then I was one of the experts that they pulled into this small chat room with a group of people who seemed to know what they were talking about. And then they kind of asked the group, you know, what is the best way to build this protocol? You guys know about protocols. And then in 2020, pandemic hit. And so this whole project kind of got derailed by the pandemic as Twitter was clearly occupied with other things. And then mid-2021, Twitter circled back around and started kind of interviewing people, both people within Twitter and experts without, interviewing somebody who could lead the Blue Sky project. And so mid-2021, they interviewed me along with some other folks and then chose me to lead Blue Sky based on this vision that I pitched for.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Former CEO of Twitter, the once former and then CEO, and then now former CEO once again of Twitter. That piece where he thought Twitter should have an underlying decentralized protocol. And I want to talk about Twitter too much, but that was a big deal, right? The idea that Twitter was too important. It was too centralized. I think Jack was uncomfortable with his moderation power. Obviously, we went through a big moment around content moderation. But that core idea that one company should not have so much power that led to a lot of things, including the creation of Blue Sky. What was the pitch there? What did he come and say, come run a program inside this company to devolve the power of the company? How did that pitch go?”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Blue Sky is an open social network. It's open source. It's built on open protocol, but it looks and works very much like Twitter. And so it's a project that was actually originally founded by Twitter back in 2019. Jack tweeted that he was going to fund the development of a protocol that Twitter would someday run on. I came into the project as someone outside of Twitter that had never worked at Twitter, but had experience with decentralized social protocols. So I built out a protocol and then through a series of changes of what happened to former Twitter, now we've ended up building an app that looks a lot like Twitter.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am really excited to talk to you. Blue Sky is one of the most exciting new social media apps on the scene. There are exciting ideas inside of it around federation and decentralization, both of which I'm obsessed with. So get ready. But let's start at the very beginning. What is Blue Sky Social?”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT