Twitter co-founder Ev Williams: “You’re selling attention”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2017

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Ev Williams, chief executive of online publisher Medium and Twitter co-founder, to talk about upping Twitter’s character limit (2:20), the dark side of the Internet (3:40), the power of the web in politics (6:00), starting four companies (7:15), the idea behind Medium (9:35), the problem with the ad-based web (11:30), pivoting (13:15), putting up a paywall (14:55), cat videos vs investigative journalism (16:40), his new “pay-for-claps” model (19:10), the broken media (20:00), why it’s so hard to make money from content online (24:00), Twitter’s problem with “trolls” (27:50), and anonymity (29:00), Silicon Valley’s awakening (30:55), and his worst day of work (34:30).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:03.0	What is it all about?
0:05.0	The internet now I just see is much more reflective of the real world.
0:11.0	Then we saw it or we imagined it 20 years ago when it was this very nascent, quirky little thing
0:20.0	where it didn't have the problems of the real
0:22.5	world because it didn't have all the people of the world.
0:28.9	That voice you just heard was Ev Williams, the billionaire co-founder of Twitter.
0:33.7	I sat down with them last week to tape this episode of Danny in the Valley, but our interview
0:37.2	happened the day before Twitter had some pretty big news.
0:40.9	And I'm not talking about its decision to potentially up the limit for tweets from 140 to 280
0:45.4	characters.
0:47.0	The company gave evidence in a closed-door session of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which
0:51.1	is looking into how Russian operatives use social media to influence
0:54.9	the 2016 presidential election.
0:57.6	Twitter said it has frozen 200 Russia-linked accounts, but Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on
1:03.0	the committee, slammed the company, calling its presentation deeply disappointing.
1:08.6	To quote him, Twitter showed an enormous lack of understanding about how
1:12.7	serious this issue is and a threat it poses to democratic institutions. That public dressing
1:19.2	down perfectly tees up the conversation I had with Williams, who's been working on this idea of
1:23.7	online publishing and idea sharing since the late 90s, when he launched his first
1:27.6	company, blogger, one of the first blogging platforms. Of course, he also started Twitter,
1:33.1	where he is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations, but remains on the board of
	...

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