Twitter vs. X: Product Lessons For Startup Founders | The Breakdown

**David Lieb** (0:00)
How do you know if your users are getting value from your product? It might be really easy just to say, well, if they're watching more content on Twitter, that must be good. But yeah, me watching a bunch of fist fight videos is not what I actually want.

**Tom Blomfield** (0:13)
If you're optimizing for a single metric to the exclusion of all other factors, you're probably going to lead yourself down one of these rabbit holes. This is where I think founder CEOs do have an advantage. They have the kind of moral authority of like, I started this company and this is what I believe, and this is where we're going.
Welcome to a new series we're doing here at YC, looking at some of the most popular consumer products from across the internet, and giving you our unvarnished thoughts.

**David Lieb** (0:43)
Tom and I both have a bunch of experience building products that a lot of consumers have used. And we thought it'd be interesting to just kind of like, dive in and take apart some of the most popular products that you all probably use.

**Tom Blomfield** (0:55)
So to start with, we're going to explore Twitter, or what is it now called?

**David Lieb** (1:02)
X.

**Tom Blomfield** (1:03)
X. Yeah, Twitter versus X, and what has happened over the last year or two under new ownership, let's euphemistically call it. So where should we start?

**David Lieb** (1:14)
I think there's a ton of things we could talk about obviously here. And the timing is right. This is like a very perfect moment to talk about Twitter. I'm sure a lot of people are using Twitter these days. By far the biggest change that I have seen in Twitter over the last year or so is this shift from a, you know, chronological-ish feed of topics that you have expressed that you want to follow to now kind of like more of a TikTok feed of stuff that you might be engaging with. Yeah.

**Tom Blomfield** (1:41)
And really explicitly, I used to see, like Twitter used to feel like a left-leaning, I mean, you know, I'm a moderate to left-leaning person. The content was sort of left-leaning politics. And now I just seem to get like MAGA rally after MAGA rally.

**David Lieb** (1:57)
Same. Yeah.

**Tom Blomfield** (1:57)
Which is sort of, you know, fine. That content, I presumed it always existed, but I just never saw it. And I don't think I've engaged with it. In a sense, it's sort of imperceptible. You know, it's not like a button has changed or the color scheme has changed, but just somehow the content has quietly morphed in a way that is becoming more and more evident.

**David Lieb** (2:15)
Yeah. On that topic in particular, to be fair, I think Elon explicitly said, when you're using Twitter, you should feel equally bad if you're on the far left or on the far right. And perhaps he has achieved that, I don't know. But at least in my own usage of the product, I'm sure that my engagement is up and my happiness, when I go and resume my life, is lower.

**Tom Blomfield** (2:36)
Totally. Totally.

**David Lieb** (2:37)
And that's the same way?

**Tom Blomfield** (2:38)
I absolutely agree. Now I see way more videos of like some random fight in Mexico City or someone get smacked in the face by something or like random cat videos. It's like, you know, it gets the dopamine hit going or something, but I don't feel like I've learned any theory or like engaged with someone who's taught me something. Correct.

**David Lieb** (2:59)
So why does this happen? Why are they doing this?

**Tom Blomfield** (3:02)
Well, it's tricky. When a team and a product manager has a number to work towards, and in this case, like dwell time or engagement or number of minutes each user uses a service, like a well-meaning product team, in my experience, like tends to optimize and optimize and optimize for that single number, almost without regard for harder to measure stuff like taste or like quality or educational content or I don't know. What do you think?

**David Lieb** (3:33)
You bring up, I think, the critical point, which is how do you know if your users are getting value from your product? Yeah. It might be really easy just to say, well, if they're watching more content on Twitter, that must be good. They're choosing to do it, so of course it's good. But yeah, me watching a bunch of fist fight videos is not what I actually want. Even though rooted in my lizard brain somewhere, I'm going to keep watching them.