Followers don’t count, only conversation does, says Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey

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New Delhi: The denizens of Twitter have been asking for an edit button for a long time, but that may have to still wait as the company does not want to “rush it.” It wants to take an informed decision before allowing individuals to make changes to their tweets. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was addressing the students at IIT-Delhi, where he answered a multitude of questions on topics ranging from his best and worst decisions, changes needed in education system and impact of social media on youth globally.

In response to a question, Dorsey said the number of followers no longer matters and users should rather focus on having meaningful conversations.  He further said: “It may have been the right thing 12 years ago but I don’t think it is so today…I think a more interesting aspect is how many conversations you contribute to your network, how many healthy conversations you have”.

On his maiden visit to India, Dorsey also met Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama and Congress President Rahul Gandhi.  Talking about bad decisions he made, Dorsey spoke of how he — in the early years of the company — was afraid of letting some “amazing” engineers go as he feared that doing so would bring down the platform, even though these staff members had a negative attitude.

He reminisced that six months later, when some of these people were let go, the site indeed went down but also some other team members filled in as leaders.Advising would-be entrepreneurs, Dorsey said it is important that these businesses and algorithms based on new technologies like artificial intelligence are built with a “sense of ethical and moral responsibility” as this will affect lives of people.