Alphonzo Terrell, the co-founder of Spill, a Twitter alternative, joined Cheddar News to discuss how the platform will be highlighting more underrepresented folks such as black women and the LGBTQ+ community.

The Twitter Employees Who Created a New Social Platform

this is really interesting here to former twitter employees have joined forces to create a new social media platform, it's called spill and aims to serve as an alternative to the Elon musk owned twitter and still says it will focus on rewarding creators who are frequently overlooked. We're talking about black women, the queer community and others Michelle, you recently spoke with the company's co founder, kind of spill the tea here, is this essentially happening in real time, because we know the ruins of twitter are still kind of ablaze and we're just starting to see the new iteration of Elon musk's company. This is pretty nimble for these employees to put this together. Well, Alfonso fonts Tyrell, who I spoke to earlier today and Davaris Brown, who was on the product team, They were two former twitter employees that saw an opportunity in the market really to create a hub for culture online and twitter has been that place in the past and they are taking some of their learnings from there and bringing it to spill. So the idea is that spill is a place that people in niche communities can gather and feel safe. They will have more safeguards, including onboarding, they're gonna have a stronger advertiser and creator ecosystem and more importantly, they will still have a more nuanced content moderation, some of the things that existed in twitter that people wanted more of, to feel safe. So this is definitely building on what they've learned and I think it's a really interesting move, a lot of people have been saying, you know, we have all these people from twitter who now have the opportunity to take what they've learned and build their own platforms. I think we're starting to see that with companies like spill Yeah, something that really struck a chord with me about what you said was the term content moderation, that's been a big focus, especially under Elon musk's twitter, what does the team over its bill feel about the changes that we're seeing currently at twitter? You know, that's a really interesting question. So he, um unfortunately Alfonso Fons Terrell was one of the people who was laid off or as he puts it liberated by the twitter changes made by Elon musk, but let you have here a little bit about what he said about specifically the changes that are happening at twitter right now, take a listen, of course twitter has been going through it, but you know, all of tech and even the economy broadly, people are all dealing with this downturn and it's been really challenging for sure, you know, losing your job going through these transitions, um, you know, hits everyone differently and you have to process it in your own way, you know, um it's gonna different people are gonna, you know, you know, I have to take time away if they can, other people have to jump right back in to support their families, whatever it might be, you know, one of the things that he said though is it's not all negative, even though he was affected by the changes or as he said, liberated the idea really, is that he took this opportunity to really gain some perspective and really launched something new. It gave him a new opportunity to try something different. So I think we're gonna start seeing a lot of this entrepreneurial spirit among a lot of twitter and former twitter employees. Yeah, that is really fascinating and it's not just spill, that's kind of the crazy thing here, is that there's a rise in competitors for twitter at this point. One of them being post, I think the other one, I don't know if I'm pronouncing this correctly, but mastodon, so do you think there is this like void in the market that's being left by twitter currently, you know, I was just looking at some numbers from insider and they did say that they are Going to notice a they're predicting a strong decline in the number of Twitter users. I think we're seeing that they're going to go down about a little bit north of 8% this year, that being said by 2024, they still do believe that Twitter will still have over 50 million active users per month. So the idea being that there are a lot of people who are still, sorry, 50, just sorry, they will still be quite a bit of people on twitter, just at this time, it's not going to go away anytime soon and a lot of this attention has brought publicity to it, but it also has brought attention to the fact that there are these things on the platform that have been really valuable, like the idea of creating communities for niche communities. I actually spoke to Terrell about this, about why they tried to center around black twitter, so take a listen to what he said. We know all social media platforms, whether you've seen the phenomenon of queer talk or black twitter get their flavor, their relevance from marginalized groups who are coming to these platforms to connect with each other and discuss what's going on in places that they might not have in their real life. So Spill is really centering these groups from the ground up, really building our core feature sets to service and support them. But of course it's for everyone.