Kanye West Shares Text Conversation With Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey
Amid Kanye West's odd and emotional Instagram posts today (Sept. 20) criticizing Drake and others, the ever-brainstorming Chicago artist posted some thoughts on how Twitter could improve. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apparently liked the ideas because he texted Yeezy his approval, a screenshot of which 'Ye proceeded to share on Twitter and Instagram.
Kanye's big proposal is to remove the numbers displaying follower and like counts. He believes the statistics screw with users' self image. The tweet in question had over 27,000 retweets and 124,000 likes at the time this post was published.
"We should be able to participate in social media without having to show how many followers or likes we have," West tweeted. "Just like how we can turn off the comments we should be able to turn off the display of followers. This has an intense negative impact on our self worth."
He continued by posting on Instagram a video of actor Denzel Washington discussing young people's relationship with online likes. "Social media can be good but we have to hold the heads responsible for the psychological damage it sometimes causes," Kanye wrote.
After apparently reading the tweets, Dorsey texted West a response that seems to announce impending changes to the way Twitter displays counts on its platform.
"We've been thinking deeply about follower and like counts, and what that incentivizes. What made sense 12 years ago doesn't make sense today. At least for us," Dorsey wrote. "Us making that number bold and big incentivized people to want to increase it, and feel bad if they couldn't. That's not right. We want to incentivize contribution to the global conversation and consciousness."
The above messages are now part of Kanye West's self-dubbed "philosophy book" titled Break the Simulation, which he announced in April consists of tweets published in real-time.
For Yeezy's own reference, you can download the web browser extension Twitter Demetricator to hide all statistics on the platform here. The tool doesn't work on mobile apps.
See Photos of Kanye West's Different Looks Over the Years