If you're responsible for it, you can be liable for it. Zuckerberg being called before Congress three times, Larry Page stepping down from Google... seems like Jack is recognizing that the writing is on the wall and that there will come a time when social networks will be held accountable for their inability to police their content. Beats the alternative.
I highly doubt that Jack and co will be able to pull it off, but it is a worthwhile effort. I remember how in the early days, Twitter was very open, and a bunch of services were created on it, only to have the rug pulled from underneath. I also remember Fred Wilson saying that to survive and grow, Twitter needed to take back control of the user experience (i.e. capture users for revenue). It's cool to see that Jack's heart remains in the same place. If they are going to decentralize a public company, then they might investigate/experiment with security tokens, which could be very interesting for its own reasons. It's happening. I'm working with an upstart decentralized finance company that is setting out with the explicit goal of decentralizing ownership via tokens. As ownership grows more liquid, there is the opportunity to experiment with better governance models. Currently our digital commons are effectively greedy and psychopathic. I think we'd all have reason to be a lot more optimistic about human nature if our systems didn't reward the least altruistic and humane among us. Providing "value" is not enough. Externalities must be part of the measure or we are fucked. I can imagine what a better world might look like, but there's also plenty of reason to think we'll fall into a trap along the way.
My beef with your quadratic payments article is that there's a lot of hand-waving about how "value" in meatspace translates into "value" in the payments/voting universe. I think the unmentioned needs heavier weight than the mentioned in this case. On the other hand, nobody buys anything from Oracle on Amazon yet they're the third largest software company in the world. Java is fundamentally necessary to run the world at this point. If I were Jack Dorsey I'd be thinking like Java. If you can monetize the protocol you can make the money without having to take the bullet for Russian botnets and nazi mass murderers. I mean, for four years now Twitter has been refusing to ban Donald Trump despite their guidelines because he's, like, the President. That's an anvil you want to get out from under and even now the shadow is spreading.