6 ms·

Regardless of what Twitter is or isn't, how in the world is the CEO surprised by how his product works? And we're not talking some obscure corner case, but basi

Regardless of what Twitter is or isn't, how in the world is the CEO surprised by how his product works? And we're not talking some obscure corner case, but basic use case? Having a conversation was a learning experience for him and his team? Such a basic level of unfamiliarity with their own product gives me a lot of pause that he can do anything to guide the company on fixing rampant automated accounts or making it less of a frequently hostile forum.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
To be fair, this is a really atypical mode of using Twitter. Normally it's used for shouting at your audience/someone you disagree with. It's rarely used for true conversations, so I can somewhat see why the CEO is unfamiliar with its performance in that role.
- est31 8y ago
  > It's rarely used for true conversations Not a twitter user myself, but I've seen a lot of people use their twitter handles like they'd use an E-Mail address. They say "this is a twitter handle send me a DM if you want to talk with me" instead of "this is my E-Mail address please send me an E-Mail if you want to talk". So they do derive conversational value from twitter.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
    DMs are chats. It's a totally different medium than tweets. Separate UI and everything. I can understand how you would not know this, since you don't use the product (neither do I, any more), so this is just an FYI.
  - egypturnash 8y ago
    It’s worth noting that DMs have a much more generous length limit than tweets. You can actually type an entire paragraph into a single DM versus the formerly 140, now 280 characters a public tweet is limited to.
- mcv 8y ago
  But then why even try to have this conversation on Twitter? You'd think that after a decade he would have some idea of what Twitter is good and bad at. I can imagine having this kind of failed interview when the company was 3 years old, but after more than a decade, it's a bit bizarre. Unless this was explicitly meant as a test, and not simply an online interview.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
    > But then why even try to have this conversation on Twitter? Delusion/hope/marketing?
  - Chazprime 8y ago
    I suspect that they’re trying to educate on how the platform could be better used.
    - toss1 8y ago
      If so, it was evidently with a lot of unsupported overconfidence. Clearly turned into a major demonstration of how it can not be used for a good conversation. I've found pretty much the same thing, just good for trading headlines & brief insights. Though, its constraints do cause me to improve the focus of some ideas to express them briefly and clearly, so that's a good exercise.
  - inerte 8y ago
    It was a massive experiment. Now they have qualitative feedback to sift through and act on. I think he knew it was going to fail, just not the many ways how it would.
  - rchaud 8y ago
    > But then why even try to have this conversation on Twitter? Many people are knowingly doing a kabuki theatre version of a conversation where they are specifically trying to get attention and grab more followers and retweets. You can see it in how responses are framed. There's a lot of attempted "mic drop" moments. Real people don't have conversations like that, because they're not playing to an audience. In real conversations, people also don't just walk away from each other at the first jab, but that happens on Twitter constantly. It's similar to how 95% of Reddit's content is posted by 1% of its user base. Most Twitter users aren't tweeting, they're voyeurs to online meltdowns (real or orchestrated), celebrity gossip and slapfights between political commentators/media/trolls. I have never understood how MySpace became unfashionable because it was "too gaudy/immature" while Twitter has been a wildfire of horrible UX, hate speech, bullying and user surveillance for over a decade now.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
The one use case I’ve seen of Twitter is rapid fire updates about some developing situation, like an emergency. But it can’t be a back and forth discussion. It can be one person or many people adding to a combined discussion via that hashtag. However, even when I see people do what is effectively a long form blog post on Twitter, I often give up on it before the end because it’s too frustrating.
- grawprog 8y ago
  >Twitter is rapid fire updates about some developing situation. This is the only thing i've ever used Twitter for. It's the best place to find out about problems on my local transit system. Long before the company ever gives an alert, there'll dozens of people tweeting angrily about the problems.
  - eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
    Yep, anytime I see some larger than normal police/fire presence in my city, or a large cloud of smoke, I go on Twitter. It works great for breaking events and is usually always way ahead of any news organizations (which are usually just pulling things from Twitter, too).
- everdev 8y ago
  Twitter was billed as a microblogging platform. Blog posts are 1-way communication. Want a discussion? Allow comments and make them visually separate and less prominent just like blogs do.
  - eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
    Huh? Then why does Twitter allow you to @reply someone? It is a feature. I mean, Jack Dorsey even doing this interview shows it's a feature, otherwise he should have said "Twitter was not made for this." And not all blog posts are one-way communication, just like you said, that is why we have comment systems attached to blog posts.
e40 8y ago
It's not like the example in the article would be hard to reproduce. It's not like those insanely tricky bugs that only present themselves in rare circumstances. They would easily test for this and fix it. They do not care.
EGreg 8y ago
Actually I am pretty shocked at the amount of “incompetence” in the business world especially at high levels. It seems people shmooze and make big deals happen. But they have no idea how their own product works, often. There are notable exceptions: Elon Musk. Warren Buffett. Jobs and Gates and Bezos. That’s why their companies rock. But like, Apple after Jobs, not so much. I am not convinced the higher-ups really are in touch with what’s the main user facing issue. Like how Apple repeatedly allowed the entire Mac app store certificates to just expire leaving all apps broken [1], or how they released an iOS where no one could click a link in safari!! [2] But that’s actually still a very high level of competence of tons of people in the company. Just the executives and lack of processes to catch this surprise me. Google doesn’t have such problems. It only has problems of product roadmap, shuttering Google Reader and Google Plus after making the entire userbase embrace it, or replacing Talk with three different products like Hangouts, Allo, Meet, etc. But most of all I just realized how much successful B-level people are just... well, they make so many spelling mistakes in email, often paint by numbers and don’t really think out of the box on the most basic things the way someone would if they were constantly learning about their space and their problem. Like oh A and B don’t go together? I guess it won’t work out. Oh, just one tiny thing had to be tweaked in B and suddenly we have a huge revenue stream coming? Huh, would you look at that. And here I was about to focus on something else. Has anyone else noticed this? I am not sure if it was always the case or think it’s a general sense of ADD that came over the business world. Hardly anyone reads books. Emails have to be 5-7 lines long. Spelling and grammar mistakes make you seem important. People - especially busy businesspeople - dont have time to read 2 lines of instructions when onboarding - they zip past them and then scratch their head what to do on next screen. I have seen it. Is this the prequel to Idiocracy? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/all-mac-store-apps-stopped-working-due-to-expired-security-certificate/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/all-mac-store-apps-stopped... and teo years later it happens again https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/02/20/apple-issued-developer-certificate-expires-causing-crashes-in-1password-and-other-apps/amp/ https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/02/20/apple-issued-deve... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2016/03/28/ios-9-3-opening-links-safari-activation-bugs-fixes.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2016/03/28/ios-9-3-opening-links-sa...
erwan 8y ago
It seems like lots of consumer products relying on advertising as a revenue model fall prey to the same problem. They aggressively optimize for a panoply of metrics that make them appealing to advertisers. Often this means hacking the algorithms governing the interactions between users (viewership, timeline visibility, feed) until the outcome yields satisfying metrics, meaningful or not. At this point a complex web of chaotic feedback loops has formed and it becomes hard to change anything. The system's stateful complexity far exceeds the engineering/product team's understanding of it. It's like trying to debug a neural network.
robbles 8y ago
My impression after following him on there for a while: he still uses, and sees the platform as if it's the original version of Twitter from ~2006. Most of his tweets are written in a way that sound like a person writing in a public diary, not someone expecting to have a conversation.
- hopler 8y ago
  He's using Twitter for what it's good at, desperately hoping people somehow stop ruining the experience while still maintaining popularity and ad views.
vb6lives 8y ago
> Having a conversation was a learning experience for him and his team? Of course not. It's boilerplate CEO speak. It's a way of "answering" the question without making any commitments and seems to terminate any further discussion. Joe Rogan and Sam Harris discuss this on Joe Rogans podcast #1241

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago

To be fair, this is a really atypical mode of using Twitter. Normally it's used for shouting at your audience/someone you disagree with. It's rarely used for true conversations, so I can somewhat see why the CEO is unfamiliar with its performance in that role.

est31 8y ago
> It's rarely used for true conversations Not a twitter user myself, but I've seen a lot of people use their twitter handles like they'd use an E-Mail address. They say "this is a twitter handle send me a DM if you want to talk with me" instead of "this is my E-Mail address please send me an E-Mail if you want to talk". So they do derive conversational value from twitter.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
  DMs are chats. It's a totally different medium than tweets. Separate UI and everything. I can understand how you would not know this, since you don't use the product (neither do I, any more), so this is just an FYI.
- egypturnash 8y ago
  It’s worth noting that DMs have a much more generous length limit than tweets. You can actually type an entire paragraph into a single DM versus the formerly 140, now 280 characters a public tweet is limited to.
mcv 8y ago
But then why even try to have this conversation on Twitter? You'd think that after a decade he would have some idea of what Twitter is good and bad at. I can imagine having this kind of failed interview when the company was 3 years old, but after more than a decade, it's a bit bizarre. Unless this was explicitly meant as a test, and not simply an online interview.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
  > But then why even try to have this conversation on Twitter? Delusion/hope/marketing?
- Chazprime 8y ago
  I suspect that they’re trying to educate on how the platform could be better used.
  - toss1 8y ago
    If so, it was evidently with a lot of unsupported overconfidence. Clearly turned into a major demonstration of how it can not be used for a good conversation. I've found pretty much the same thing, just good for trading headlines & brief insights. Though, its constraints do cause me to improve the focus of some ideas to express them briefly and clearly, so that's a good exercise.
- inerte 8y ago
  It was a massive experiment. Now they have qualitative feedback to sift through and act on. I think he knew it was going to fail, just not the many ways how it would.
- rchaud 8y ago
  > But then why even try to have this conversation on Twitter? Many people are knowingly doing a kabuki theatre version of a conversation where they are specifically trying to get attention and grab more followers and retweets. You can see it in how responses are framed. There's a lot of attempted "mic drop" moments. Real people don't have conversations like that, because they're not playing to an audience. In real conversations, people also don't just walk away from each other at the first jab, but that happens on Twitter constantly. It's similar to how 95% of Reddit's content is posted by 1% of its user base. Most Twitter users aren't tweeting, they're voyeurs to online meltdowns (real or orchestrated), celebrity gossip and slapfights between political commentators/media/trolls. I have never understood how MySpace became unfashionable because it was "too gaudy/immature" while Twitter has been a wildfire of horrible UX, hate speech, bullying and user surveillance for over a decade now.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago

The one use case I’ve seen of Twitter is rapid fire updates about some developing situation, like an emergency. But it can’t be a back and forth discussion. It can be one person or many people adding to a combined discussion via that hashtag. However, even when I see people do what is effectively a long form blog post on Twitter, I often give up on it before the end because it’s too frustrating.

grawprog 8y ago
>Twitter is rapid fire updates about some developing situation. This is the only thing i've ever used Twitter for. It's the best place to find out about problems on my local transit system. Long before the company ever gives an alert, there'll dozens of people tweeting angrily about the problems.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  Yep, anytime I see some larger than normal police/fire presence in my city, or a large cloud of smoke, I go on Twitter. It works great for breaking events and is usually always way ahead of any news organizations (which are usually just pulling things from Twitter, too).
everdev 8y ago
Twitter was billed as a microblogging platform. Blog posts are 1-way communication. Want a discussion? Allow comments and make them visually separate and less prominent just like blogs do.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  Huh? Then why does Twitter allow you to @reply someone? It is a feature. I mean, Jack Dorsey even doing this interview shows it's a feature, otherwise he should have said "Twitter was not made for this." And not all blog posts are one-way communication, just like you said, that is why we have comment systems attached to blog posts.

e40 8y ago

It's not like the example in the article would be hard to reproduce. It's not like those insanely tricky bugs that only present themselves in rare circumstances. They would easily test for this and fix it. They do not care.

EGreg 8y ago

Actually I am pretty shocked at the amount of “incompetence” in the business world especially at high levels. It seems people shmooze and make big deals happen. But they have no idea how their own product works, often. There are notable exceptions: Elon Musk. Warren Buffett. Jobs and Gates and Bezos. That’s why their companies rock. But like, Apple after Jobs, not so much. I am not convinced the higher-ups really are in touch with what’s the main user facing issue. Like how Apple repeatedly allowed the entire Mac app store certificates to just expire leaving all apps broken [1], or how they released an iOS where no one could click a link in safari!! [2] But that’s actually still a very high level of competence of tons of people in the company. Just the executives and lack of processes to catch this surprise me. Google doesn’t have such problems. It only has problems of product roadmap, shuttering Google Reader and Google Plus after making the entire userbase embrace it, or replacing Talk with three different products like Hangouts, Allo, Meet, etc. But most of all I just realized how much successful B-level people are just... well, they make so many spelling mistakes in email, often paint by numbers and don’t really think out of the box on the most basic things the way someone would if they were constantly learning about their space and their problem. Like oh A and B don’t go together? I guess it won’t work out. Oh, just one tiny thing had to be tweaked in B and suddenly we have a huge revenue stream coming? Huh, would you look at that. And here I was about to focus on something else. Has anyone else noticed this? I am not sure if it was always the case or think it’s a general sense of ADD that came over the business world. Hardly anyone reads books. Emails have to be 5-7 lines long. Spelling and grammar mistakes make you seem important. People - especially busy businesspeople - dont have time to read 2 lines of instructions when onboarding - they zip past them and then scratch their head what to do on next screen. I have seen it. Is this the prequel to Idiocracy? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/all-mac-store-apps-stopped-working-due-to-expired-security-certificate/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/all-mac-store-apps-stopped... and teo years later it happens again https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/02/20/apple-issued-developer-certificate-expires-causing-crashes-in-1password-and-other-apps/amp/ https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/02/20/apple-issued-deve... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2016/03/28/ios-9-3-opening-links-safari-activation-bugs-fixes.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2016/03/28/ios-9-3-opening-links-sa...

erwan 8y ago

It seems like lots of consumer products relying on advertising as a revenue model fall prey to the same problem. They aggressively optimize for a panoply of metrics that make them appealing to advertisers. Often this means hacking the algorithms governing the interactions between users (viewership, timeline visibility, feed) until the outcome yields satisfying metrics, meaningful or not. At this point a complex web of chaotic feedback loops has formed and it becomes hard to change anything. The system's stateful complexity far exceeds the engineering/product team's understanding of it. It's like trying to debug a neural network.

robbles 8y ago

My impression after following him on there for a while: he still uses, and sees the platform as if it's the original version of Twitter from ~2006. Most of his tweets are written in a way that sound like a person writing in a public diary, not someone expecting to have a conversation.

hopler 8y ago
He's using Twitter for what it's good at, desperately hoping people somehow stop ruining the experience while still maintaining popularity and ad views.

vb6lives 8y ago

> Having a conversation was a learning experience for him and his team? Of course not. It's boilerplate CEO speak. It's a way of "answering" the question without making any commitments and seems to terminate any further discussion. Joe Rogan and Sam Harris discuss this on Joe Rogans podcast #1241