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What is Twitter even doing? Like I realize they likely have an infinite number of people working for them, but are any of them doing anything important at all?

by saurik 7y ago

What is Twitter even doing? Like I realize they likely have an infinite number of people working for them, but are any of them doing anything important at all? This is not like the usual "I just don't see how a company needs that many people" laments: this is specific to Twitter, as they seem to have at most one engineer working on new features... it took like five years for them to implement "increase size of Tweet to 280 characters", and the only feature of note I can think of since then was adding a half-assed ability to mute replies (which to me is a critical feature that prevents trolls and hate groups from using my audience to spread their hate; but the feature is somehow designed to take a reply that would have maybe been buried in hundreds of people replying to me and "mute" it by giving it a dedicated icon with a pop up dialog reminding people to go look at the content I muted, so in fact more people probably see the thing I muted now than before I muted it... it is ridiculous). Like I frankly feel the decision here is "I guess send all the employees home as it isn't like their productivity could be any lower, right? hell: maybe one of them gets inspired and finally builds something!".

AlwaysBCoding 7y ago
I've hung out a bunch at Twitter's offices (in both SF and NYC). It's pretty eye-opening and a good lens into why Twitter the company is so fucked up. The vibe that comes off is more of a social hangout club than a serious tech company. You meet your friend for lunch and there's professional chefs cooking gourmet meals, you hang out in the social area while the celebrity of the day comes into the office and everyone takes pictures with them. There's breakout rooms where people are filming marketing videos. The people that are hanging out talking to celebrities all day are making $200,000+ somehow. Anyone with right of center political views is casually censored from the platform with no recourse, because it's a "cool social hangout platform" not a serious technology product with mature guidelines of what acceptable speech is and formalized appeals processes. There won't be any productivity loss from everyone going remote because nobody is doing real work anyway.
- RangerScience 7y ago
  > Anyone with right of center political views is casually censored I've been having very productive conversations with someone on twitter whom I'm pretty sure is a Catholic fundamentalist. I'm specifically following a few other accounts because the provide outside-filter-bubble views, and they're all rather further than "right of center." Haven't heard a peep from any of them about Twitter censorship. TL;DR: Not sure what you're talking about here.
- philjohn 7y ago
  "Anyone with right of center political views is casually censored from the platform with no recourse" That's just not true - Donald Trump hasn't been "casually censored", neither have any of the GOP representatives who have Twitter accounts. If you say abhorrent stuff, then yes, their platform, and they can say "you're not welcome here", but just look at the cesspit of comments on the recent "gate" hashtag and you'll see there are MANY right of center (some cases miles right of center) voices on there.
- esoterica 7y ago
  > Anyone with right of center political views is casually censored from the platform with no recourse You have a persecution complex. Almost every conservative political figure and media personality has a twitter account that they post regularly on. Only a small number of abusive psychos (e.g. Milo) have been banned for breaking Twitter rules.
- treesrule 7y ago
  > Anyone with right of center political views is casually censored from the platform with no recourse As someone half/two-thirds of whose twitter reading is right of center/right wing people, I find this comment perplexing?
wikwocket 7y ago
Say what you will about Twitter, but is a globally distributed database with trillions of entries, which has to add and sort and display billions of those entries in real-time for 100+ million daily active users. And it has to resist nation-state bad actors doing everything they can to corrupt it. As a result, I would guess a lot of Twitter's engineers are working on infrastructure, internal tooling, and moderation. Regarding your example, doubling the size of a tweet, that was probably more work than one dev writing ALTER TABLE tweets MODIFY tweet_text VARCHAR(280). In fact, I don't know if you were around 20 years ago or so, but there was a similarly scoped project to double the number of digits we were storing the year in. ;)