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I was wondering why these apps (inc Parler) seem to be so poorly made. It could just be regular small-team issues, but part of me wonders if it's the lack of di

I was wondering why these apps (inc Parler) seem to be so poorly made. It could just be regular small-team issues, but part of me wonders if it's the lack of diversity in the teams that exacerbates it. It's fairly well known that more diverse teams (different education, backgrounds, universities, as well as racial/gender diversity) produce better products because they have fewer blind spots on things, and a diversity of approaches tends to weed out issues. An apocryphal example of this is avionics software companies hiring teams with no overlap in universities to ensure that software was created with very distinct approaches. These apps are essentially built on a premise of lack of diversity, and so I'd imagine that the teams that work on them are much less diverse than they would otherwise be. The only one that seems to be more immune to this is Gab, which is based on Mastodon I think (funnily enough a project with incredible diversity).

throwaway3699 5y ago
I'm sure AT&T was a very diverse place when Bell invented the telephone. Same with early Microsoft or Google. The likely answer is lack of funding. The median app is very poorly made.
- long_time_gone 5y ago
  There are multiple types of diversity, no? ==Women pioneers have been a part of AT&T since 1878. That’s when Emma Nutt joined a team of teenage boys at a telephone exchange in Boston to become the first female operator. Within a few years almost all the telephone operators were women. Those female operators rose to the occasion during World War I, operating the telephone switchboards for the U.S. Army in France.== ==“As a result, AT&T and its subsidiaries became the largest employer of women in the United States,” he said. “At its peak, in the early 1950s, AT&T employed over 200,000 women as telephone operators.”== https://about.att.com/pages/our_people/Our_innovators/female_firsts https://about.att.com/pages/our_people/Our_innovators/female...
  - throwaway3699 5y ago
    Sure, but aren't you implying there no female developers that would work on this software?
    - long_time_gone 5y ago
      I’m not implying anything. I’m stating the fact that diversity can come in many different shapes, sizes, and shades as shown by AT&T. It’s also worth point this out as well while we are talking about AT&T and politics: “ Cramer calls AT&T the ‘most Republican of any publicly traded company’” https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/09/cramer-calls-att-the-most-republican-of-any-publicly-trade-company.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/09/cramer-calls-att-the-most-re...
      - majewsky 5y ago
        Telephone operators were female because female voices were easier to understand on contemporary telephones (their voice frequencies had a better signal/noise ratio). Their hiring into this specific profession is in fact a counter-example to inclusivity, since one gender was predominantly hired for this role specifically.
hsn915 5y ago
Diversity was not a thing throughout the early 20th century when most of the innovations that made the modern world were invented. > An apocryphal example of this is avionics software companies hiring teams with no overlap in universities to ensure that software was created with very distinct approaches. How is this relevant? Diversity of thought is not the same as diversity of race.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  I’m not the person you’re replying to but I don’t really read the comment as being specifically about race at all? I think what they’re getting at is that an app made by and for one “identity group” (and it could be any identity group) is an app that’s intentionally not optimized for diversity and that lack of diversity (no matter how it’s defined) might have some unexpected consequences.
- zbentley 5y ago
  Well, since we live in a deeply racist society, the backgrounds of people of different ethnicities are often quite different. That can produce diversity of thought in a similar way to differences in educational or geographical background. Race is only one part of GP's suggestion about diversity contributing to product quality, but you seem to have stuck on it. As for the fact that many important innovations were developed before diversity was valued as much as it is today, I am reminded of a blind inventor, who achieves great things in spite of disability: imagine how much more he could do if given the power of sight!
  - hsn915 5y ago
    Really? Almost all the companies I've been to have "diversity" of ethnicity but there's no diversity of thought at all. Because they only hire people who think like them. Let me give you a concrete example: If your business is based on "cloud" and "docker" and "dynamically typed languages", how likely are you to hire someone who thinks the cloud is overrated and that using docker is over engineering and that statically typed and compiled languages are better for productivity and reliability? The chance you would hire such a person is nil. And if you do by mistake hire such a person, it's probably because there did not voice this opinion during the interview process and just "played along" to get the job. So you will hire a bunch of people from different ethnicities who all buy into the "cloud is the future" mindset and who think that learning a 100 different tools and configuration languages is how to build a modern website.
the_snooze 5y ago
The value proposition of these things is that they're supposedly "non-biased." Why spend valuable development resources on building a good product when your target audience will be drawn to it out of ideology, regardless of quality?
oconnor663 5y ago
I think demographic skew is a stronger effect here than diversity per se. Oversimplifying a lot, if we imagine Twitter hires only left-leaning coders, and Parler hires only right-leaning ones, Twitter would have a larger pool to hire from. Doubly so in any coastal techy city. Diversity seems like it would be a second order effect here.
beaconstudios 5y ago
Do you not remember the early days of twitter? It was down as much as it was up, to the extent that the "fail whale" error page became a meme. I think the reality is that new software usually sucks until it takes enough of a hammering that it becomes decent.
- danpalmer 5y ago
  I remember it well! I'm not sure I agree that scaling problems like those of Twitter are the same as these problems, but I could be wrong.
chakkepolja 5y ago
It's just almost nobody wants to identify with or work for an app made exclusively for extremists.
readflaggedcomm 5y ago
It's not "diversity" which differs in the development team, it's money and age. These platforms are primarily filled with "boomers", as the rest of the right would say. The young ones are on image boards, not Facebook surrogates.

throwaway3699 5y ago

I'm sure AT&T was a very diverse place when Bell invented the telephone. Same with early Microsoft or Google. The likely answer is lack of funding. The median app is very poorly made.

long_time_gone 5y ago
There are multiple types of diversity, no? ==Women pioneers have been a part of AT&T since 1878. That’s when Emma Nutt joined a team of teenage boys at a telephone exchange in Boston to become the first female operator. Within a few years almost all the telephone operators were women. Those female operators rose to the occasion during World War I, operating the telephone switchboards for the U.S. Army in France.== ==“As a result, AT&T and its subsidiaries became the largest employer of women in the United States,” he said. “At its peak, in the early 1950s, AT&T employed over 200,000 women as telephone operators.”== https://about.att.com/pages/our_people/Our_innovators/female_firsts https://about.att.com/pages/our_people/Our_innovators/female...
- throwaway3699 5y ago
  Sure, but aren't you implying there no female developers that would work on this software?
  - long_time_gone 5y ago
    I’m not implying anything. I’m stating the fact that diversity can come in many different shapes, sizes, and shades as shown by AT&T. It’s also worth point this out as well while we are talking about AT&T and politics: “ Cramer calls AT&T the ‘most Republican of any publicly traded company’” https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/09/cramer-calls-att-the-most-republican-of-any-publicly-trade-company.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/09/cramer-calls-att-the-most-re...
    - majewsky 5y ago
      Telephone operators were female because female voices were easier to understand on contemporary telephones (their voice frequencies had a better signal/noise ratio). Their hiring into this specific profession is in fact a counter-example to inclusivity, since one gender was predominantly hired for this role specifically.

hsn915 5y ago

Diversity was not a thing throughout the early 20th century when most of the innovations that made the modern world were invented. > An apocryphal example of this is avionics software companies hiring teams with no overlap in universities to ensure that software was created with very distinct approaches. How is this relevant? Diversity of thought is not the same as diversity of race.

elliekelly 5y ago
I’m not the person you’re replying to but I don’t really read the comment as being specifically about race at all? I think what they’re getting at is that an app made by and for one “identity group” (and it could be any identity group) is an app that’s intentionally not optimized for diversity and that lack of diversity (no matter how it’s defined) might have some unexpected consequences.
zbentley 5y ago
Well, since we live in a deeply racist society, the backgrounds of people of different ethnicities are often quite different. That can produce diversity of thought in a similar way to differences in educational or geographical background. Race is only one part of GP's suggestion about diversity contributing to product quality, but you seem to have stuck on it. As for the fact that many important innovations were developed before diversity was valued as much as it is today, I am reminded of a blind inventor, who achieves great things in spite of disability: imagine how much more he could do if given the power of sight!
- hsn915 5y ago
  Really? Almost all the companies I've been to have "diversity" of ethnicity but there's no diversity of thought at all. Because they only hire people who think like them. Let me give you a concrete example: If your business is based on "cloud" and "docker" and "dynamically typed languages", how likely are you to hire someone who thinks the cloud is overrated and that using docker is over engineering and that statically typed and compiled languages are better for productivity and reliability? The chance you would hire such a person is nil. And if you do by mistake hire such a person, it's probably because there did not voice this opinion during the interview process and just "played along" to get the job. So you will hire a bunch of people from different ethnicities who all buy into the "cloud is the future" mindset and who think that learning a 100 different tools and configuration languages is how to build a modern website.

the_snooze 5y ago

The value proposition of these things is that they're supposedly "non-biased." Why spend valuable development resources on building a good product when your target audience will be drawn to it out of ideology, regardless of quality?

oconnor663 5y ago

I think demographic skew is a stronger effect here than diversity per se. Oversimplifying a lot, if we imagine Twitter hires only left-leaning coders, and Parler hires only right-leaning ones, Twitter would have a larger pool to hire from. Doubly so in any coastal techy city. Diversity seems like it would be a second order effect here.

beaconstudios 5y ago

Do you not remember the early days of twitter? It was down as much as it was up, to the extent that the "fail whale" error page became a meme. I think the reality is that new software usually sucks until it takes enough of a hammering that it becomes decent.

danpalmer 5y ago
I remember it well! I'm not sure I agree that scaling problems like those of Twitter are the same as these problems, but I could be wrong.

chakkepolja 5y ago

It's just almost nobody wants to identify with or work for an app made exclusively for extremists.

readflaggedcomm 5y ago

It's not "diversity" which differs in the development team, it's money and age. These platforms are primarily filled with "boomers", as the rest of the right would say. The young ones are on image boards, not Facebook surrogates.