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.
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.
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.
Want a discussion? Allow comments and make them visually separate and less prominent just like blogs do.
And not all blog posts are one-way communication, just like you said, that is why we have comment systems attached to blog posts.
I understand why they did it. They let the site kind of grow organically to see what it could become and embraced how people were using it. And I think they are likely super nervous from a financial perspective about any user loss if they start pulling features.
But I think Twitter has a similar problem as Facebook -- it connects a lot of random people into a conversation system that should likely not be connected. On HN, I'm connecting with people that care about the tech community. On a Reddit sub-reddit, it's specific to some topic. Twitter just seems to encourage too many outliers to get involved in conversations they should probably sit back and simply listen on.
Perhaps what we really need is a million meeting rooms that people can enter or leave as they desire.
I don't use Twitter, but I do use Facebook to keep up with family and friends, but the primary value I get out of it is from the groups I belong to, often private, where people can have (moderated, if needed) discussions about topics of common interest.
They would easily test for this and fix it. They do not care.
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.
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.
Unless this was explicitly meant as a test, and not simply an online interview.
Delusion/hope/marketing?
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.
I think he knew it was going to fail, just not the many ways how it would.
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.
Although for Twitter, I think they absolutely know the site has a problem with toxicity, but they 100% do not care. Angry people will spend longer on the site arguing, post more, and see more ads. They may say they care, but their actual business incentives push them towards maintaining the current state of discourse.
Just in the last couple of weeks, he's been making himself available for long form discussions. He was on Sam Harris and Joe Rogan and other podcasts. He participated in this Kara interview.
He's been a bit more behind the scenes before, and now he's more visible and active and participatory. He doesn't have all the answers yet, but maybe this effort will lead to improvements.
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
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... and teo years later it happens again https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/02/20/apple-issued-deve...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2016/03/28/ios-9-3-opening-links-sa...