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gadnuk

Who thought designing this page and actually publishing it was a good idea?

https://investors.block.xyz/governance/leadership/default.as...

My eyes! My eyes!

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Horrible design aside, there's some interesting politics represented on there.

1) Alyssa was given all of Square to run, making her the effective CEO of Square. Jack was never going to give up CEO of Square role in any other way than by taking over a top-level entity. I strongly suspect he hasn't had any interest in the core business in years, though. Given Alyssa's general background in AWS, this likely represents continued platformization of Square, and a continued de-emphasis on Square as a product. Instead an emphasis on Square as infrastructure. How this squares (hah) with their small business moat time will tell.

2) Jesse Dorogusker runs Tidal and crypto hardware, which is fascinating - he's ex-Apple, a solid hardware lead, but to my knowledge he has no music background or industry experience. I wonder how that happened?

3) Mike Brock in charge of whatever the fresh hell TBD54566975 is, is honestly the about 10x as puzzling as Jesse in charge of Tidal. I could not understand this less. The name, the design, the mission, the lead choice, the twitter page [1]. None of it. It's complete nonsense.

[1] https://twitter.com/TBD54566975

I worked at AWS at a time when Alyssa was there (running Amazon S3), and the few times I've met her, I can guarantee she was a formidable executive. No surprise she's in the top ranks at Square.

“Running Amazon s3”… wow, it’s hard to think of many roles that are more fundamental to today’s Internet infrastructure (never lose a byte!) and at the same time quite dull (it’s an object heap after all. Nothing else to see here).

It's easy to underestimate how difficult it is to make a core building block do one thing and do it really good. I mean, Twitter is another frequently cited example; most people with basic software development knowledge could build a Twitter clone in an afternoon, but the challenge is to make it globally and infinitely scalable.

The real challenge is it to get people to use. I believe that there are no insurmountable technical or organizational problems in scaling a messaging service.

Comparing Twitter and S3 though? Twitter literally epitomized site unreliability with its fail whales for so many years before finally figuring out how to do the one single thing they do reliably, viz. shuffling around a bunch of text messages. As far as big tech goes Twitter looks like the least well managed or thought Out tech stack I can see.

To make sure it’s not interpreted that way, I’m not saying a single guy could create Twitter at its scale in a month, but they do basically one thing and have infinite resources. It’s not that hard.

Payment processing is at least as dull as storage. And it should be. Dull and reliable is exactly what I want in anything financial.

The hard part isn't designing and building an object heap, the hard part is building, guiding and managing a team that builds, manages and operates an object heap, at a world wide scale.

What made her so formidable?

their white paper is one of the most obtuse writing I've ever read:

https://tbd54566975.ghost.io/introducing-tbdex/

the best I can understand... you can use your identity as a token? or something?

stuff

They're using LaTeX, it must be legit

This explains it a bit better

https://twitter.com/brockm/status/1431319755055513610

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1431320761474617344

> The name, the design, the mission, the lead choice, the twitter page [1]. None of it. It's complete nonsense.

That's intentional. If you're peddling crypto, you're either a scammer, or a gullible fool. Those people are no fools.

I have to say I thought the most ridiculous name I'd see in this space was coins named after people's dogs. This not-even-a-name might be even more ridiculous. It reminds me of those spam emails where they the writing forms an effective filter on the people who reply, the idea being that they are so ludicrous that only a sucker would reply (hence saving the time of the scammers on interacting with people who reply but won't fall for the scam). I have to say I'm super sick of all the bullshit happening in the crypto space at the moment because I think it really tarnishes the reputation of everything in the space including some decentralized apps and decentralized finance stuff that could actually be a massive net positive to everyone.

TBD to me is pretty clearly just trying to capitalize on memecoins. That Twitter is exactly what a watered down corporate version of a shitcoin looks like. Some technical mumbo jumbo, a white paper, bs name, and what boomers think memes are (putting lowercase text on a hat, using a drake img as your Twitter profile, weird snarky responses).

Based on my knowledge of shitcoins, this will do extremely well.

Honestly... I love it.

The whole website is just aggressively bad. The C suite cube faces, ugly color palette, spinny cube complete with a Jay-Z curated soundtrack, the misaligned text & links on the media kit page etc.

It reminds me a lot of aesthetic in the game Cruelty Squad - just an intentional rejection of design norms. Nothing worse than being boring right?

/default.aspx on every url

This is actually the investor relations tool they're using (Q4). If you follow the "powered by" link you can see that Q4's corporate website has the same thing

and hijacked scrolling

Also on the whole, it's a very unimportant website. It's just some investor relation website. There's no signup conversions to optimise for.

squareup.com is still a normal "boring" website.

> It reminds me a lot of aesthetic in the game Cruelty Squad

Would love to work for a company with full Cruelty Squad world branding, but I guess Consumer Softproducts isn't hiring.

it reminds me of the 'siren song' in Odyssey that would dash sailors across the rocks... except its ADHD Millenial/Zoomer developer/crypto enthusiasts

I think it's intentional. I don't think anyone in the company said "this is great design let's do this" but more like "this is unconventional (in Apple words, "takes courage") and rad, we know people will call it ugly but let's be unique this way and do it". Which, in my opinion, works.

You're being way too charitable here. It's a quick and dirty website built with a CMS[1] and no designer involved. There's tons of obvious design mistakes. Don't get me wrong, I'm a terrible designer myself but after spending a lot of time with great ones, I can tell the difference between an ugly website made by a designer with an aesthetic intent and one built by a front-end web developer without supervision, and using 5 different fonts on a single page is definitely a clue.

[1] https://www.q4inc.com/Powered-by-Q4/

Ok, I just had a quick look on the go. If 5 different fonts (families I suppose) are used it's definitely a red flag. Interesting on their side, then, to go such a route.

The cubes slowly popping into view as the page lags out is a special kind of unintentional modern humor.

It is obviously heavily inspired by web pages from the NFT/crypto space. Because it is trendy or because they want to go that route, who knows…

Edit: seems like they are already heavily invested in crypto. There you go.

Let's do financial crimes ... in Minecraft

(joke nicked from __femb0t on Twitter https://twitter.com/__femb0t/status/1466283819246538753 )

As someone who doesn’t design websites for a living, I’m always a little baffled by strong reactions to website designs, especially ones like this one that don’t look all that different from a million other websites to me. I have a suspicion that there’s a very wide gap between how website designers appraise a website, and how everyone else does. Just an observation.

Upper left corner: "Block Vibes, Curated by Jay-Z" is probably the most silicon valley thing I've ever seen on a website.

It's all going to crash horribly, isn't it?

I thought it's a joke. It's a like a bunch of 4chan teenagers designed it for shits and giggles.

You can make jokes but these people already are a large portion of the money spending people and they will only become more important when they get better jobs and opportunities as they move on in life.

Haha unreal, that is the worst design I've seen in a long time

Lol I love it. The music is not really my cup of tea but the whole site oozes S O U L. If it was a bit more optimized and wouldnt stutter on my iGPU equipped laptop id give it 8/10. It's just the right amount of wacky and tasteless that it wraps around and becomes enjoyable.

I would love it even more if it wasn't made for yet another rent seeking, blood sucking, middleman bullshit company that feasts on people being discouraged from using cash, yet having no privacy respecting alternative that is run for their benefit instead of getting rich off their situation.

My guess is whoever that was decided to go full-on for the NFT aesthetic.

This page is 18 MB.

A company run by literal blockheads

That is surprisingly less bad than some of the stuff my company has pulled and thought it was excellent while patting themselves on the back.

Usually it is a sign that the greater spotted MBA is insufficient on its own to produce effective business strategy and marketing. It requires a combination of two other mysterious forces; talent and clue, which are unavailable at business school.

  > Who thought designing this page and actually publishing it was a good idea?

Somebody who read "I wish webpages today were as simple as they were in 1999" and then did their best to emulate the Geocities pages that they found from that era.

But still managed to ship a 20MB webpage!

Haha, now that’s good visual humor.

If the design for this didn't create negative reactions like this they would have probably considered the design a failure.

its the block logo meant to be flashing or is it just me?

It's the n64 tech demo all over again!

Clearly a bunch of blockheads!

A single >15MB page. Nice.

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