Twitter’s heads of engineering and design will leave in a company shake-up | Hacker News Reader

Twitter’s heads of engineering and design will leave in a company shake-up

nytimes.com

85 pointsfortran7751 comments

One observation: the longer companies go on without big wins and innovative leadership, the more stressful, messy, and generally horrible they become. The cool peeps left first, and then it tends to circle the drain into oblivion from there.

Edit: Like "rats" fleeing a "sinking ship."

A colleague I worked with at a dying startup called this the “Dead Sea effect.” All the choosers chose to leave and all that was left was salt.

Not sure if that’s an industry term or not.

Seems like a mistake to assume ability/cost of getting a new job is indicative of making positive contributions. A lot of hire-ability in Tech is based on brand (university or employer) and network. Tech is actually a very snobby industry. Where as it-least in Wall-St or Sales you are tied to P&L

I always heard it along the lines of "The elves have sailed into the west."

You're probably thinking of "The elves have left Middle Earth"? That's slightly different -- it's a reference from this blogpost[0] which is talking about bean-counters taking over from focus on product, i.e., basically fiddling more with costs than trying to innovate to improve revenues.

https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Not very well known, but not new.

http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

I've definitely seen this happening more than once, so to me this is a thing for real. The people you you'd want to stay leave, and the people you'd want to leave stick forever.

Yep. I worked as a consultant in the Valley. Sometimes, folks wanted me to work at these dying shops. I was always hesitant because they're not fun places but they do have more technical and political challenges than elsewhere.

In French they say something like "Quand les dégoutés partent, il-n'y-a que les dégoutants qui restent"

(When the disgusted leave, only the disgusting remain)

Thanks for that. I love French aphorisms.

Davis failed the "no *sshole" rule, and so, morale and retention suffered.

If you want people to stay, don't be a dick and don't treat them like serfs.

Well, let's hope this means an about face in Twitter's awful, awful, awful design direction.

It is hard to see how any design team that thought it was a good idea to take a font commissioned for logo work, try and make it the body text font thoughout the site, and didn't even realise it didn't render or kern correctly in Windows is at all functional.

I see a lot of people living in a bubble in Silicon Valley thinking Microsoft and Windows are all but dead, and any phone other than an iPhone doesn't exist.

https://archive.md/es9gT

It'd be cool if Twitter would allow users to publish long form content. Like a blog or at least longer than a tweet. So we don't get a hairy thread of 1/ 2/ 3/ 4/ tweets from people who share ideas that can't be summed up in 280 characters. With a special built-in hashtag, like #thread or #blog.

If they keep the notification feature and the choice to only get notifications from such long form content, that'd be even cooler.

Who am I kidding.

What's the point of Twitter then? Isn't the character limit (whether 140, or 280, or whatever) part of what makes it "it"?

The distribution, the networks?

A microblogging service should cost micro crypto to post, and have a rate gently exponential with # of characters.

Indeed, Twitter is for angry people to vent and for social validation. Ticket closed with "As intended". Thanks for your suggestion.

The point of 1/ 2/ 3/ ... threads is to enable out of context deep linking. They are not going away, lest Twitter becomes yet another run-of-the mill blog platform nobody engages with.

That's a quick way to turn Twitter into Linkedin or Medium.

There's a reason Twitter is bigger and more addictive than both of the above, and that's because people don't have the patience to read more than a few sentences at a time without getting bored. Most of what's posted on Twitter isn't that interesting, so people keep scrolling to find the next minor dopamine hit.

I'm not sure that's true that Twitter is bigger than LinkedIn, though maybe it is for HN users.

I don't personally have a LinkedIn account (and am thus blocked from using it for the most part) and I do have multiple Twitter accounts. However, from what I've seen of my friend group, random acquaintances and online stats aggregators, I'm in the minority.

From what I can tell, normal people almost all have LinkedIn while Twitter is mostly still just for people in activism, tech or journalism.

I have a LinkedIn and I never log in except for when I'm looking for a job, or when a new grad from my alma mater reaches out for career advice. So 2x a year tops.

> Twitter is mostly still just for people in activism, tech or journalism.

Music? TV shows? Books? Comedy? Art?

My Twitter has all of those. It doesn't just have to be a medium for doomscrolling.

> That's a quick way to turn Twitter into Linkedin or Medium.

Will it, though ? It's not like it'd be replacing the core Twitter experience, it can be added as a link to a tweet "Here's a nicely formatted longer content". Now of course there are only 2 or 3 people i follow who'd be into that and not the smaller posts crafted for engagement.

Linkedin and Medium are cesspools of circle-self-pleasure.

They are communities of job seekers and job providers who are constantly trying to showcase their skills or scouting for talent.

When was the last time you thought you could speak your mind on Linkedin?

Also, I have a special place of hatred in my heart for linkedin because the news feed is a reflection of corporate bootlicking and corporate promotion that borders on insane.

They cannot be compared to Twitter, which is clearly anonymous (if the user wants such) and more open.

> They are communities of job seekers and job providers who are constantly trying to showcase their skills or scouting for talent.

What's actually wrong with this? People want to get hired, people want to hire.

> When was the last time you thought you could speak your mind on Linkedin?

I signed up for a linkedin account a couple of months ago and used it a couple of times and otherwise have no idea how it works. But I guess I would feel about the same as speaking my mind in any workplace or professional function. That is to say I would not say a thing about religion, politics, sex, medical concerns, etc., so I'm not sure what your rhetorical question is getting at. Do you think people should more freely speak their minds about things like that in professional settings? Or that linkedin would be less of a cesspool if they refrained?

> Also, I have a special place of hatred in my heart for linkedin because the news feed is a reflection of corporate bootlicking and corporate promotion that borders on insane.

Not sure what you define as bootlicking exactly but that just seems to be what some people do. I've seen what I consider almost obsessive worship of companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, etc., by people who desperately want jobs with them for many many years before ever seeing a single linkedin page. People bootlick celebrities, political parties, government bureaucrats, etc too. I would try to be more accepting and tolerant, or at least not let people being people upset you too much.

> They cannot be compared to Twitter, which is clearly anonymous (if the user wants such) and more open.

Twitter comes to mind as one place where I have seen astounding amounts of this bootlicking. And I don't even have a twitter account it's just from occasionally reading comments on some tweet I followed a link to.

> Not sure what you define as bootlicking

LinkedIn is full of posts that are put up by employees that are filled to the brim with either extreme compassion / extreme empathy / self congratulatory likes/comments on their bosses or higher ups in the company.

Its just so artificial.

Also, the point I was making was in response to the parent comment lamenting that opening up twitter for longer posts will lead to it becoming another Linkedin or Medium. My point was that the social structure and context of Twitter will never allow that to happen because (as I expanded) the social structure and context of LinkedIn and Medium are very different.

I am not really sure why you are questioning me.

> LinkedIn is full of posts that are put up by employees that are filled to the brim with either extreme compassion / extreme empathy / self congratulatory likes/comments on their bosses or higher ups in the company.

Oh. Like Elon Musk or Sundar Pichai? Or their managers or team leaders or boss's boss?

> Its just so artificial.

I can assure you the former is rampant all over social media including twitter and the latter is rampant in actual workplaces.

I'm questioning you because I wanted to learn more about what you wrote. I accept you like twitter and think linkedin is a cesspool, it's just not clear to me exactly why that is.

Here's a Twitter account dedicated to the many self-congratulatory posts on LinkedIn: https://mobile.twitter.com/bestoflinkedin

It's its own unintentional genre. Once you learn to recognize it, you see it everywhere.

there's a perfectly suitable alternative to Twitter in the interoperable open web. Folks should be making demands to policymakers to push publicly funded content into publicly run infrastructure.

Also, some people are just blind to the faults and complaints people using Twitter have. I would invite people come check out /r/Twitter on reddit for a rough idea what kind of sentiment people have with the service.

“Publicly funded” Twitter? No thanks. I don’t want my tax money going to a Skinner box.

fine, enjoy your Twitter login-walls just to view wildfire notifications (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).

As a content consumer I don't want a login to a state-funded system, but I want state-funded content to be pushed into a standard/interoperable ecosystem.

This ecosystem exists today btw. We don't need to wait for some bs ponzi web3 crypto savior to develop their form of nonsense.

We already have everything in place today except for political will.

Alternatively, a decentralized and anarchist based social media without the states tendrils :)

You know, like mastodon. Or literally anything else that develops. The State should just interface with anything and everything it can out there, rather than dictate a standard.

I'm implicitly referring to Mastodon.

However, It does not need to be Mastodon per se. You could just shoehorn whatever open protocol that exists into your content management system and then push those updates out to the broader network. This is an existing system.

State-funded content won't be pushed into a standard or interoperable ecosystem, it will either be published as it is today (into freely available private platforms with huge public usage) or into proprietary state systems built by the lowest bidder.

Regardless of your feelings on "the interoperable open web," one of the above two options is objectively better than the other.

Publicly funded Twitter would not exists. Why would any government facilitates more free speech? If it exists, it will be censored to oblivion.

I already don't use twitter, please don't make my tax dollars go there too

I was just saying yesterday about twitter's inane design. kind of glad he 's listening

I would wait for a bit to see some results before seeing this as an improvement.

old.twitter.com, I hope.

You mean, people who oversaw the roll-out of a new, horrible design with no testing and multiple breaking bugs that took over a year to fix (and many are still not fixed)?

Good. Good.

> You mean, people who oversaw the roll-out of a new, horrible design with no testing and multiple breaking bugs that took over a year to fix (and many are still not fixed)?

lol but wouldn't that all have rolled up to the new CEO since he was the CTO?

I think this decade tide is going to turn against public global social networks. It's going to happen for all platforms as people see how detrimental social media really is and how under equipped these companies are in moderating their network for misinformation.

It will not be end of social media but an exodus is going to happen from these existing networks to more privately deployed social networks where individuals from community moderate their own networks.

The only barrier at the moment is we need at least a dozen open source self hosted solutions. These have to be very simple to host and moderate. Even a layman should be able to host and moderate.

This is a very hackernews take. The majority of people love Twitter as a product. A vocal minority are upset about disinformation, but most people think it’s entertaining. We know this because it generates more clicks.

A ministry of truth that could regulate is also fraught with peril for obvious reasons. It’s a catch-22 if you value liberal philosophy.

Sure this very well could be my wishful thinking but let's wait a decade to prove me wrong :)

Not convinced that people will move to segregated communities, but I don’t think love of twitter is a majority. Not very many people I know use twitter.

Don’t users self-segregate by virtue of the follow lists?

I’m not plugged into the firehose

Your FB or Twitter experience might converge on a topic but we each choose our own adventures

To a large extent one can't do this on these platforms, especially Facebook. As they have a tendency to algorithmically include "recommended content". Even if they did, I suspect there is enough overlap into people's follow lists that one would not be able to split these platforms into discrete subsets without cutting off some follows

don't a lot of twitter users regularly complain about how much they hate it, or take breaks or whatever?

> but most people think it’s entertaining. We know this because it generates more clicks.

All this shows is that it fosters engagement. That can also mean it's addictive - which it is because it's designed to be. That doesn't mean it is really entertaining in a nourishing way.

The shake has been arguably happening since 2016(i would say even sooner, but those efforts were more of hobbyists and explorers), where polarization was exacerbated by certain "political views" these social networks hold.However even though a lot of platforms have risen up and cool technologies (mastodon, IPFS-based hosting,etc) emerged, the core problem still somewhat exists: centralized power: whether it be the registrar, the hosting(which many people look into solving, because that's arguably the most critical point, and some have managed to somewhat de-couple from the monopolized 'cloud'), payment processors, ISPs,etc. All of these remain vastly centralized, and even though we haven't see extreme censorship in the west, the issue is a slippery slope, and that doesn't mean we won't see it in the future.(Unless politicians & philosophers try to push something akin of a "bill of rights" to the internet space, which would mean they are smart, so let's not hold our breaths on that)

I'm more hyped, though i know progress is slow, in decentralized solutions in the hardware and networking space.Because the way i see it, even with something like bitcoin or any other decentralized solution that is mostly software-based, you're still at the mercy of couple entities.Again, process is slow in the HW space because most of the corporations/monopolies that are potentially abusive also hold most of manufacturing.

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