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Comment by johnboiles | Hacker News Reader

This is mind boggling to me. Kayvon is one of the best product leaders / visionaries I know. It was confusing to me in Dec that he wasn't Jack's successor.

Kayvon was a huge driving force behind all the interesting product efforts of the last few years: Spaces, Fleets, topics, etc. Twitter went from not iterating on product (remember when Twitter's only change in several years was to change the star to a heart?) to starting to take some shots. Behind the scenes he was often pushing against significant headwinds that resisted product change (not the least of which was the internal 'sacred cow' that all things must be built with Scala and only run inside Twitter's on-prem datacenters).

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> Kayvon is one of the best product leaders / visionaries I know.

Maybe this person is absolutely amazing and is just constrained by the crazy realities of working in a very large and political company. Maybe they did the best possible job under difficult circumstances. I'm not the insider and can't easily judge that.

But as an outsider, what I can judge is that it's easy to perceive the Twitter platform as basically doing nothing truly noteworthy in terms of design/features to improve the platform other than feeling like a slower and slower site, while at the same time it's increasingly hostile to the open Internet (stuff like blocking viewing Tweets unless you login), and has some significant and growing freedom of speech issues until Musk came along. The stuff that outsiders can judge doesn't feel too good.

100% of those features are terrible.

Topics, in particular, are actively and significantly harmful to the quality of my experience on Twitter. If there was a way to hide them permanently, now THAT would be a feature!

Agreed completely. All those functions are simple hacks on top of the platform to emulate functionality that is offered in other apps:

* Spaces => Clubhouse

* Topics => Instagram/Reddit

* Fleets => Instagram

Twitter should focus on its core value product: the tweets themselves, and manage that better. This means easier thread displays, better spam control and user management, better algorithm for displaying relevant tweets.

Spaces are warty and ugly right now but I'm enjoying them.

Spaces are really good.

But I would liked an anonymous 'join to listen' feature. Random people stalking your account after they see you in the space is something I find creepy.

Twitter copied all of those features from other apps. Spaces = Clubhouse, Fleets (which was also cancelled last year) = Snapchat. At best, Kayvon was good a being reactionary to competition. Not that great of a track record.

Fleets as in fleeting. I thought it meant “group of ships” and seriously struggled to see how the name connected. Mind you, my use of Twitter is confined to “order by time desc” and Lists.

Why do you think Twitter needs any changes? I would personally prefer if they removed all of the remaining features you listed and went back to the good old plain chronological list of tweets that made Twitter popular.

Spaces is a good feature. Topics is the worst thing I've been subjected to in my life. I have a second account in Japanese and Topics constantly adds posts about trashy American pop stars I barely know to the feed.

Agree. Spaces is good and the others not as much. Though I do use the 'War in Ukraine' topic a lot.

The main diff though is that Twitter for a moment in time started taking some shots. Not that they were all the best shots. But for my first two years there it felt like the company took nearly 0 shots. That shift happened with Kayvon.

personally I'm very sick of the "perma-trending topics". "COVID-19: News and updates for $YOUR_LOCATION" still pops up in the sidebar here and there, and it's on the full trending topics list probably forever now?? like, guys, it's over, you can pull it now, I'm good thanks

A trick is to set your sidebar region to a country whose language you can't read. Then it just gets filled with irrelevant, impossible-to-read noise

Topics for anyone outside the US is completely dysfunctional. I've browsed the list of topics it generated for me (to disable them manually in the most dysfunctional way ever imagined) and half the topics it contained were completely unknown to me. Rappers, celebrities, baseball players, and K-pop stars. None of those are topics I've ever spent any real interest in, neither through searching nor interacting with other people's tweets.

Are Spaces, Fleets, or Topics considered successes?

As others have said here, Spaces is a minor success. In my corner of Twitter I see people use it occasionally and I've had a few good experiences with it

Fleets was actually relatively good amongst certain content creators, especially as a monetization funnel.

Fleets certainly not, Twitter internally removed it because it did so poorly.

>(not the least of which was the internal 'sacred cow' that all things must be built with Scala)

Lol wtf, why should a product person have any say in programming languages?

As a product person, if the engineering leadership has a personal preference and it impacts the ability to deliver features... I'm not sure why they wouldn't push back.

Err, is the accusation that engineering says “we want to keep Scala but it is slowing us down”? Because i think it is way more likely that product people are saying stupid shit like “well at my last company we used PHP and we churned out features twice as fast!”

All of those product efforts are failures so far. Literally nobody outside hardcore twitter users knows what any of them are.

I'm not sure you're supposed to be acclaimed for the features you listed.

I had the same reaction as the siblings, so I'm almost wondering if this is satire.

Given the toxic dump twitter is today, I doubt this is true.

> Kayvon was a huge driving force behind all the interesting product efforts of the last few years: Spaces, Fleets, topics, etc

Honestly not sure if you're being sarcastic. Fleets were killed within months of launch because they were awful and no one wanted them. Spaces will die when the nft bubble finishes collapsing. And topics are just a way to shoehorn crap no one wants onto their timelines without asking first.

What do spaces have to do with NFTs?

NFT dudes are the only people I have EVER seen using that feature, and I use Twitter daily. I also follow exactly zero NFT dudes so I don't know why I always see their spaces.

Spaces are heavily used where I am right now as a replacement for radio with plenty of really interesting topic. Basically, "everyone can open a station" scenario.

Off the top of my head, there is a big trial going on, and people are discussing details and commentary on that (with competing spaces for the defense and persecution sides). Stuff that you don't have the time to convey using traditional media.

It has gotten big enough to have politicians show up and do special shows. Thing about 2+ hours of interacting directly with the public.

I've been in a bunch of local political spaces run by journos and activists and experts, but my province is in the middle of an election right now.

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