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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Do we really need new features in everything? I mean, I understand the business point, more features, higher price, higher chances someone will buy product for feature X.. but I've seen feature creep, where a good app that did one thing great, now becomes a bloated mess, because they added one feature, and another, and another,...

First it's just a file browser.. then it starts with a text editor.. then image viewer, pluus cloud support (dropbox, onedrive,...), then file sync, backup solution, package management, image editor, music player, video player, and in the end, with all the "streamlining" added, you've got a 300mb app that just lost the ability to sort files by size, but which can now order food delivery for you.

What new features does eg. twitter need?

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Ongoing improvement in tools for dealing with abuse. This has three major components, none trivial: ensuring that users keep enjoying the service and aren’t turned off by spam or harassment, keeping things appealing to advertisers, and complying with government regulations. I describe this as ongoing because it has human adversaries and they’re often quite dedicated and/or paid to do things like spam or shape public option so the problem shifts but is never solved.

It's funny that Lord Elon whined about abuse from bots then immediately fired the teams that could prevent it.

The new features Twitter needs might be as simple as implementing new standards that keep the status quo. No tech company produces 100% of the software it relies on and eventually they hit changes that go beyond maintenance and hit “rearchitect the platform”.

Just in my own experience I once inherited ~20 .net 3.5 projects that needed to be updated to support tls 1.2 which required going up to 4.5?4.7? Can’t recall beyond it needing a major version update. The company was then hit with the decision of either doing a multi month effort to update all the inconsistencies between those version for the minimum viable product of updates or spend a year ish to get onto .net core and be ahead of the update schedule.

That was one set of decisions and work for a team of 8, solely to maintain status quo, for a relatively tiny company. Tech companies as they have all currently organized themselves, cannot just run with minor maintenance

> What new features does eg. twitter need?

Advertising features. It's overall advertising story lacks a lot of the capabilities of Facebook/Google which is why it's a distant 3rd in total ad-spend.

This is where those employee cuts are going to be most felt because this is directly tied to revenue. And whilst overall advertising is down there was still a huge opportunity for Twitter to grow.

Just running thru some software in my head and there's a ton of stuff I'd still use the MVP version of. If Reddit was developmentally arrested in 2010 I'd still be wasting the same number of hours there everyday. Talk about a company that creates bloat!

I don't know what units to use but if we count the buckets of progress from the first computer to today the industry has become like government tinkering with a tiny number of laws while most buckets of law had already been developed.

Our food? Our culture? Our language? What part did we play in making those? We added the word tweeting and are now trying to figure out what it should mean?

ha-ha

Does anyone that used old reddit even use the new redesign?

Yep, a lot of older version were a lot better than the current ones

You need people to monitor bwhat users are doing. They realize that users are doing X and Y manually to do Z. So you implement feature Z.

If you don't, then a competitor that implements Z might become more appealing to users.

But features are not always user-visible. New features are regularly added to web browsers and phones, and it's often in your interest as a web site or app developer to make use of them.

Twitter needs whatever features the customers want so they can increase their DAU’s to a rate that will drive their profits to pay off the debt. He can’t coast with the current feature set as it has shown that it can’t pay the bills.

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