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Comment by hmokiguess | Hacker News Reader

This sort of stuff to me is an example of fear within an organization. Whenever I see engineering resources allocated towards self promotion and branding rather than quality and features for its users it shows how leaders want control over narratives.

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It's equally possible there was one engineer with some free time who thought it would be cool.

Implementing a watermark isn't a thing anyone thinks is a cool feature they want to try out.

what do you mean, it's a very normal cool thing that everyone loves

Sent from my Ryobi Riding Lawnmower

I mean. I read this and immediately thought it was a cool thing I'd like to try out

By the end of your first year in CS you will have hopefully learned enough to place an image on something, that's about as cool as it gets.

It's probably silly to make OP's judgement of any of these implementations in isolation, but you can sense a real fear about the growth (or lack thereof) inside Bluesky. Fiddling with the presented metrics (likes count getting moved ahead of reposts), promoting total user signups while being silent on collapsing DAUs. They are promising a lot at once with AI custom feeds from Attie and subreddit-style communities that smells like feature creep.

Your indicators that we're afraid about growth is that we're shipping features and experimental new products?

They aren't my indicators, but they read as sweat against the observable metrics being in decline. There is a perception that they want to pull on users outside of Bluesky that I don't really think exist, and I guess I share in that feeling when I believe the core still has so much basic parity missing with X et al that would demonstrate confidence in the current users you already have. Still interested to see what they ship as.

This is correct. I was tired of Bluesky screenshots looking bland, no culture of fear needed

I agree with you. It’s a nice touch.

I also have no issue with the API, people here are definitely overreacting to it’s existence.

Adding a watermark, how radical, dude

And such engineer would have enough organizational clout to just ship it without going through anyone?

That's how a modern organization works. You trust your colleagues will do good work, and will ship something useful and there's not really "someone to go through".

I agree this can be defined as cool and very very likely someone did this on their free time/prompted Claude on the side.

It's a Series B company, it needs to make money, and they have to answer to a board and provide information to investors. They have a roadmap, direction, and leadership. Yes, trust and good intentions is an awesome thing and I hope they have that indeed, but I would think reality lies in the middle of both sides.

I've worked at a Series B company and reality is this is too minor for investors to care on its own, and it's also very hard to correlate this change to new revenue, so not something that's likely to have been done with that intention

I guess we had very different experiences. Maybe it’s the B2C industry or these free apps

Bluesky has <100 employees so it could be possible

I agree that having less people to manage means easier to build trust relationships and culture, though I believe some form of management and control must exist.

I'm sure this wasn't even in the top 10 of things that we made sam implement out of fear

It's pretty easy to find the PR considering the entire app is OSS https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/pull/9637

Yes actually Sam often ships random fun things he feels like doing.

You're fun

Marketing, like every other functional part of a business, requires technology and engineers. This has nothing to do with fear, you just don’t respect non-engineering work as critical to running a business.

Someone spending half a day on a feature that places the app's logo in the screenshot so people seeing it can know where it came from is "fear within an organization"? You've got to be kidding lol

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