I am a fan of Twitter. It is a much better social network then Facebook and Instagram. But when it comes to development quality, Twitter reminds me of Ebay. The technology just does not seem solid. Every other month, something goes wrong.
I wonder if there is a systematic difference between companies with solid development and companies with wonky development. Is there a different hiring philosophy in place? A different type of tech stack? A different management structure?
Just a week ago, Twitter lost over 20% market cap because they noticed that they were showing people device-personalized ads even though they were opted out of that. After they fixed it, revenues went down.
In other words, a stunning 10 billion dollar of Twitters market cap was based on the illusion that the tech was working as expected. While in reality it was wrecking havoc.
Is it really possible that a feature that makes up a quarter of the companies value is not being tested?
I've thought a lot about this, having worked at some of these companies with both good and bad quality. The best conclusion I can come to is whether or not the executives use the technology on a regular basis.
At eBay, the execs didn't use the platform much. In fact, when I worked there, they had to give us a $10 credit just to get us to use it (and then stopped when the users said it wasn't fair that employees were bidding with someone else's money).
At Facebook/IG, the execs use the platform often. At Netflix the execs use it pretty much every day. At Twitter, you don't see a lot of executive use.
You can even see it at Apple. The quality on MacOs has been falling, quite possibly because all the execs are using iPads and iPhones as their daily drivers, and rarely using laptops.
I think in the end it boils down to visibility to people who can affect change. Either your execs need to use the product often, or the engineers need to be empowered to make changes without exec approval (or both, like at Netflix or Facebook/IG).
I'm honestly shocked around how bad the experience is on the site. Mobile video especially. 30% of the time the video says "my account may not be allowed to see this video", even while logged out. Refreshing the page fixes it. But even when the video is loaded, it takes 2-3 taps on the play button to actually play.
It's not even the edge cases that they have issues with, it's the basics on the site. There are some serious quality control issues happening at Twitter.
Twitter... is a much better social network then Facebook and Instagram.
Off on a tangent: Are to elaborate? I've found Twitter extremely hard to use - people tweet and retweet so frequently, it always looks like a deluge of short, mostly meaningless, fluff. At least with Facebook, the longer bits of fluff are in a single post instead of spread aross and intermingled with other fluff.
But, maybe I'm doing it wrong? I really don't know. These days, I mostly stick to Instagram - it doesn't seem to have the negative impact on my psyche as either FB or Twitter.
> I am a fan of Twitter. It is a much better social network then Facebook and Instagram.
I mean. You have the right to your opinion. But... really?
I understand that the sentiment is “Twitter is mostly what you make it“, but it was so incredibly toxic that I was stunned to the point where I almost became radicalised against the ideology that was pervasive at the time.
Even now I am sensitive to it.
Facebook in comparison never had strangers piling on me telling me I am worthless and invalid based on my race and gender.
Not that any of them are fantastical beacons of acerbic communication which puts such a high emphasis on civility as hacker news does. But to call twitter the best of this breed is, I feel, speaking from a far different experience than my own.
I'm more stunned at Twitter's UX. For example if a tweet of mine has x likes, I click on the link to see who liked it, and am often just greeted with a blank modal. I believe it has something to do with the likes being private, or likes from people who don't follow me? I actually don't know, and feel they could use this blank modal as a chance to tell me.
Their icon buttons on desktop have no tooltip. For some of them you can get a sense of what they do by hovering over them and looking at the url in the corner of the browser. But others that just have click handlers on them give you no clue at all. I could go on and on about how perplexing I find Twitter's UX to be, these are just two examples.
> I am a fan of Twitter. It is a much better social network then Facebook and Instagram
I used to follow a lot of blogs of people on Google Reader, when it was shut down everyone just chanted "What's the big deal? Just use Twitter it does the same thing".
Now to follow the same creators I did before I have to experience everything with a side order of hot takes about American politics (I'm not American).
Twitter is one of the worst things to happen to the internet, I can't have any sort of healthy interaction with the internet and actually keep up with what I'm interested in anymore. It sickens me that every time a platform or service shuts down the answer from Twitter addicts is always "just use Twitter".
> Just a week ago, Twitter lost over 20% market cap because they noticed that they were showing people device-personalized ads even though they were opted out of that. After they fixed it, revenues went down.
I'd like to clarify what actually happened here (throwaway for paranoia).
The actual bug was that the account signups flow was accidentally modified to automatically opt out new signups[1]. When Legal reviewed the ads targeting and discovered the opt out setting wasn't being respected, they made ads start doing so. Two this later they discovered the sign-ups bug.
[1] I know, a bunch of people would rather it was always like that.
I honestly wouldn't read anything in this bug in terms of development quality. Catalyst is buggy and poorly supported. Developing for Apple products is often-time an exercise in workarounds, hacks, and undefined behavior fun. These issues only get worse when you get to be the size of Twitter and the app architectures starts to get more complicated to support a large team. The iOS application patterns are not super evolved or friendly to scale.
I think it all depends on their mindset on developing the platform and the mindset of new hires - are they being incentivized to "shake X industry" or brainstorm features every other day, or do they look at what they have and figure out how to make it even better. Is Twitter made to make it easy for users to do some thing, or is it being made to do what some other company did, but "for X"
I find most SV companies, like game design, falls apart when it is used as a vehicle to test out a philosophy instead of implementing an idea users actually want.
There's also some weird, non-determinism in the beginning where the 'c' after a long chain of failed 'b's overwrites the previous 'a', which he is later unable to replicate. Not to mention preventing arrow-key navigation of the password field is the most annoying UI decision they could make. What an absolute mess.
So I am able to replicate this reliably but at first I misunderstood what was happening.
What happens is this:
1. Type some stuff in
2. Turn on “reveal password”
3. Type one of the “banned” characters
4. Switch “reveal password” back off
5. Type another character
6. The whole existing password is deleted and replaced by the letter you just typed.
So the reason I end up with two Cs in a row at the beginning is because I actually typed in another. After I type in the C that causes the field to reset, I erroneously believed that it had deleted both the B and C, leaving only the A, so I say “C” again out loud and type another C, believing the text entered is now “ac”.
In reality, it had cleared the field, replacing both the A and B with a C. So when I typed in that second C there were then two in a row.
The reason I didn’t understand what was going on was because I was just counting dots and assuming which letters were deleted at first.
Oddly, when this field-clearing behavior happens, it also hides the “reveal password” button until you add a second character to the field. That should be visible with only one character but in this particular situation it hides instead.
Reminds of when I was not able to log into Skype, because when I typed in my username, which was something like firstname...familyname, it kept replacing the three dots with an elipsis automatically, without me noticing.
What could possibly be the reason for this? I mean...there's got to be some kind of validation that's going wrong here but I don't see any validation scheme that would include standard alphabetical characters.
> Root cause is Catalina regression that fails keyboard inputs when a UIKeyCommand is registered for the same key. UIResponder chain regression most likely.
Maybe some over-zealous shortcut handler that's preventing keystroke events from bubbling up? It's interesting that shift-b produces "B" but just b with caps-lock doesn't produce any characters.
It reminds me of the days when I used WinRAR for a lot of things. The password field would only allow entry of ASCII characters but the program will accept any character by copy and paste, leading to a world of pain where certain archives can only be opened on a specific OS with one particular version of WinRAR because the internal parsing seems to depend on both when it comes to exotic characters. Good times and I think everybody have learned to avoid this sort of hiccups by now.
[+] [-] nikrdc|6 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/nolanobrien/status/1189623346033381376?s...
[+] [-] hayksaakian|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TicklishTiger|6 years ago|reply
I wonder if there is a systematic difference between companies with solid development and companies with wonky development. Is there a different hiring philosophy in place? A different type of tech stack? A different management structure?
Just a week ago, Twitter lost over 20% market cap because they noticed that they were showing people device-personalized ads even though they were opted out of that. After they fixed it, revenues went down.
In other words, a stunning 10 billion dollar of Twitters market cap was based on the illusion that the tech was working as expected. While in reality it was wrecking havoc.
Is it really possible that a feature that makes up a quarter of the companies value is not being tested?
[+] [-] jedberg|6 years ago|reply
At eBay, the execs didn't use the platform much. In fact, when I worked there, they had to give us a $10 credit just to get us to use it (and then stopped when the users said it wasn't fair that employees were bidding with someone else's money).
At Facebook/IG, the execs use the platform often. At Netflix the execs use it pretty much every day. At Twitter, you don't see a lot of executive use.
You can even see it at Apple. The quality on MacOs has been falling, quite possibly because all the execs are using iPads and iPhones as their daily drivers, and rarely using laptops.
I think in the end it boils down to visibility to people who can affect change. Either your execs need to use the product often, or the engineers need to be empowered to make changes without exec approval (or both, like at Netflix or Facebook/IG).
[+] [-] jjcm|6 years ago|reply
It's not even the edge cases that they have issues with, it's the basics on the site. There are some serious quality control issues happening at Twitter.
[+] [-] alistairSH|6 years ago|reply
Off on a tangent: Are to elaborate? I've found Twitter extremely hard to use - people tweet and retweet so frequently, it always looks like a deluge of short, mostly meaningless, fluff. At least with Facebook, the longer bits of fluff are in a single post instead of spread aross and intermingled with other fluff.
But, maybe I'm doing it wrong? I really don't know. These days, I mostly stick to Instagram - it doesn't seem to have the negative impact on my psyche as either FB or Twitter.
[+] [-] dijit|6 years ago|reply
I mean. You have the right to your opinion. But... really?
I understand that the sentiment is “Twitter is mostly what you make it“, but it was so incredibly toxic that I was stunned to the point where I almost became radicalised against the ideology that was pervasive at the time.
Even now I am sensitive to it.
Facebook in comparison never had strangers piling on me telling me I am worthless and invalid based on my race and gender.
Not that any of them are fantastical beacons of acerbic communication which puts such a high emphasis on civility as hacker news does. But to call twitter the best of this breed is, I feel, speaking from a far different experience than my own.
[+] [-] city41|6 years ago|reply
Their icon buttons on desktop have no tooltip. For some of them you can get a sense of what they do by hovering over them and looking at the url in the corner of the browser. But others that just have click handlers on them give you no clue at all. I could go on and on about how perplexing I find Twitter's UX to be, these are just two examples.
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|6 years ago|reply
I used to follow a lot of blogs of people on Google Reader, when it was shut down everyone just chanted "What's the big deal? Just use Twitter it does the same thing".
Now to follow the same creators I did before I have to experience everything with a side order of hot takes about American politics (I'm not American).
Twitter is one of the worst things to happen to the internet, I can't have any sort of healthy interaction with the internet and actually keep up with what I'm interested in anymore. It sickens me that every time a platform or service shuts down the answer from Twitter addicts is always "just use Twitter".
[+] [-] twitter_anon|6 years ago|reply
I'd like to clarify what actually happened here (throwaway for paranoia).
The actual bug was that the account signups flow was accidentally modified to automatically opt out new signups[1]. When Legal reviewed the ads targeting and discovered the opt out setting wasn't being respected, they made ads start doing so. Two this later they discovered the sign-ups bug.
[1] I know, a bunch of people would rather it was always like that.
[+] [-] mackey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dastbe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michannne|6 years ago|reply
I find most SV companies, like game design, falls apart when it is used as a vehicle to test out a philosophy instead of implementing an idea users actually want.
[+] [-] ericcholis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tempsy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eindiran|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MikeBeas|6 years ago|reply
What happens is this:
1. Type some stuff in
2. Turn on “reveal password”
3. Type one of the “banned” characters
4. Switch “reveal password” back off
5. Type another character
6. The whole existing password is deleted and replaced by the letter you just typed.
So the reason I end up with two Cs in a row at the beginning is because I actually typed in another. After I type in the C that causes the field to reset, I erroneously believed that it had deleted both the B and C, leaving only the A, so I say “C” again out loud and type another C, believing the text entered is now “ac”.
In reality, it had cleared the field, replacing both the A and B with a C. So when I typed in that second C there were then two in a row.
The reason I didn’t understand what was going on was because I was just counting dots and assuming which letters were deleted at first.
Oddly, when this field-clearing behavior happens, it also hides the “reveal password” button until you add a second character to the field. That should be visible with only one character but in this particular situation it hides instead.
[+] [-] nikanj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rolae|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkonofalski|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aqua_Geek|6 years ago|reply
> Root cause is Catalina regression that fails keyboard inputs when a UIKeyCommand is registered for the same key. UIResponder chain regression most likely.
[+] [-] ChristianBundy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pornel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|6 years ago|reply
Note: it only happens when the password field is set as 'hidden', clicking reveal makes it work fine.
[+] [-] ErneX|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MikeBeas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] platypii|6 years ago|reply
"I included emoji in my password and now I can't log in to my Account"
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/202143/i-included-...
[+] [-] Laforet|6 years ago|reply
It reminds me of the days when I used WinRAR for a lot of things. The password field would only allow entry of ASCII characters but the program will accept any character by copy and paste, leading to a world of pain where certain archives can only be opened on a specific OS with one particular version of WinRAR because the internal parsing seems to depend on both when it comes to exotic characters. Good times and I think everybody have learned to avoid this sort of hiccups by now.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] allard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baud147258|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] janpot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] not_a_cop75|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]