Twitter C/D

Man, poor Pepys. It all starts with a kidney stone and ends with the death of twitter.

Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about Twitter > X and figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company.

I tweeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup to Twitter in… pic.twitter.com/bw7CHhk0Xg

— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) July 26, 2023

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/034/711/Screen_Shot_2020-07-24_at_11.33.38_AM.jpg

Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out.

lol go off person who got fired

In person Elon is oddly charming and he’s genuinely funny.

surprisingly down to earth!

I'd be interested in caek's take on her description of pre-Elon corporate culture. Doesn't sound too surprising really, for a place that grew as fast as it did.

xp
amazingly lifelike!

I was shocked by how old and bespoke the infrastructure was

Management had become bloated to accommodate career growth

Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out.

all true. all SOP at big tech. not unique to twitter, even in degree.

she's using "bespoke" like it's a dirty word, which reflects a naive startup understanding of how to build a service at that scale (you can't rent it from AWS).

It often felt like things were held together with duct tape and glue, and that many people had just accepted that a small product change could take months or quarters to build.

first part not true. second part true.

and the company culture felt too soft and entitled for my own taste

i don't know what she means by "soft" (i can guess) but "entitled" was true at every big tech company at the time she and i were at twitter. it was a seller's market for tech workers. but it was probably truer at twitter than elsewhere. certainly more than anywhere else i've worked.

this simply sounds like a description of any large company, tech or no.

i guess people expect these problems to be rarer at tech companies for whatever reason ("disruption", "agile", relatively young, etc.). they're not.

resisting them is part of what you're being paid for by a big slow company like twitter when it tries to absorb a startup like hers. being genuinely surprised by them (which she may or may not be) seems naive though.

Unless you count my experience working at a Burger King franchise during and after high school (LOL), I have never worked in or for a large corporation. Based on what I hear from my friends who do, what she says about turf wars sounds right. Some of these folks spend much or most of their time defending their perceived territory (and attending unproductive meetings).

I had an hour-long Zoom call yesterday with a woman who is not in my department, offering me lessons in how to do a thing I will never need to know how to do, and when I asked my direct supervisor why I had to take that call she said "She's just like this, so we humor her."

like, 'gets harder to fire people', yeah, because larger companies get more worried about bias and discrimination claims when this happens, usually after having suffered through lawsuits when they were less careful about things. this is called being a mature company.

and when I asked my direct supervisor why I had to take that call she said "She's just like this, so we humor her."

That is infuriating, and a waste of everyones time. And feeds dickheads like that with false confidence!

And feeds dickheads . . . with false confidence!

This is, like, what most businesses spend half their time doing.

Which reminds me of this which I learned about yesterday, and is perfect (and perfectly horrifying)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair?wprov=sfla1

large entities are afraid of change because even if the status quo is melting, abrupt changes could clear the status quo entirely, including the bits that actually make your product a product?

scope is the hardest part to tackle, because focused teams with clear accountability and goals can still get stuff done and all of the people crawford’s being dismissive of have some function, and any small team’s leadership is there to identify project needs and coordinate with those other groups to prioritize and deliver the functionality your focused project needs.

kind of blows up if the management of other groups doesn’t prioritize your work, or if they’re hesitant to change things because of that institutional inertia

caek’s otm with the “bespoke” interpretation. my impression is that nearly any large org can make everything cleaner by swapping out and modernizing parts of their software stack, especially as things they developed in-house end up having off the shelf alternatives. many of those alternatives exist because people at twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc. developed things in-house (bespoke!) that weren’t bound to specific company needs, were then open sourced or spun off, and everyone can build off of what’s now institutional knowledge. you also gain the ability to onboard new people and technologies faster when there’s a more common set of tools.
maybe twitter’s stack needs a little updating but shitting on the very process that created the tools you’ll move to is asinine and I’d assume her prior company relied on common components

they shouldve used wordpress

no one ever lost their job for picking wordpress

what if you renamed it to xpress

AdBlock browser worked on Twitter ads for like a day or two, now seeing ads again :(

more grist for this stupid mill: logging into tweetdeck and its called "XPro" now, my god what in the name of winamp skins and netscape navigator is this

I'm taking down my business account. I never posted much on it anyway, mostly used it to follow people. Sometimes nice when somebody tags us or something, but it's not a big part of our self-promotion or anything. But now I just don't even want to be affiliated. I've created a burner account to keep following politicos and so forth but I don't even want to be there in any official capacity. It's too dumb and gross.

So is threads a bust? I've kind of been enjoying it since deleting Twitter a week ago; between it and Mastadon I felt like I was achieving some kind of overlap that was almost twitter-like. but I just saw threads lost 50% of it's users in one month, which I'm going to partially attribute to it's lack of a web UI. Siloing it to a phone app only was a bizarre choice. People like to waste time on these things while they're working, and not have to open up their phone to do it.

why's everyone quitting all of a sudden?

lots of die-hard tweeters seem to be finally logging off for good this week and last, was the X thing the last straw? I mean I hate it too, but there's been a lot worse.

i logged off right before the X change. feels good tbh

thing with threads is they got a ton of people to try it, the most ever iirc, using their existing instagram account so losing 50% of them doesnt actually seem that bad

everyone quit threads when they found out i dont use it

the problem with all of these new apps is that actually we all hate social media, but are just in the habit of using it.

Everyone posting the dril tweet about never logging off and then logging off after an X is posted? Wtf?!

I think the difference/last straw with X is how coercive it feels. You signed up for Twitter however many years ago and now against your will you are on something stupidly called "X" constantly hectored by a racist blowhard.

and then the more people who log off the less reason there is to not do the same yourself

Well that and the fact the site is buggy as hell now and can be down for days at a time.

the worst thing that musks done to twitter imho by far is boost blue checks to the top of replies, its made looking at replies of any popular tweet completely useless and a terrible experience in fact

Twitter Blue subscribers can now hide their blue checks. If you enable this then nobody can tell "this mf paid for Twitter" anymore 🥲 https://t.co/M7BQNBTumN

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) August 2, 2023

If you are a terf/racist/climate denier/landlord I am going to assume you paid.

Siloing it to a phone app only was a bizarre choice. People like to waste time on these things while they're working, and not have to open up their phone to do it.

This doesn't seem that bizarre to me. A study from 2016 found that about 80% of all time spent on social media in the U.S. is on mobile rather than desktop. I wouldn't be surprised if a) that's now higher because of TikTok, b) the global rate is also higher given the dominance of mobile in developing countries. Not everyone has a desk job, obv.

insta was phone only for ages

is threads still doing the 'algorithmic feed only' thing? (or was that mis-reported?)

(actually, i think *posting* on insta was phone-only for ages)

insta was even iphone only at first

makes sense for a photo based app as yr phone is yr camera tho

Yeah aren’t the main users of web/desktop Instagram professional photographers you’d imagine? Prestige accounts probably pushed for it but it’s not their bread and butter.

I don't think the lack of Threads use is due to the lack of web embedding/UI, just the completely confusing and underwhelming experience

Had a great opportunity to just throw it out there and let people auto-follow their instagram follows, then kind of organically let it cook for a while. Instead, I signed up immediately like many others, and the first three things I saw were two influencers I've never heard of posting boring shit and Wendy's conversing with Kum & Go

brands and influencers oh hell yeah

Yeah, Threads is a virtual mall

AlthoughThreads also gave us “stuffed crustussy” so it wasn’t a total loss

https://www.readtpa.com/p/are-the-brands-ok

Threads has a chronological following timeline now but I haven’t logged in since it launched. Ironically I use the Instagram account I had to create to join threads more than I use threads itself.

the evolution of the blue check into something people actively want to hide is one of the most incredible things

Gotta say I really kinda enjoy Twitter becoming virtually unreadable for me now

Funny thing is "L-I-R-R" is only one less syllable than "Long Island Railroad," and "L-I-double-R" is the same number of syllables. Might as well say the name.