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Comment by _pmf_ | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand is the discrepancy between the size of their engineering workforce and the lousy quality of their web client on mobile.

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This may be an intentional dark pattern / effort to drive users away from the web client and to the official app. Facebook and reddit do the same thing. More permissions = more juicy data to harvest.

Never assume malice where stupidity will do.

I've been in an enterprise-y work environment. It's amazing the crap that gets churned out by massive teams for simple tasks.

I assume malice. I work corporate for a Fortune 200 and if anything was broken as badly as Twitter's mobile website, it would be caught by someone in 5 minutes with an on-call assigned to fix the problem ASAP.

Ding ding ding. The web page is so comically broken it can only be intentional. No user pages even load for me unless I do an explicit reload; the first time around, the spinner just spins endlessly.

Another fun one is that a single page load can give you a "rate limit exceeded" failure.

It's a dark pattern indeed. Facebook does the same with their mobile web version. If you try to use messenger from a mobile browser, you are redirected to download the app.

If you switch to "Desktop" mode in a mobile browser. The messenger is so freaking buggy and unusable, it deletes text as you type and try to send a message. It's made to frustrate you so you download the messenger app.

And imgur. Their mobile website is almost unusable.

You also have to realize how internal politics plays into things like this. Who wants to work on maintaining their mobile web browser when it's not going to get them the promotion? Thus it falls on the least skilled/interested.

This is why Google has products stagnate for years before it is finally euthanized, allowing a completely new iteration of it to take place.

Not just the client's quality, but the amount of obvious spam that could be automatically deleted by simple string comparisons, should they ever think about hiring competent developers.

I’m sure it’s the engineers deciding to do that and not management and leadership.

Why would they do simple, fast & efficient things like that when they can bring ML and AI to the party? :)

The entire experience is utterly unusable, not just mobile.

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