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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Features are a looooooong second place to userbase. Hashtags mean nothing compared to having millions of users to interact with.

Launching in a hurry to capitalize on the mistakes of your competitors is an amazing plan. Better to ship without the feature than to ship the wrong feature and be stuck with the tech debt. Better to launch and acquire users when possible, and slowly add the necessary parts.

A far more important piece than hashtags is the ability to search posts. But even that is far behind the ability to have good image sharing on posts, and Threads already does that better than Twitter, as the carousel allows far better viewing.

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Hahah I love the bias here.

Musk ships & changes things on the fly, Twitter is going to hell.

Zuck releases threads, amazing he dears to launch an MVP that fast.

The difference is simply in stage. Threads is 0 to 1. Twitter is legacy. If Twitter shipped a massive extension it would rightly be mocked as it, until recently, had a staff of folks iterating and improving on it. Threads is probably 15-20 people proving a concept.

The dissonance you’re pointing out is Twitter is being mocked for turning itself from incumbent to upstart when it certainly didn’t need to. It’s the stick in the spokes meme in corporate form.

Threads on the other hand is a proper upstart from a company that very much isn’t - and notably one that hasn’t shown itself particularly adept at building 0 to 1 products.

Meta is doing an uncharacteristically good job launching Threads and Twitter is doing an uncharacteristically bad job of maintaining and iterating on Twitter.

[edit] I can't help but feel like the Twitter changes are just like the Digg re-design that led to its relegation to archive.org, and if this had never happened, I seriously doubt anyone would have challenged Twitter, let alone Zucc.

>Musk ships & changes things on the fly

I don't think it's biased to be a lot less impressed by "things" like dragging your engineers in over the weekend over the threat of termination if they can't make your own tweets more popular.

>His deputies told the rest of the engineering team this weekend that if the engagement issue wasn’t “fixed,” they would all lose their jobs as well.

>Late Sunday night, Musk addressed his team in-person. Roughly 80 people were pulled in to work on the project, which had quickly become priority number one at the company. Employees worked through the night investigating various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should and testing out possible solutions.

That's not impressive, it's reprehensibly poor management of people both as human beings and as company resources. There's no way I can figure how to view this story as a laudable effort to ship fast and iterate the platform quickly.

[0]https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...

Isn't it far more biased to assume that anything Musk ships is good?

Features and shipping should be evaluated empirically by results, not by deciding a priori that the decision maker is good or bad.

So I think you might be projecting a bit with your bias. And for that matter, I didn't even mention Musk's changes at all, yet you seem to be grouping me in with people that have! (But for the record, I preferred the feature set of Twitter before Musk started changing things. Still, the feature changes are still a loooot less important than the user base. And by prioritizing replies by paying versus non-paying customers, the user base that I experience on Twitter has gone down in quality by a ton, meaning that it is far less useful. That and shutting down the site for a few days and letting me experience zero of the user base-or rather a feed refresh two reply threads before 600 tweets were hit-was completely boneheaded. Stupid. B-player move.

The person you are replying to did not say both of those things.

What has Musk shipped exactly that benefits non-blue users?

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