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Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

Fact is it is hard to make a great product. I don’t think we need complex conspiracy theories to explain bad ones.

Odds are the product team cherry picked conversations for internal demos, their management wanted press and promotions, KPIs were around engagement and not quality, and nobody had perspective and authority to say “this sucks, we can’t release it”.

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It’s not hard to identify, before launching, “this is unacceptably bad”. Like, I think this is actually quite a bit worse than Microsoft Tay, which others mentioned, as an example of “how could you possibly launch this”? Tay was reckless, and you’ve got to assume that they knew there was at least a change it could work out as it did, but in this case the product _as launched_ was clearly unacceptable; it didn’t require input from 4chan to make it so.

I mean, just very basic QA, having someone talk to the damn things for a bit, would’ve shown the problem, in this case.

I’ve always believed Microsoft Tay was a really idealistic, genuine, if bombastically naïve situation.

I wish I agreed. But I have seen many products launched where only true believers who internalized the limitations were involved in testing. Yes, a good org with self-critical people and an independent red team and execs who cared about quality would not have made this blunder. Getting that org stuff right sounds easy but is nigh impossible if it doesn’t align to the company culture.

Critics and naysayers tend to leave teams where they don't believe in the product, and eventually teams are left with only true believers. Their entire purpose is to ship Project X, and if they were to admit Project X is a blunder, then they are admitting that their purpose is a blunder. Few teams at few companies are willing to do that.

Exactly. That’s why formal and independent compliance / security / red team signoffs are so important. A good product team wants those checks and balances.

"and eventually teams are left with only true believers."

Or with nihilists who learned to say yes to everything, to at least get paid.

Isn’t it as simple as management wanting to be first one across the release line, with the wishful thinking of “we’ll fix everything later”?

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