Comment by jmilloy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmilloy | Hacker News Reader

I think Greg is too close to the events: I still mostly don't know what happened when Obama used Mixlr. Can anyone help out? Some specific questions:

>Unfortunately the call was marketed and promoted as a “conference call” ... which does happen to be what Mixlr is intended for

Okay, so what is Mixlr for? I poked around and found out briefly, but I'm still curious what Mixlr allows that they didn't use and could have. What did you mean by "nor to the extent of what Mixlr allows"?

>This led to some pretty mis-set expectations and disappointed users which wasn’t a great tone to recover from.

How do you know users were disappointed? Do you have any data, or at least anecdotes, that you could show? Do users rate their experience, for example? How did you recover? And how did you decide that you recovered already?

>Even 10 trolls are a lot louder than 30,000 supporters

What actually happened? What features enabled a few people to effect the experience of the other listeners?

>Note to self... disable comments

I gather that disabling comments is not a feature available to the broadcaster? Maybe it should be; are you considering adding it? What other changes will you be making as a result of this experience? How will you "do better next time"?

>the press are now all over the OFA team

The write up makes it sound like the whole event went smoothly, yet you're also saying that there are negative reports in the press. I read the DailyMail article, and it sounds possible that they are exaggerating by citing the minority of users who couldn't connect. What is your takeaway here? Do you have to be perfect in such high profile situations? Or are a few errors expected? Are you getting flak or losing credibility because of the press, or is it all falling on the OFA team?

> the call was flawless for the vast majority of those listeners for more than 99% of the call

Are more details available? Maybe it's just me, but this sounds wishy-washy (99% always sounds to me like "a lot, we swear!")

> we think we can do even better next time

Great! Is there going to be a next time? And, more generally, have you noticed any effect on the call on your user base?

The article linked in the Mixlr blog post (http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/thecaucus/2013/11/18/another...) seems to tell a different story. From the NYT's perspective, it seems that a significant number of people had problems even hearing the audio stream. The way the NYT article is written implies that many of the listeners, rather than the 0.1% claimed by Mixlr, experienced problems. And it wasn't due to trolls, but rather the basic problem of people not even being able to hear the audio.

I don't see what the incentive for NYT to overstate or mischaracterize things, unless just to cast Obama further into a negative light, so I'm tempted to believe what the press says over what a self-motivated startup CEO would write. The NYT article makes no references to trolls, but rather what seems to be valid claims from would-be listeners that they can't access the audio stream.

If the audio problems were truly experienced by the insignificant minority, and a small number of trolls caused the majority of problems, then why was the article written in the NYT as if the glitches were the primary story, rather than the content of the broadcast (which is not even covered in the NYT article). The truth is somewhere between the NYT article and Mixlr blog post, but most likely weighted more to NYT's side.

I think Mixlr should thank their lucky stars that the blame was placed on OFA and not on them. In fact, I would be thankful the Mixlr name didn't even appear in the article. Had they not written the blog post, no one would have associated the event with their service. Having the president use their service serves as a good reference, but this one teleconference would not be what I would consider to be a positive testimonial.

Well, I wouldn't discount the bias in the New York Times; they have every incentive to maintain ongoing controversy. Also, notice that it's a NYT blog, which I take less seriously than a news article.

I don't think this can be understated. The media have a voracious appetite for controversy, because 24-hour news cycle.

I agree with the parent poster that the truth probably lies somewhere in between, but like you, I don't think we can give NYT much extra credit here.

I'm also surprised to see that more technologists aren't empathetic to the "tens of thousands of end users" matter. In a group of people over 100,000, we can begin to expect a fairly sizable number of users who have configuration issues that would cause their own host of problems. I'm not indemnifying Mixlr, but it's worth keeping in mind when finding the middle ground about what really happened.

> The media have a voracious appetite for controversy, because 2-hour news cycle.

I think you mean "...because advertising".

> I don't see what the incentive for NYT to overstate or mischaracterize things, unless just to cast Obama further into a negative light

Perhaps the NYT blogger's editorial goal is to counteract the blame aimed at OFA / Obama by pointing it at Mixlr instead.

The NYT blog doesn't once mention Mixlr and instead refers constantly to this being something offered by OFA... so the reverse of what you state here.

The article linked tells the exact same story, as far as I can tell. "Many" people could not connect, and were vocal about it. There were no numbers in the article, and 7 people quoted as having issues.

Lets assume that there were 100x that many failures, that would be 700 who failed, and 139,300 who could hear, which matches Mixlr's description fairly accurately. They had a large event that went well overall, but the problems that did occur caused a bit of a stir.

Frankly, I have never heard of these guys before, but they earned my respect via their post because they did accept their own accountability for the issues. They are not passing the buck, they acknowledged that there were problems, and they intend to do better next time. That is absolutely the correct attitude.

I still mostly don't know what happened when Obama used Mixlr.

Yup. Huge opportunity missed - they should have hired a real writer to tell the story, instead of "this happened, then this happened, then ..."

No, that seems to be the ideal form for expressing information.

A "real writer" would have said the same thing but taken 5000 words to say it. It would be more fun to read, sure, but would take much longer to get the gist, and half of it would probably be made up to sound good.

Except, a real writer would have included the gist. Which was sadly missing here.

Can you give me an example of a good, long piece in a news publication, written to be exciting, which also includes the gist so you don't have to click through say 10 pages?

It allows for multiple screens to be broadcasted and the screens to be sent to everybody. Everybody can also chime in. Apparently, it was a one way feed from the President to everyone else. Nobody could chime in. How is that a conference call.

I got the impression from the blog post that the President's team disabled that feature for fairly obvious reasons (i.e. can't really let 10K+ people chime in). Here:

"Unfortunately the call was marketed and promoted as a “conference call” and questions were invited in advance [...] which does happen to be what Mixlr is intended for [...] However, in the end they didn’t really use it that way nor to the extent of what Mixlr allows and it was just a one-way broadcast." (from the eighth paragraph in)

There are plenty of scenarios where the term "conference call" is used to refer to one-to-many communications. For example, quarterly shareholder conference calls are usually one-to-many calls. You can dial in, but you can't speak.

Ask fewer questions. The number you have asked is bordering on hostile.

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