systemicdanna

This strategy did not start with Twitter and won’t end with this acquisition. Tech startups will keep betting on capturing the market first and getting to profit later. Not sure this specific fact makes Jack an idealist.

This situation for Twitter is closer to winning a lottery than to being a wild success. The fact that they locked in the offer at that price point and then the market crashed is pure luck (with a ton of work from smart lawyers), but it’s not the result of some brilliant long term strategy.

An important question to ask yourself before you launch a product: when you look at the final result, do you personally think that it delivers on your value prop? If you don't think so, then users, who are often more critical, definitely won't either.

"you don't have to be a fashion designer or graphic artist to create amazing clothes that express your personality. Whether you want to print a simple design or something more complex, 1SEWN makes it easy and affordable to get the perfect item, every time"

Do you think a generic white T-shirt with a small print of a low artistic quality is really expressing anyone's personality? Or that it looks like a "perfect item"?

Many complained about voice-only input. I want to highlight a few other aspects that could be improved:

1. Navigation doesn’t work. Sometimes swiping right goes to the next page, sometimes doesn’t. Then you are stuck on the 3rd page and can’t go back.

2. What are points? I have 5 points, got to the payment step - the T-shirt is $25. How am I supposed to use points?

3. The T-shirt that is displayed as a 3D background is completely different from the low quality generic fit design at the end. This discrepancy is off-putting.

4. The tiny final print is unintelligible on my phone. Some squiggles and circles that I can’t make sense of at this resolution/zoom level.

I think the idea of custom fashion is interesting, but this implementation doesn’t feel empowering at all. Feels limiting and gimmicky. More importantly, the result - a generic T-shirt with a very small print is not fashionable or even attractive.

Not giving microphone access unless it’s something _I_ need, not the website.

Would be great if you could add text input as an alternative to voice input.

My friends in different size tech companies.

Looking forward to a new insidious workaround Google and Apple will use to limit the impact of this legislation.

Yes. Underperformance is a decent indicator. Number of PRs is not a great one, but it can be somewhat correlated with eng velocity/productivity. Twitter will probably end up using a combination of metrics like that.

They will hopefully also talk to EMs, but at this scale might choose not to. It's going to be an ugly process but I doubt it's going to be a random one. They clearly understand that it's in their interest to retain the most skilled and performant employees.

Also, don't want to sound too cynical, but I would guess that it's actually not that hard to evaluate eng performance with all the data companies are collecting during WFH. I am sure Twitter requires using a VPN, so digging into that data would yield quite a revealing and precise performance metric. The only reason this approach is not widespread is ethical, not technological.

A very large number of people do slack off at these companies. Some engineers code only a few hours a week. They do attend meetings and such, but the actual task delivery timeline is very relaxed.

One way is to look at a few most recent perf reviews. Another way - look at some internal productivity metric that many companies introduced during Covid/WFH.

Many big tech companies, especially in the social space, are extremely bloated. They could literally have 10x more employees and everyone would still find something meaningless to work on. On the other hand they could have had far fewer employees and the company would have delivered better results and built a better product. A lean, focused engineering culture will do wonders to a company like Twitter.

According to this definition everything that requires a passport is racist. We need to agree on some very basic level of how we participate in a society, not to give up because a few people can't prove their citizenship. Instead of focusing on criticizing the new document type that is presumably much harder to forge, let's focus on how people can prove their citizenship.

> This sort of discrimination was wholly race based

You said it right. “Was”, not “is”. In 2022 we need to focus on what’s affecting our society the most, which is income and wealth, not race. Of course racism exits today, but it’s playing a far smaller structural role than the amount of money a person and their family has.

Both links contain great examples of late 1960s Polish animation. Poland was never a part of USSR.

Moreover, just like Czechoslovakia, Poland did not develop its animation style in a vacuum. They had strong artistic connections with many other European countries, especially France.

> They are unique and completely different from what the west was used to (Disney)

Not sure if you are an American... but Europe has a very old and very rich animation tradition. Growing up in Europe I was only vaguely familiar with Disney. The vast majority of animation I watched as a child was European.

You just listed some of the reasons for having a successful messaging app. Why wouldn't any of those reasons be attractive to Google? They could have _finally_ owned a social network. Or a "backbone for a business SaaS ecosystem" tightly integrated into their Cloud services.

I never understood this argument.

> Apparently Gchat was not growing while competitors with emojis and other features were.

So... add emojis and other features to Gchat, not create a new messaging app.

Seems like every time there was a hot new messaging app with a new paradigm/ feature-set, Google's reaction was to build another competitor and sunset its previous efforts, disappointing everyone internally and externally.

That's exactly why I am not going to donate this year, and I donated annually for almost a decade now. I love Wikipedia, will support it if it gets in trouble. But I am not rich enough to donate to some random causes, especially if I find them wasteful and even ethically questionable.