I have a post in mind about pundits and metrics and amplifying voices and accountability, but — honestly — watching returns for most of the evening and into the early morning (even on the West Coast) was exhausting. So instead, let’s take a trip around the Twitter product changes I saw today, shall we?
After getting to work, I started seeing reports that the new verification indicators had launched. And then, all of a sudden, they were gone. It seems like the difference between a Verified account and an Official account was confusing. Huh, whodathunkit?
As you may imagine, this has caused a bit of chaos on the platform; impersonation was apparently rampant.
There’s much more to say about how this could’ve been done. There is definitely no shortage of ideas. I’m not going to share mine, both out of respect for the people having to work on this under current conditions and also to respect the value of my own ideas, but I do want to point out the way these ideas are coming about. It reminds me a lot of the time Homer Simpson got to design his dream car.
When I was on the @design team, I had a habit of adding a note to our white boards which read, “I am not the target audience.” It wasn’t a staggering revelation, just a gentle reminder to center our solutions on our customers’ problems instead of our own. What I fear is happening inside Twitter HQ is that the current ownership is trying to solve the perceived problems, like people changing their display names to the owner’s or the fact that he needs to pay billions in interest in just a few months, instead of the real ones. I guess that’s what happens when you unceremoniously jettison your entire Research team. And surround yourself with people too sycophantic to question you.
One day, I hope to make these posts about something else. Anything else. But, for now, I’m still desperate for something beneficial to happen to the service I miss so much. But it just keeps getting worse and worse. And I’m having a hard time thinking about anything other than Twitter’s role in the world and how this could get so much more disastrous before it gets better.
Power Trip
09 November 2022
I have a post in mind about pundits and metrics and amplifying voices and accountability, but — honestly — watching returns for most of the evening and into the early morning (even on the West Coast) was exhausting. So instead, let’s take a trip around the Twitter product changes I saw today, shall we?
After getting to work, I started seeing reports that the new verification indicators had launched. And then, all of a sudden, they were gone. It seems like the difference between a Verified account and an Official account was confusing. Huh, whodathunkit?
As far as I can tell, the design was questionable. But so was the implementation. And also the educational messaging. As well as the process to get the Official label. Oh, and they closed the application process for what used to be used for identity verification.
Quite a legacy.
As you may imagine, this has caused a bit of chaos on the platform; impersonation was apparently rampant.
There’s much more to say about how this could’ve been done. There is definitely no shortage of ideas. I’m not going to share mine, both out of respect for the people having to work on this under current conditions and also to respect the value of my own ideas, but I do want to point out the way these ideas are coming about. It reminds me a lot of the time Homer Simpson got to design his dream car.
When I was on the @design team, I had a habit of adding a note to our white boards which read, “I am not the target audience.” It wasn’t a staggering revelation, just a gentle reminder to center our solutions on our customers’ problems instead of our own. What I fear is happening inside Twitter HQ is that the current ownership is trying to solve the perceived problems, like people changing their display names to the owner’s or the fact that he needs to pay billions in interest in just a few months, instead of the real ones. I guess that’s what happens when you unceremoniously jettison your entire Research team. And surround yourself with people too sycophantic to question you.
One day, I hope to make these posts about something else. Anything else. But, for now, I’m still desperate for something beneficial to happen to the service I miss so much. But it just keeps getting worse and worse. And I’m having a hard time thinking about anything other than Twitter’s role in the world and how this could get so much more disastrous before it gets better.
See you tomorrow?