The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Meet the Women Who Ruined Twitter

Posted on | July 26, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

Twitter rolled out a site redesign this week and it sucks — a giant leap backward, to a clunky and inefficient user interface. Who did this? It was a crew of social-justice quota hires:

IN JANUARY . . . following Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s return from a 10-day silent meditation trip to Myanmar, about which he praised the food and the beauty of the monasteries but neglected to mention the ongoing regional genocide, Twitter made it clear that some things were about to change. . . .
It was time to give the experience of using Twitter a makeover.
A redesign of Twitter’s website was long overdue. The desktop interface hadn’t been refreshed in seven years . . .
“Personalization and customization — that’s something we hope to start bringing out throughout the product,” says Ashlie Ford, the product designer who led Twitter[dot]com’s redesign. . . .
“People use Twitter a lot on desktop to look for information, and it tends to be around their interests,” says Jesar Shah, the web redesign’s product lead. “So we’re trying to make that easier for people, and leverage these new spaces we’ve created on the site and compliment their primary browsing experience.” . . .
“Internally, we call this project ‘Delight,’” says Shah. “One of the things we’re trying to do is make sure this is a delightful experience for users.”

It’s not “delightful.” It’s a nightmare. It’s wrong. You screwed it up.

But they’ll never be held accountable for their failure. That’s the thing about “social justice” as a human-resources policy — if your employer decides it needs to hire more “women of color,” just to satisfy some diversity goal, the people hired under this policy can never be fired, no matter how spectacularly incompetent they are, or no matter how much harm their failures inflict on the company’s profitability.

Six months or a year from now, when the metrics show that “New Twitter” has been a complete disaster, the quota hires responsible for this disaster will not suffer any actual consequences for their failure. Remember when Marissa Mayer became CEO of Yahoo in 2012 and everybody was like, “Yeah, GRRRL POWER!” What happened? In 2013, Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr, which proved to be such a disaster that within three years Yahoo had to admit that the site was “basically worthless,” and in 2017 Yahoo was sold to Verizon, with Mayer getting a buyout of more than $20 million. No consequences.



 

Category: Computers, Economics

Comments

One Response to “Meet the Women Who Ruined Twitter”

  1. News of the Week (July 29th, 2019) | The Political Hat
    July 29th, 2019 @ 8:04 pm

    […] Meet the Women Who Ruined Twitter Twitter rolled out a site redesign this week and it sucks – a giant leap backward, to a clunky and inefficient user interface. Who did this? It was a crew of social-justice quota hires. […]