How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

That seems like a remarkably bad strategy from a CEO. If your company is being stubborn, deal with it in-house, not in public.

I'm not sure what original goal Twitter had in mind. At the moment they appear to have 100+ millions of users and are valued in the billions of dollars. Even with the shortcomings and flaws people seem to use. Presumably people put up with the shortcomings and use it anyway. I found it funny that people went on Twitter to declare that they were deleting Facebook. I guess my main point is that whether intentionally or not Twitter has stumbled upon a formula that generally works. By that I mean people keep coming back to have their rant, to put someone else down, to share their joys, frustrations, sell their productions, etc

Actually I am pretty shocked at the amount of “incompetence” in the business world especially at high levels.

It seems people shmooze and make big deals happen. But they have no idea how their own product works, often.

There are notable exceptions: Elon Musk. Warren Buffett. Jobs and Gates and Bezos. That’s why their companies rock.

But like, Apple after Jobs, not so much. I am not convinced the higher-ups really are in touch with what’s the main user facing issue. Like how Apple repeatedly allowed the entire Mac app store certificates to just expire leaving all apps broken [1], or how they released an iOS where no one could click a link in safari!! [2]

But that’s actually still a very high level of competence of tons of people in the company. Just the executives and lack of processes to catch this surprise me.

Google doesn’t have such problems. It only has problems of product roadmap, shuttering Google Reader and Google Plus after making the entire userbase embrace it, or replacing Talk with three different products like Hangouts, Allo, Meet, etc.

But most of all I just realized how much successful B-level people are just... well, they make so many spelling mistakes in email, often paint by numbers and don’t really think out of the box on the most basic things the way someone would if they were constantly learning about their space and their problem. Like oh A and B don’t go together? I guess it won’t work out. Oh, just one tiny thing had to be tweaked in B and suddenly we have a huge revenue stream coming? Huh, would you look at that. And here I was about to focus on something else.

Has anyone else noticed this? I am not sure if it was always the case or think it’s a general sense of ADD that came over the business world. Hardly anyone reads books. Emails have to be 5-7 lines long. Spelling and grammar mistakes make you seem important. People - especially busy businesspeople - dont have time to read 2 lines of instructions when onboarding - they zip past them and then scratch their head what to do on next screen. I have seen it.

Is this the prequel to Idiocracy?

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/all-mac-store-apps-stopped... and teo years later it happens again https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/02/20/apple-issued-deve...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2016/03/28/ios-9-3-opening-links-sa...

(Checks Twitter) (Finds bots arguing “a man is a man and a woman is a woman”) (Deletes Twitter)

Twitter has this public utility value: a place where you can get updates on air quality during a wildfire, when the official agency websites are buckling under the traffic.

Some report having good experiences by following a very selective group of people with shared interests.

But it’s interesting that both Facebook and Twitter evolved into these negative, emotional, politically charged, environments when they moved from a chronological list of updates from your curated set of friends and followers, to an algorithmic one that shuffles in “popular” content.

It’s hard to have a nuanced conversation in a noisy stadium. Much easier to chant along with the crowd.