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It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

simonwillison.net

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Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#171

Post by exodust »

thinkingemote wrote: post #135
exodust wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would a team of "accessibility engineers" occupy themselves with every day anyway? Did they build features that will fail unless someone is there to handhold? " Day 2: still accessible? check. Day 3: still accessible? check. ".... Accessibility is important, but once you build a wheelchair ramp into a building, the ramp builders have nothing more to do. Likewise, Twitter remains fairly static, with only minor ch…

It most likely needs a smaller team than they used to have, but some dedicated employees are necessary. Accessibility should be part of every design team. Any new features being developed need accessibility input. This includes all the different mobile apps and integrations with native accessible platforms and accessibility tools. It also needs full internationalisation and language support too, which increases compl…

> "Accessibility should be part of every design team"

Yes but that doesn't mean dedicated people. Accessibility knowledge is already well understood by designers and developers, particularly at the big end of town.

The previous team would have presumably written plenty of documents and guidelines and generally fostered a culture of thinking about accessibility. No reason why that will disappear.

Patterns and best practice methodologies are common in tech, precisely for efficiency reasons. They belong in standards, and shared knowledge - which is better for the industry as a whole. If every small team needed dedicated accessibility staff, the system is BROKEN.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#172

Post by oefrha »

schipplock wrote: post #87

I expect that the feature I’ll miss most from Twitter will be the algorithmic timeline! I must be old. I remember a time when people wanted a chronological timeline (on by default). Twitter still offers a chronological timeline, but now that people are migrating to Mastodon, I've come across the wish to have an algorithmic timeline again quite often :). I just find this interesting (I can relate, I find the algorithm…

You just discovered that happy people aren’t complaining on social media. 99% of people can be perfectly happy with something that’s constantly dumped upon.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#173

Post by klabb3 »

mechanical_bear wrote: post #134
vorticalbox wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there could be a number of reasons other than "Elon doesn't care about xyz" other members of the dev team can/are already doing this Maybe he plans to make it part of everyone's job Maybe he has his own team to replace it We have zero knowledge of what's going to happen so jumping ship without knowing the full picture seems haphazard to me.

Jumping ship because of X at this point is just ideological flexing, we have zero indication how this will play out yet.

I wouldn't go that far. I agree that there's a lot of that visible right now, but Elon demanded round-the-clock hours from employees as his first "executive order", as well as locking down offices. He just doesn't seem that good of a boss, and more like a traditional capitalist in a sense. Is it ideological to want decent working hours?

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#174

Post by Emigre_ »

LEDThereBeLight wrote: post #150
bitwize wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter used to be run by progressives, so there was a modicum of "we are, or should be, doing good things here". Elon Musk bought Twitter specifically to hollow out its progressive cultural core.

Quoted post unavailable.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#175

Post by low_tech_love »

Doddler wrote: post #68
buf wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep talking about laying off half the company like it's a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, there are lots of negative factors to laying off staff and I'm not denying those. But anyone who has worked in a large org, especially a public one, knows that there is excessive bloat. Many people at large orgs do nothing. They go to great lengths to ensure it looks like they're doing something, which I guess is somethin…

I think even if he was correct that Twitter has a lot bloat that needs to be cut, I really struggle to believe you could accurately judge who or what needs to be cut when slashing your 7000 employee business in half within 5-6 days of walking in the door. The chance of making big mistakes and cutting critical staff and teams is very high.

Exactly. It smells very strongly of the same kind of overgeneralized superficial thinking that leads people to believe that less moderation is always good. You can’t possibly expect that everyone in your company will be 150% invested work-any-time business evangelists. Maybe the 50% who are left now have to work double? Are they so incredibly enthusiastic about the job to take the hit silently?

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#176

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

I find this hilarious. We all understand that the core reason some people might want to hurt twitter is because it is no longer going to follow the moderation policy that they liked (namely, silencing people with different political opinions). Yet, people can't name this reason honestly, and invent some other thin weiled excuses like 'layoffs are baaaad and unethical'.

Bold prediction: this influencer with 40k followers will find that ~40 of his followers have followed him to mastodon, and will be back quietly in a few months. Likely, after finding some reconciling excuse about Musk doing something good so he can be forgiven.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#177

Post by nathias »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #67
nathias wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people with megaphones are the point, the problem is when there are mechanisms of moderation to manipulate them and make them into groups, if there is no such mecanisms and moderation is up to the user completely(unfollow/block) things function very differently

Moderation that is solely user-based doesn't work well at scale. It means you expect every user to block every asshole they come across, and each time they have to endure some asshole first before blocking them.

for me that would be completely reasonable, but it isn't necessary, you can have many decentralized filters like automatically block people that are blocked by a % of people I follow and many similar mechanisms

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#178

Post by robin_reala »

LEDThereBeLight wrote: post #169
NZ_Matt wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue the accessibility team wasn't doing a very good job if Mastodon have done it better without a dedicated team. An application can and should have good accessibility by default without a dedicated team

The UX can be better and the accessibility worse.

Not really: the implication there is that people who need additional accessibility work are not users. The UX of a system is the sum totality of the experience of all users of the system, regardless of their needs.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#180

Post by quixoticelixer- »

stanislavb wrote: post #85

> I can’t see myself putting the same work in to help the world’s (current) richest man pay the billion dollar annual interest on the loans he took out to buy the place on a weird narcissistic whim. This

Who did you think you were working for before?
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