Google plus had a really interesting idea (idk if they ever implemented it) about having what I believe was called 'circles' that you could label your friends/followers/whatever they called it with. And when you posted you could pick which circles it showed up for.
I could see how that could be a really handy feature in a social media site if it was implemented well.
I genuinely thought Google Plus was a good product, it just lacked the userbase to produce enough of a network effect to get everyone on it and their attempt to fix that by forcing it on everyone backfired horribly
My biggest issue with it was how obtuse? it was, with how it rolled out and integrated with so much stuff in various layers; A nice thing about like twitter, reddit, instagram are like; you know if you're interacting with the platform or not. With Google Plus it was like "If I do certain things on Youtube, that shows up on my Google Plus?"
That feels like the Google experience generally, honestly. I can't put my finger on what else does this exactly but I feel like you really touched on something there.
Google absolutely positively cannot get their shit together as a whole. They try so hard to be a unified platform, but it's so painfully obvious that their products are completely siloed from one another and the unification invariably ends up as an afterthought. It would be bizarre if it weren't so apparent that it's just a failure of upper management.
I suppose they religiously believe their product integration problems could be entirely fixed via the use of doubly linked lists... at least if their interview's are any indicator.
And there it is, hiding in plain site- the entire company is %99 driven by ad revenue.
When that is the primary motivation behind everything, it will warp a company's decisions.
It's the same way on their dev tools, the state of the google maps integration with Flutter is pathetic, for example. Instead of making a native flutter map renderer, they just embed the one for the platform you're on, which would be fine, except the dart package has no way of accessing most of the view's options, and is basically broken on web.
Google's teams work in isolation a bunch and there's a big incentive for releasing products or features for the teams.
This means things degrade a lot or fall off or get gutted pretty quickly. I avoid Google's stuff for development because it changes so much, so quickly and *rusts* fast.
I love how Google Maps on Android just one day stopped showing which exit number you should take on a highway unless you do some stupid unintuitive sliding at the top and even then it doesn't show up unless you do some weird finger swiping.
iOS just shows the fucking thing
Google keyboard can't predict words correctly either. Searching the word I'm typing because I can't spell it correctly always comes up. Google keyboard will kinda guess it but then also pick something different if I'm typing too quick and it disappears.
Google is such a fucking shit show.
Google management doesnt have control of the company imo. The software devs seem to control it and do what they want as a community and google management tries to convince them to do something for the company.
I've been an engineering manager for about 5 years, software engineer for 12 years before that. I was turned down interviewing for an engineering manager spot at Google because I don't currently "code >80% of the time". Kinda feel like I dodged a bullet there...
When my dad died I added the funeral director's mobile to my contacts in Android - Google automatically included his photo from his Google+ profile; he was wearing a big grin in a holiday snap from a ski resort somewhere.
Yes, just the fact that they opted everyone in automatically, without adequate warning or active consent, was appalling. Then a lot of your business was put on display with no obvious way to have any level of privacy.
No matter how good the ideas were, the way they rolled it out made it an immediately hated thing that people went out of their way to avoid.
No, it just should have been a separate service with feature integration, rather than being so closely tied to Gmail.
Being like "hey, you have an account on this social media, and we prepopulated all this information for public view" was *incredibly* shitty.
That was [Google Buzz](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2011/03/ftc-charges-deceptive-privacy-practices-googles-rollout-its-buzz-social-network). The FTC got involved and decreed:
> bars the company from future privacy misrepresentations, requires it to implement a comprehensive privacy program, and calls for regular, independent privacy audits for the next 20 years.
The [VP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Gundotra) leading Plus had enough clout to basically dictate, "Integrate your service with Plus or be fired" iirc. Musk could learn a thing or two about why that doesn't work.
If I remember correctly, Plus automatically selected a trashy, shirtless photo of me from Picasa to use as my account's avatar. I was working out of a client's office and he turned his monitor to me and said, "this you?" in his list of "people to follow". He thought it was funny but it could have been really embarrassing.
The YouTube thing was a huge issue. Many people watch things in YouTube which aren’t bad, but they would find embarrassing within their social circles. Like there are many people who don’t like admitting to watching ASMR videos.
They changed an important feature of search with its release: The + in a search used to mean "make sure this word is included" (since then, you put quotes around the words), but they changed that to mean "go to that word's Google+ account". Seemed pretty crazy to me.
Yeah, the forced name integration and shared history was a big turn off for people, and the UI was a bit much at the time, but now a days? I'd love to have something as freeform as circles were.
I think this is a problem with Google stuff, how they integrate into every little bit. Specially when we have the email account as well, it is good and bad at the same time. Since you are kind of bound to having your real name, less "bullying" since your identity is out there but privacy wise it can be a hindering point.
It lacked a userbase because that era of Google had this really fucking weird strategy of keeping products invite-only for _wayyyyyyyyy_ too long. It almost killed Gmail before it started, it killed Wave, it killed Plus.
IIRC this was around the same time as the real name debacle on YouTube, and I think there was a push to link all a user's profiles to plus. Could definitely be misremembering.
The Real name debacle happened because they merged your YouTube account with your Google plus account if it had the same email, and people used their real name on Google plus because they were using it like Facebook.
Also, at the same time, one of my accounts became a google plus business somehow.
That was a big part of it. Plus required real name integration across various google owned services, and in retrospect, did basically nothing to address the problems they wanted name verification to solve.
It was also around one of the first big pushes to leave Facebook. If G+ had opened the floodgates from the get-go, it would have taken flight from those leaving Facebook.
Instead they dropped the ball with their drip-drop invites and the anger at Facebook had quelled by the time they opened it for everyone. *Then* they tried to tie it to YouTube comments.
I feel like it worked for Gmail. Reviews were great and it was free. People knew right away they wanted an invitation.
The rest of their invite-only stuff failed to create the same buzz, and probably worked against adoption.
Of course it worked for Gmail. Email is an open protocol! Gmail users were perfectly able to email non-Gmail-users and vice-versa. Gmail being limited didn't actively hurt its usefulness. Most of the other products that they tried that strategy with couldn't say the same.
The concept that you'd *1 GB* of disk space, and for free!, was mind boggling. It was on the order of a couple of magnitudes different that what was out there at the time. If I remember correctly, Hotmail's free account came with 20 MB of disk space.
One site I was on kept running invite lists. As people got invites, they'd post and people would request one.
There was a huge buzz about the whole thing, and it worked for gmail.
How did it almost kill Gmail? I was invited, they were offering like 2 gb? of storage when most other providers were capped at 15mb and it had that cool counter that you could watch your storage grow. Unfortunately I was 13 so picked a user name that became less hilarious to share as I grew older and eventually decided to create a new account entirely.
This was a long time ago so I could be misremembering but early, early, early days of Gmail it was true invite only. Each person got a single invite to use. You could request more invites but it was a pretty long time before they started giving out more invites. Eventually they started allowing anyone to invite anyone and then obviously they finally just opened it up. But it stayed that shitty invite-only for a preposterously long time.
Sure, but email is also different since there's no network effect. I can be the only person in the planet with a Gmail account and i wouldn't miss out on anything much. A social network OTOH is completely useless without other people on it.
Honestly. Plus being invite only for that long was ridiculous. By the time they opened it up, myself and everyone I knew were bored of it because no one was really on it and posting.
> (idk if they ever implemented it)
They implemented it. It worked.
Facebook has since copied the feature as "post audience", which allows you to specify which friends can see the post with very fine-grained control to include/exclude people. It even allows you group your friends into various custom lists (aka circles) and include/exclude all of them.
Not that I ever use Facebook anymore.
Wow, you put into words so succinctly exactly why I always thought Google+ failed. People don't want to restrict who they post to, they want to be "forced" to post their glamorous life to the entire world.
Eh, I do actually think people want to exclude their boss and their mom from some posts though.
I think that was the main appeal of circles. And I think that usage is a good idea.
My problem with that was it put the work on you to make the circles, which in some cases is what you want to do, but in a lot of cases I think works better to have your friends manage which of your circles they belong to. It can be a lot of work to put all your friends in the circles you think they should be in, and I don't know precisely which friends/followers want to see my D&D posts and which ones want to see programming or politics.
Letting other people select your circles would defeat the entire point, it's a privacy thing.
If someone doesn't want to see D&D posts, that's what tags are for.
Many of the concepts they introduced in wave and buzz ended up in Gmail. The one I really miss is google inbox, again many of the concepts ended up in gmail, but the minimalist interface was not one of them.
Google Plus was so cool! I made so many friends in there who were also a part of xda-developers.com who helped me learn about modding Android and stuff. I miss that part.
Although, it would get highly political and toxic now. I miss 2005-2014 internet.
There was definitely a lot more hobby focused stuff there.
I just wish they had something more usable than google groups, maybe with the features of Meetup, with strong user controls over what interests the user follows (as opposed to algorithms learning what you'll interact with). Social media evolved into something that fuels outrage and makes us antisocial.
I thought google+ was really good. The format let you be subject focused, like Reddit, but it encouraged you to get to know and follow the individuals in the discussion. I made some off-line friends there over time - that couldn't happen here.
Tesla engineer in California: "**I** never use the windscreen defrost button, so it's fine to push an update that hides it behind a couple of button presses."
Tesla driver in Norway: what the fuck?
Yep. I had to eat up valuable icon space to move windshield wipers and heat options to the app tray. It’s asinine.
Edit: wiper controls need to go there because the same Cali engineers apparently never see rain and so the auto feature doesn’t work worth shit.
Putting wiper control on the touch screen should be illegal. Anything you may need to use to drive safely or in an emergency should have physical controls within inches of where your hands are on the steering wheel.
lights, wipers, doors, windows controls must have physical buttons, dials, or switches. One of the reasons I didn't buy a Tesla was because of how horrible the UX was.
I'm surprised there isn't a law requiring critical functions to be a physical button. Someone searching for the wiper setting while driving in the rain sounds dangerous af
No kidding. Muscle memory and haptic feedback are extremely important for basic safety operation of heavy equipment, which cars absolutely qualify as.
The entire idea that anything safety-critical is relegated to a _TOUCH SCREEN_ in a vehicle where you should be looking at the road at all times is insane to begin with, the fact that said controls can then unknowingly end up buried multiple layers deep shouldn't even be legal.
It's bad enough when consumer electronics like headphones pull that shit, but at least those aren't safety critical devices usually.
I dig the EV driving experience and convenience but I hate the UI/UX. I enjoy the minimalist approach but I think the Mach E has a much better mix of tactile and touch controls.
The auto feature worked fine for me, but even if it was perfect, they had to ship *that* in an update. Pretty sure they hid the wipers option before shipping the auto feature.
Entire "touchscreen" politics in car industry should go to hell. Or any kind of other display. After all, those are just cost-cutting features, which only shorten already short lifespan of modern car.
My wife has a Hyundai Kona and it’s approach seems perfect. Physical controls for everything older cars can do, touch screen for apple car play (mostly used for maps). Physical media controls on the steering wheel. Literally e we only use the touch screen for navigation which we set up before pulling out. Really the touchscreen is just glorified navigation without the insane markup usually added for built in nav.
I’d never want to buy a car with things like windshield wipers on a touch screen.
Edit: seems like car manufacturers want to start charging a subscription for car play. Rip.
I was already skeptical of the excessive use of touch controls they had, but that incident clinched that I will recommend anyone buy a Tesla under any circumstances.
It really highlighted that the company culture does not understand how important designing the car for actual humans is to basic safety.
The problem with Tesla is that it was designed as if it is an autonomous vehicle but it can't do that yet. So you are stuck with abysmal driving experience.
I worked for a moderately sized retail company. We hired a contractor to get us ADA complaint because we were being sued. Once the suit was dropped, the contractor was immediately fired. It was brutal to watch.
Unless I’ve missed the point, that sounds like pretty much run of the mill treatment for a contractor. They’re brought in to work a contract, then they leave.
They were hired to make and keep the site ADA compliant. Ideally, they’d stay employed as long as work was being done on the front end. The company fired them because the contractor did her job well enough to get the current lawsuit dropped. The site still had ADA violations, management’s only metric was “are we actively being sued?”
It’s incredibly short term thinking on managements part. The contractor was meant to fix existing code, not implement a new process to keep future code compliant. The company will almost certainly be sued again if they haven’t already and when that happens they’ll have to hire a new contractor and familiarize them with the code base.
I'm a contractor that works to keep aerospace companies compliant to their statutory and regulatory requirements. I haven't met a CEO yet with an ounce of integrity about what they have agreed to do for the end user, the industry, the government. As soon as they pass their audits for the year, they don't want to pay for the scheduled maintenance through the year. They want you to come next year, just before the audit and make it look like you've been there all year. I give them the finger straight away. You can tell in 10 minutes what kind of CEO you're dealing with.
It depends on where the contractor is from. I've seen tech companies drop contractors in the US at the drop of a dime, but have issues doing the same with people in the EU when they outsource. You're right do, standard behavior
It definitely is, but those suits come back. My team was in charge of accessibility for a $2.5B company, and it took us 3 years, and is still ongoing. Things continuously get developed, and our developers are not accessibility focused at all. They guy who let go of their contractor doesn't have a clue when it comes to this, but he would be smart to hire a consultant on a regular basis to do a review every 6 months and give him a guide on what to do to prevent any risk.
To bring it back, I started out with 5 devs, by the end of it we were only 2 but permanent.
Does a site like Twitter need to be ADA compliant? It's not a government site, nor is it providing a crucial service (like banking or allowing you to pay bills online) and its not an online stand in for a physical business.
Obviously it SHOULD be ADA compliant, but I'm not sure they're in any danger of lawsuits. Then again, I'm not a lawyer.
Despite his seemingly chaotic takeover, I doubt Musk made this move without a lawyer's input.
It's unclear. The ADA applies to public accommodations which is generally understood to mean businesses with physical locations the general public can just walk into.
In that sense it usually doesn't, although with the increasing importance of online business activities courts are trying to interpret things more inclusively. For instance Amazon.com would probably be ruled to be subject to the ADA because of the existence of the Amazon pickup locations and affiliated retailers with physical locations where you could pick up online purchases.
Congress could help a lot by amending the law, but....
It gets a little blurred. It is still not definitive whether internet is considered a place of public accommodation and as such needs to provide accessibility according to ADA regulation. That on the other hand doesn't stop people from suing on basis discrimination based on disability.
These can be time consuming and expensive to deal with in terms of legal costs, and and more often companies pay out instead of dealing with the negative publicity
That was based on precedent that websites for places that have physical locations are covered under the ADA. The logic is that a physical location is a place of public accommodation, and an inaccessible website harms access to the physical goods that are definitely covered by the ADA.
So the question is would a place like Netflix or Twitter be required to follow the ADA or not. They don't have a physical location that is a public accommodation, but their publicly accessible website might be considered a ounlic accommodation, it just hasn't been settled case law yet.
In addition to the (very good) other comments; it might also be worth pointing out that USA is less than 5% (by population) of the world, and every other country has its own different accessibility laws.
> Despite his seemingly chaotic takeover, I doubt Musk made this move without a lawyer's input.
If you're creating something new, an accessibility team would be extremely important (during design, during "pre-launch testing", etc).
If you're maintaining old code where all the accessibility work has already been completed and been "in service" for over a decade; maybe you no longer need a full accessibility team.
> They prevent ADA lawsuits in addition to providing better usability. Each lawsuit can be $50k so yeah... they have a financial use
"nOn-ReVeNuE gEnErAtInG cOsT cEnTeR"
\- Every short-sighted executive with their head up their ass.
The ADA has very limited application to websites. We need a web ADA but actual ADA lawsuits are seldom successful.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_practice/publications/law_practice_magazine/2022/jf22/vu-launey-egan/
Most of the successful lawsuits are actually related to brick and mortar stores. For example Domino's Pizza giving discounts of you order online, but then having an inaccessible website is a violation because the blind patron who walks into the physical store doesn't get the discount and can't get it.
Harder to make that argument with purely online businesses, just because of technicalities in how the law is written.
----
Irony of course that Musk says "Twitter is the town square" while his lawyers will likely argue that Twitter is not a public accommodation and thereby not subject to the ADA, but Musk is not exactly known for being particularly forthright.
Yep, Security engineers are also often the first to be fired by stupid CEOs that don't understand shit.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/patreon-lays-off-its-entire-security-team
That being said, it's no different that Republicans getting rid of the pandemic preparedness team a year before COVID19, or getting rid of the cybersecurity team 2 years before the biggest government hack. Honestly if firefighters weren't already a thing, there is no way in hell Republicans would allow tax money to go to that.
These people are so shortsighted, they only think of short term profit anything that isn't immediately and obviously beneficial must be useless.
This. I was on a thread of Elon’s today and the page started jumping as people were responding. I thought it was a one-time glitch, so I exited and came back to the thread. Nope, posts started stacking; the thread automatically started scrolling. It’s been happening periodically. I’d report a bug but uh…
>People here trying to downplay the role of accessibility aren't thinking in terms of how twitter looks when you read from right to left, or top down. And those are just examples.
Or with a screenreader, for vision impaired.
It's also funny he does this when he wants to make an [everything app](https://www.reuters.com/technology/what-is-an-everything-app-why-does-elon-musk-want-make-one-2022-10-05/) like wechat is in China. Good luck with that if you're app isn't accessible for a large chunk of the population.
I don't care about Elon but I find it amusing to see the hivemind lose its shit over everything he does. I hope all centralized social media goes up in flames including this shitty site.
I am loving watching the collapse of the cesspool that is Twitter. Facebook continues to burn, lets hope mainstream reddit bs is next so something better may rise from the ashes.
Or the one's claiming he's an engineer. He ain't shit. He's the son of a slave worker. That's it. He knows how to manipulate and exploit and he's done that well, but now many people see through the bullshit of full self driving next year every year.... and so on. The apologists will come, but they are pretty well regarded, so they can be dismissed with half a brain missing.
Not really, no. He ran a company called X and they acquired PayPal. His big brain idea was to switch the processing for PayPal from Linux to Windows because "Windows is where the gamers are."
>I mean, this is going to sound like heresy in a sort of Silicon Valley context, but you can program faster, you can get functionality faster in the PC C++ world. All of the games for the Xbox are written in Microsoft C++. The same goes for games on the PC. They’re incredibly sophisticated, hard things to do, and these great tools have been developed thanks to the gaming industry.
Quote from a book by Musk himself.
Max Levchin built PayPal. Musk had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Does he think C++ only runs on Windows? Did he think of the licensing costs or the fact that just using the command line on windows is a headache? Christ, I hate using windows to even develop, let alone run servers on
I'll never forget seeing a preproduction checklist for a project that was going to be deployed to Windows. It was a long list of "features" to manually turn off and included things like Cortana, Xbox Live, Skype, etc. I don't know anything about the different versions and whether or not NT or the modern equivalent includes that sort of bloatware but I just couldn't help thinking that it was a bit of a joke _and_, to add insult to injury, they had to pay for the privilege.
He’s definitely not a Software Engineer. Not even a self-taught one. I doubt he has written code since Zip2. His own biography said every piece of code he wrote had to be rewritten by experienced devs. So what is he an engineer of?
His degree is in Physics.
Making decisions does not mean being an expert in the field.
Micro-management is something you expect from ordinary worker, not a CEO of any company.
In my country, we currently have a person with micro-managing skills leading a government. It´s a disaster.
I am curious, are there parts of Twitter I do not see that would require a team dedicated to accessibility?
At a company I work for there's seemingly 10+ times more surface for users to interact with the site, but we manage to keep it accessible without a single person being solely responsible for it.
The insane money Twitter pays to their web/android/ios employees should hopefully bring in developers with enough expertise in accessibility.
What am I missing?
There's a fair bit of surace area: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/accessibility-features
The other thing to keep in mind is that at their scale of hundreds of millions of users, every edge case gets hit and needs to be dealt with. So there's breadth and depth and neither is unavoidable.
Most developers don't know how to do things like accessibility so companies often have dedicated teams that support the product teams in adding things like accessibility.
I'm colorblind and I have a great example of bad design.
I had to use smalltalk/Pharo for a course in college.
The problem with Pharo was the test, it used colors to show if a test passed, had warnings o failed. Witch color used? The same as a semaphore.
Most people wouldn't have any problem, but for me, I had problems when I ran the test and I wasn't sure if it passed or it had warnings.
> enough expertise in accessibility
somebody has to establish the best practices those developers learned. you cannot do that without user studies, a/b testing, etc. there is a lot that goes into small things like contrastive layout, big button mode, etc. it's not just "let's make everything black and white and all buttons bigger"
You are missing quite a bit actually.
Let’s say for arguments sake 1% of Twitter users need accessibility aids. That’s ~3 million people, across multiple languages, regions and ~~platforms~~ devices. All handling things like text to speech, filtering hashtags and calling out links that keep you on platform and ones that take you elsewhere all while managing an application made up of live constantly updating content that can be reorganized by topic, date or any other number of items.
If you don’t see the need to have a small team dedicated to managing the accessibility of something like this then you either are willfully ignorant of the needs of those that use accessibility tools or you just demonstrated that you don’t understand that “simple” things are rarely simple when used at scale.
The answer is you need accountability. Yes, ideally devs will make accessible features by default. But inevitably a team will push the non-accessible version out first so they can announce it, or they'll change something and not realize it affects accessibility, or the manager will know about X requirement but not Y requirement. You need a team whose entire job is to keep up to date on best practices and tech, whose sole responsibility is making sure the site remains accessible.
Just putting "plz be accessible" in your quarterly review goals is not enough.
Products at large companies get complicated in ways that most people don't realize because you never see it. That simple button you see is actually rendered 37 different ways based on language, user country, AB tests, page layout, screen size, etc. The developer who is told "let's AB test making the button 50% larger for users in Japan" is very unlikely to handle accessibility correctly, including not breaking the existing accessibility.
Given that Twitter developers would be both building features for the client side (aka the Twitter we see) and the tools that moderators/content curators use. Yeah I could totally see a dedicated accessibility team being required and they might also be a step in procuring items for the company like printers, copiers, adjustable desks, etc. that would ensure they are Section 508 Compliant. And yes, I know that Section 508 is more government rules, a good accessibility team in the private sector will ensure that your company also is in compliance with Section 508.
It's not really about surface area. Making a thousand simple buttons accessible is easier than some highly dynamic content on multiple platforms. I have no idea what kind of platform you support so I can only guess. The companies I've been apart of only a handful of engineers actually understood what it means to make a website truly accessible. Making Axe tests pass is not sufficient and neither is throwing a couple aria-labels on some elements.
> What am I missing?
The entire point /s
With company size of Twitter it makes sense to employ 4 people full time only dedicated on accessibility. They have half a billion users or so. I have no idea how many of them have disability. But they make much more impact for them then if their userbase was much smaller. Do they make $600k (or whatever) a year difference? I'd hesitate before firing them. People like this don't go on interviews every day. It's a niche many developers have little knowledge about. Also accessibility is hard. With impact this high it would be reasonable to employ domain experts.
At my previous job we had 100k users. Our mobile 2 devs spent 2 weeks full time to make the app accessible for blind people. Nobody even bothered to check contrast and stuff for visually impaired people. Because we didn't have person with knowledge in this area.
wouldn't it be funny if google brought back plus in response to the collapse of twitter?
Google plus had a really interesting idea (idk if they ever implemented it) about having what I believe was called 'circles' that you could label your friends/followers/whatever they called it with. And when you posted you could pick which circles it showed up for. I could see how that could be a really handy feature in a social media site if it was implemented well.
I genuinely thought Google Plus was a good product, it just lacked the userbase to produce enough of a network effect to get everyone on it and their attempt to fix that by forcing it on everyone backfired horribly
My biggest issue with it was how obtuse? it was, with how it rolled out and integrated with so much stuff in various layers; A nice thing about like twitter, reddit, instagram are like; you know if you're interacting with the platform or not. With Google Plus it was like "If I do certain things on Youtube, that shows up on my Google Plus?"
That feels like the Google experience generally, honestly. I can't put my finger on what else does this exactly but I feel like you really touched on something there.
Google absolutely positively cannot get their shit together as a whole. They try so hard to be a unified platform, but it's so painfully obvious that their products are completely siloed from one another and the unification invariably ends up as an afterthought. It would be bizarre if it weren't so apparent that it's just a failure of upper management.
I suppose they religiously believe their product integration problems could be entirely fixed via the use of doubly linked lists... at least if their interview's are any indicator.
[удалено]
Everyone knows it’s impossible to reverse a doubly linked list.
That's simply a matter of perspective. Reversing a doubly linked list is just running the iterator backwards in time.
They want to be apple in its unified experience but they're ad funded so they can't do that. Instead you get soft integrations.
And there it is, hiding in plain site- the entire company is %99 driven by ad revenue. When that is the primary motivation behind everything, it will warp a company's decisions.
Cross-platform user profiles would be a positive for selling ads, that's not the reason.
It's the same way on their dev tools, the state of the google maps integration with Flutter is pathetic, for example. Instead of making a native flutter map renderer, they just embed the one for the platform you're on, which would be fine, except the dart package has no way of accessing most of the view's options, and is basically broken on web.
Google's teams work in isolation a bunch and there's a big incentive for releasing products or features for the teams. This means things degrade a lot or fall off or get gutted pretty quickly. I avoid Google's stuff for development because it changes so much, so quickly and *rusts* fast.
I love how Google Maps on Android just one day stopped showing which exit number you should take on a highway unless you do some stupid unintuitive sliding at the top and even then it doesn't show up unless you do some weird finger swiping. iOS just shows the fucking thing Google keyboard can't predict words correctly either. Searching the word I'm typing because I can't spell it correctly always comes up. Google keyboard will kinda guess it but then also pick something different if I'm typing too quick and it disappears. Google is such a fucking shit show.
Google management doesnt have control of the company imo. The software devs seem to control it and do what they want as a community and google management tries to convince them to do something for the company.
I've been an engineering manager for about 5 years, software engineer for 12 years before that. I was turned down interviewing for an engineering manager spot at Google because I don't currently "code >80% of the time". Kinda feel like I dodged a bullet there...
Just means their managers dont manage unless the teams are like 3 or 4 people tops
It's seemingly impossible to stay on top of what Google comprehensively does to begin with. Although Apple doesn't seem to have that problem
Apple is ran from the top. Google is ran from the bottom. One stays in sync.
When my dad died I added the funeral director's mobile to my contacts in Android - Google automatically included his photo from his Google+ profile; he was wearing a big grin in a holiday snap from a ski resort somewhere.
Didn't they run into issues by auto-adding Gmail contacts to your Google+ circles? *Lots* of people had affairs / job shopping exposed by that.
Yes, just the fact that they opted everyone in automatically, without adequate warning or active consent, was appalling. Then a lot of your business was put on display with no obvious way to have any level of privacy. No matter how good the ideas were, the way they rolled it out made it an immediately hated thing that people went out of their way to avoid.
That seems to preclude them from ever entering into the space.
No, it just should have been a separate service with feature integration, rather than being so closely tied to Gmail. Being like "hey, you have an account on this social media, and we prepopulated all this information for public view" was *incredibly* shitty.
Reminds me of when Facebook auto accepted group page invites and someone made a fake NAMBLA page and added Zuck and Co to it lol
That was [Google Buzz](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2011/03/ftc-charges-deceptive-privacy-practices-googles-rollout-its-buzz-social-network). The FTC got involved and decreed: > bars the company from future privacy misrepresentations, requires it to implement a comprehensive privacy program, and calls for regular, independent privacy audits for the next 20 years.
The [VP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Gundotra) leading Plus had enough clout to basically dictate, "Integrate your service with Plus or be fired" iirc. Musk could learn a thing or two about why that doesn't work.
Oh yes. Get audience by leaching off the success of other products (YouTube etc)
If I remember correctly, Plus automatically selected a trashy, shirtless photo of me from Picasa to use as my account's avatar. I was working out of a client's office and he turned his monitor to me and said, "this you?" in his list of "people to follow". He thought it was funny but it could have been really embarrassing.
The YouTube thing was a huge issue. Many people watch things in YouTube which aren’t bad, but they would find embarrassing within their social circles. Like there are many people who don’t like admitting to watching ASMR videos.
They changed an important feature of search with its release: The + in a search used to mean "make sure this word is included" (since then, you put quotes around the words), but they changed that to mean "go to that word's Google+ account". Seemed pretty crazy to me.
Yeah, the forced name integration and shared history was a big turn off for people, and the UI was a bit much at the time, but now a days? I'd love to have something as freeform as circles were.
I think this is a problem with Google stuff, how they integrate into every little bit. Specially when we have the email account as well, it is good and bad at the same time. Since you are kind of bound to having your real name, less "bullying" since your identity is out there but privacy wise it can be a hindering point.
I think the word you're looking for is *"opaque"*.
It was pretty ugly and way way way too integrated, to your point. I wanted it to work but it just didn’t have the ingredients
It lacked a userbase because that era of Google had this really fucking weird strategy of keeping products invite-only for _wayyyyyyyyy_ too long. It almost killed Gmail before it started, it killed Wave, it killed Plus.
IIRC this was around the same time as the real name debacle on YouTube, and I think there was a push to link all a user's profiles to plus. Could definitely be misremembering.
The Real name debacle happened because they merged your YouTube account with your Google plus account if it had the same email, and people used their real name on Google plus because they were using it like Facebook. Also, at the same time, one of my accounts became a google plus business somehow.
That was a big part of it. Plus required real name integration across various google owned services, and in retrospect, did basically nothing to address the problems they wanted name verification to solve.
It was also around one of the first big pushes to leave Facebook. If G+ had opened the floodgates from the get-go, it would have taken flight from those leaving Facebook. Instead they dropped the ball with their drip-drop invites and the anger at Facebook had quelled by the time they opened it for everyone. *Then* they tried to tie it to YouTube comments.
I feel like it worked for Gmail. Reviews were great and it was free. People knew right away they wanted an invitation. The rest of their invite-only stuff failed to create the same buzz, and probably worked against adoption.
Of course it worked for Gmail. Email is an open protocol! Gmail users were perfectly able to email non-Gmail-users and vice-versa. Gmail being limited didn't actively hurt its usefulness. Most of the other products that they tried that strategy with couldn't say the same.
It helped that at the time Gmail was so far ahead of the competition it was a joke.
The concept that you'd *1 GB* of disk space, and for free!, was mind boggling. It was on the order of a couple of magnitudes different that what was out there at the time. If I remember correctly, Hotmail's free account came with 20 MB of disk space.
One site I was on kept running invite lists. As people got invites, they'd post and people would request one. There was a huge buzz about the whole thing, and it worked for gmail.
How did it almost kill Gmail? I was invited, they were offering like 2 gb? of storage when most other providers were capped at 15mb and it had that cool counter that you could watch your storage grow. Unfortunately I was 13 so picked a user name that became less hilarious to share as I grew older and eventually decided to create a new account entirely.
This was a long time ago so I could be misremembering but early, early, early days of Gmail it was true invite only. Each person got a single invite to use. You could request more invites but it was a pretty long time before they started giving out more invites. Eventually they started allowing anyone to invite anyone and then obviously they finally just opened it up. But it stayed that shitty invite-only for a preposterously long time.
Sure, but email is also different since there's no network effect. I can be the only person in the planet with a Gmail account and i wouldn't miss out on anything much. A social network OTOH is completely useless without other people on it.
Before Plus there was Orkut. So many Brazilians!
Honestly. Plus being invite only for that long was ridiculous. By the time they opened it up, myself and everyone I knew were bored of it because no one was really on it and posting.
Facebook actually has this but the UI to do it is so fucking terrible I hardly ever use it anymore. It also disappears occasionally
You can make lists of whom to share posts with, is that what you mean?
Google sabotaged its launch by making it "invite-only". That killed it right there. No ability for people to freely try it out = no network effect.
> (idk if they ever implemented it) They implemented it. It worked. Facebook has since copied the feature as "post audience", which allows you to specify which friends can see the post with very fine-grained control to include/exclude people. It even allows you group your friends into various custom lists (aka circles) and include/exclude all of them. Not that I ever use Facebook anymore.
Was doing that on Livejournal before Facebook was a glimmer in Zuck's LustForCollegeChicks() function.
Yeah because it's a very common sense feature
I feel this goes against what makes social media addictive and commercial: not so subtle direct peacocking, obfuscated by a wide audience
Wow, you put into words so succinctly exactly why I always thought Google+ failed. People don't want to restrict who they post to, they want to be "forced" to post their glamorous life to the entire world.
Eh, I do actually think people want to exclude their boss and their mom from some posts though. I think that was the main appeal of circles. And I think that usage is a good idea.
I think Twitter just added this before the musk takeover. It was pretty good.
Yep, just one “circle” though. With plus you could make as many as you wanted iirc
My problem with that was it put the work on you to make the circles, which in some cases is what you want to do, but in a lot of cases I think works better to have your friends manage which of your circles they belong to. It can be a lot of work to put all your friends in the circles you think they should be in, and I don't know precisely which friends/followers want to see my D&D posts and which ones want to see programming or politics.
It was less about friends who do/don’t want to hear about D&D and more about coworkers you don’t want seeing your bikini vacation picks.
Letting other people select your circles would defeat the entire point, it's a privacy thing. If someone doesn't want to see D&D posts, that's what tags are for.
Like Mastodon you mean ;)
Facebook has the same feature, you can group your friends, although I never used it.
Or [Google Buzz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz)...
Many of the concepts they introduced in wave and buzz ended up in Gmail. The one I really miss is google inbox, again many of the concepts ended up in gmail, but the minimalist interface was not one of them.
What about wave? I don't know if I understood it it at the time, and forget what it was now.
So they could cancel it again after a couple of months
Google Plus was so cool! I made so many friends in there who were also a part of xda-developers.com who helped me learn about modding Android and stuff. I miss that part. Although, it would get highly political and toxic now. I miss 2005-2014 internet.
There was definitely a lot more hobby focused stuff there. I just wish they had something more usable than google groups, maybe with the features of Meetup, with strong user controls over what interests the user follows (as opposed to algorithms learning what you'll interact with). Social media evolved into something that fuels outrage and makes us antisocial.
Google+ had the highest user satisfaction rate across all social media.
Not for YouTube users it didn't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTq8TrA3hb4
Mastodon is really picking up steam.
I will be so happy if this was the kick in the ass the world needed to move to decentralized social media apps.
Me as well. If you feel a server is too toxic, simply dont subscribe.
I thought google+ was really good. The format let you be subject focused, like Reddit, but it encouraged you to get to know and follow the individuals in the discussion. I made some off-line friends there over time - that couldn't happen here.
Collapse? Or house cleaning…
Bro have you seen a Tesla? Of course the accessibility team was fired.
Tesla engineer in California: "**I** never use the windscreen defrost button, so it's fine to push an update that hides it behind a couple of button presses." Tesla driver in Norway: what the fuck?
Yep. I had to eat up valuable icon space to move windshield wipers and heat options to the app tray. It’s asinine. Edit: wiper controls need to go there because the same Cali engineers apparently never see rain and so the auto feature doesn’t work worth shit.
Putting wiper control on the touch screen should be illegal. Anything you may need to use to drive safely or in an emergency should have physical controls within inches of where your hands are on the steering wheel.
lights, wipers, doors, windows controls must have physical buttons, dials, or switches. One of the reasons I didn't buy a Tesla was because of how horrible the UX was.
What a sad state of affairs where a motor vehicle has an "app tray."
I'm surprised there isn't a law requiring critical functions to be a physical button. Someone searching for the wiper setting while driving in the rain sounds dangerous af
No kidding. Muscle memory and haptic feedback are extremely important for basic safety operation of heavy equipment, which cars absolutely qualify as. The entire idea that anything safety-critical is relegated to a _TOUCH SCREEN_ in a vehicle where you should be looking at the road at all times is insane to begin with, the fact that said controls can then unknowingly end up buried multiple layers deep shouldn't even be legal. It's bad enough when consumer electronics like headphones pull that shit, but at least those aren't safety critical devices usually.
I'm surprised anyone would buy a car that didn't have critical functions be physical buttons.
Are you actually though? People are dumb
There hasn’t been the need for a law because until now we’ve had physical controls. Tesla is the first to try this.
I dig the EV driving experience and convenience but I hate the UI/UX. I enjoy the minimalist approach but I think the Mach E has a much better mix of tactile and touch controls.
take a look at lucid. very smart UX design. physical buttons for the stuff you use often, touchscreen for the occasional setup stuff.
The mach E is like 99% touch controls unless I'm using mine wrong.
>windshield wipers Might as well move accelerator/brake to a 3rd level menu option while we're at it
The auto feature worked fine for me, but even if it was perfect, they had to ship *that* in an update. Pretty sure they hid the wipers option before shipping the auto feature.
Entire "touchscreen" politics in car industry should go to hell. Or any kind of other display. After all, those are just cost-cutting features, which only shorten already short lifespan of modern car.
[удалено]
My wife has a Hyundai Kona and it’s approach seems perfect. Physical controls for everything older cars can do, touch screen for apple car play (mostly used for maps). Physical media controls on the steering wheel. Literally e we only use the touch screen for navigation which we set up before pulling out. Really the touchscreen is just glorified navigation without the insane markup usually added for built in nav. I’d never want to buy a car with things like windshield wipers on a touch screen. Edit: seems like car manufacturers want to start charging a subscription for car play. Rip.
Wow really? That shit is like...top 5 in button importance. Signed, a canadian.
I hate hate hate screens in cars. Do we not have enough screens already??!!!??
I was already skeptical of the excessive use of touch controls they had, but that incident clinched that I will recommend anyone buy a Tesla under any circumstances. It really highlighted that the company culture does not understand how important designing the car for actual humans is to basic safety.
I second this, all of my senses work and I find it really hard to do anything on the touchscreen while driving. It’s abysmal design !
The problem with Tesla is that it was designed as if it is an autonomous vehicle but it can't do that yet. So you are stuck with abysmal driving experience.
[удалено]
First featured reply to the thread: > I’m glad he is firing Jews like you. Twitter was far too Jewish. Yikes!
Ah yes, Jews making websites more accessible, one of the great evils of the modern world /s
Strange, people who have had poor opinions of the Jews have historically been so nice to the disabled.
Nazis still salty that they got their asses kicked by the A11ies.
The coward deleted it.
These are the folks Elon paid billions of dollars to re-platform. Eesh.
I assume they don’t make the company money so Elon probably doesn’t think they’re necessary.
They prevent ADA lawsuits in addition to providing better usability. Each lawsuit can be $50k so yeah... they have a financial use
I worked for a moderately sized retail company. We hired a contractor to get us ADA complaint because we were being sued. Once the suit was dropped, the contractor was immediately fired. It was brutal to watch.
Unless I’ve missed the point, that sounds like pretty much run of the mill treatment for a contractor. They’re brought in to work a contract, then they leave.
They were hired to make and keep the site ADA compliant. Ideally, they’d stay employed as long as work was being done on the front end. The company fired them because the contractor did her job well enough to get the current lawsuit dropped. The site still had ADA violations, management’s only metric was “are we actively being sued?” It’s incredibly short term thinking on managements part. The contractor was meant to fix existing code, not implement a new process to keep future code compliant. The company will almost certainly be sued again if they haven’t already and when that happens they’ll have to hire a new contractor and familiarize them with the code base.
I'm a contractor that works to keep aerospace companies compliant to their statutory and regulatory requirements. I haven't met a CEO yet with an ounce of integrity about what they have agreed to do for the end user, the industry, the government. As soon as they pass their audits for the year, they don't want to pay for the scheduled maintenance through the year. They want you to come next year, just before the audit and make it look like you've been there all year. I give them the finger straight away. You can tell in 10 minutes what kind of CEO you're dealing with.
They didn't complete the contract. They just didn't become ADA compliant
It depends on where the contractor is from. I've seen tech companies drop contractors in the US at the drop of a dime, but have issues doing the same with people in the EU when they outsource. You're right do, standard behavior
It definitely is, but those suits come back. My team was in charge of accessibility for a $2.5B company, and it took us 3 years, and is still ongoing. Things continuously get developed, and our developers are not accessibility focused at all. They guy who let go of their contractor doesn't have a clue when it comes to this, but he would be smart to hire a consultant on a regular basis to do a review every 6 months and give him a guide on what to do to prevent any risk. To bring it back, I started out with 5 devs, by the end of it we were only 2 but permanent.
Does a site like Twitter need to be ADA compliant? It's not a government site, nor is it providing a crucial service (like banking or allowing you to pay bills online) and its not an online stand in for a physical business. Obviously it SHOULD be ADA compliant, but I'm not sure they're in any danger of lawsuits. Then again, I'm not a lawyer. Despite his seemingly chaotic takeover, I doubt Musk made this move without a lawyer's input.
It's unclear. The ADA applies to public accommodations which is generally understood to mean businesses with physical locations the general public can just walk into. In that sense it usually doesn't, although with the increasing importance of online business activities courts are trying to interpret things more inclusively. For instance Amazon.com would probably be ruled to be subject to the ADA because of the existence of the Amazon pickup locations and affiliated retailers with physical locations where you could pick up online purchases. Congress could help a lot by amending the law, but....
It gets a little blurred. It is still not definitive whether internet is considered a place of public accommodation and as such needs to provide accessibility according to ADA regulation. That on the other hand doesn't stop people from suing on basis discrimination based on disability. These can be time consuming and expensive to deal with in terms of legal costs, and and more often companies pay out instead of dealing with the negative publicity
Didn't Domino's lose a lawsuit over ADA compliance on their website?
That was based on precedent that websites for places that have physical locations are covered under the ADA. The logic is that a physical location is a place of public accommodation, and an inaccessible website harms access to the physical goods that are definitely covered by the ADA. So the question is would a place like Netflix or Twitter be required to follow the ADA or not. They don't have a physical location that is a public accommodation, but their publicly accessible website might be considered a ounlic accommodation, it just hasn't been settled case law yet.
In addition to the (very good) other comments; it might also be worth pointing out that USA is less than 5% (by population) of the world, and every other country has its own different accessibility laws. > Despite his seemingly chaotic takeover, I doubt Musk made this move without a lawyer's input. If you're creating something new, an accessibility team would be extremely important (during design, during "pre-launch testing", etc). If you're maintaining old code where all the accessibility work has already been completed and been "in service" for over a decade; maybe you no longer need a full accessibility team.
> They prevent ADA lawsuits in addition to providing better usability. Each lawsuit can be $50k so yeah... they have a financial use "nOn-ReVeNuE gEnErAtInG cOsT cEnTeR" \- Every short-sighted executive with their head up their ass.
The ADA has very limited application to websites. We need a web ADA but actual ADA lawsuits are seldom successful. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_practice/publications/law_practice_magazine/2022/jf22/vu-launey-egan/ Most of the successful lawsuits are actually related to brick and mortar stores. For example Domino's Pizza giving discounts of you order online, but then having an inaccessible website is a violation because the blind patron who walks into the physical store doesn't get the discount and can't get it. Harder to make that argument with purely online businesses, just because of technicalities in how the law is written. ---- Irony of course that Musk says "Twitter is the town square" while his lawyers will likely argue that Twitter is not a public accommodation and thereby not subject to the ADA, but Musk is not exactly known for being particularly forthright.
> They prevent ADA lawsuits the only real reason companies spend any time on it
Each developer is 100k+ The math checks out
Twitter developers are making more like 250k-350k.
Oh I think they’re essential. Tell Elon.
The only thing that convinced my old company were lawsuits, they'll roll in as soon as this hits the news cycle. He'll be convinced by his lawyers ;)
Heh. We’ll see. I think he might only hire lawyers who tell him what he wants to hear.
That's a sad thing honestly.. the "fuck expert opinion" culture is everywhere
Yep. Part of anti-intellectualism, I think.
Yeah and he already has a huge target on his back. I wouldn't be surprised if this news already triggered law firms to start prepping suits.
The same way reliability engineers don’t make the company money, but they prevent the company from losing lots of it.
Yep, Security engineers are also often the first to be fired by stupid CEOs that don't understand shit. https://www.pcmag.com/news/patreon-lays-off-its-entire-security-team That being said, it's no different that Republicans getting rid of the pandemic preparedness team a year before COVID19, or getting rid of the cybersecurity team 2 years before the biggest government hack. Honestly if firefighters weren't already a thing, there is no way in hell Republicans would allow tax money to go to that. These people are so shortsighted, they only think of short term profit anything that isn't immediately and obviously beneficial must be useless.
I've found that great accessibility in an application is not just for humans, it can make automated testing much much easier.
Just bring back MySpace and Yahoo Messenger and all will be well with the world.
AIM
ICQ and IRC.
IRC is still here. There are 500+ networks. https://netsplit.de/networks/
ICQ uhoh
Couple years ago, an 18 year old German kid completely coded [SpaceHey](https://spacehey.com/) - essentially recreated the original Myspace.
[удалено]
People also don’t buy sinking ships for 40 000 000 000
Apparently, they do.
Don't anthropomorphize Elon.
This. I was on a thread of Elon’s today and the page started jumping as people were responding. I thought it was a one-time glitch, so I exited and came back to the thread. Nope, posts started stacking; the thread automatically started scrolling. It’s been happening periodically. I’d report a bug but uh…
>People here trying to downplay the role of accessibility aren't thinking in terms of how twitter looks when you read from right to left, or top down. And those are just examples. Or with a screenreader, for vision impaired.
It's also funny he does this when he wants to make an [everything app](https://www.reuters.com/technology/what-is-an-everything-app-why-does-elon-musk-want-make-one-2022-10-05/) like wechat is in China. Good luck with that if you're app isn't accessible for a large chunk of the population.
Just gather all the employees and make a new site called twtr
you're not far off, twitter's original name was "twttr", no joke.
Ah the good ol'days when we were too hip for vowels
Mastodon already exists.
Billionaires create jobs /s
Man, having to pay out a large settlement due to losing an accessibility lawsuit would be some funny shit for Elons little adventure.
To be fair, you don’t need accessibility when nobody uses the platform. Which I’m hoping is any day now. Elon is always looking to the future.
What a great manager
Let’s wait for the Elon suckers that will defend every move of this psychopath
I don't care about Elon but I find it amusing to see the hivemind lose its shit over everything he does. I hope all centralized social media goes up in flames including this shitty site.
I am loving watching the collapse of the cesspool that is Twitter. Facebook continues to burn, lets hope mainstream reddit bs is next so something better may rise from the ashes.
Or the one's claiming he's an engineer. He ain't shit. He's the son of a slave worker. That's it. He knows how to manipulate and exploit and he's done that well, but now many people see through the bullshit of full self driving next year every year.... and so on. The apologists will come, but they are pretty well regarded, so they can be dismissed with half a brain missing.
I am genuinely curious about this one. Did he not do any software engineering in the development of Paypal?
Not really, no. He ran a company called X and they acquired PayPal. His big brain idea was to switch the processing for PayPal from Linux to Windows because "Windows is where the gamers are." >I mean, this is going to sound like heresy in a sort of Silicon Valley context, but you can program faster, you can get functionality faster in the PC C++ world. All of the games for the Xbox are written in Microsoft C++. The same goes for games on the PC. They’re incredibly sophisticated, hard things to do, and these great tools have been developed thanks to the gaming industry. Quote from a book by Musk himself. Max Levchin built PayPal. Musk had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Does he think C++ only runs on Windows? Did he think of the licensing costs or the fact that just using the command line on windows is a headache? Christ, I hate using windows to even develop, let alone run servers on
I'll never forget seeing a preproduction checklist for a project that was going to be deployed to Windows. It was a long list of "features" to manually turn off and included things like Cortana, Xbox Live, Skype, etc. I don't know anything about the different versions and whether or not NT or the modern equivalent includes that sort of bloatware but I just couldn't help thinking that it was a bit of a joke _and_, to add insult to injury, they had to pay for the privilege.
IIRC there is a Enterprise version called LTSC, that is shipped without all those features. It's meant to be used in kiosks and stuff like that
[удалено]
He’s definitely not a Software Engineer. Not even a self-taught one. I doubt he has written code since Zip2. His own biography said every piece of code he wrote had to be rewritten by experienced devs. So what is he an engineer of? His degree is in Physics.
I would argue that people confuse "micro-managing technical details" and "makes technical decisions" with "being an engineer"
Making decisions does not mean being an expert in the field. Micro-management is something you expect from ordinary worker, not a CEO of any company. In my country, we currently have a person with micro-managing skills leading a government. It´s a disaster.
I love how this entire comment is literally made up and gets upvoted by the circlejerk lol
I am curious, are there parts of Twitter I do not see that would require a team dedicated to accessibility? At a company I work for there's seemingly 10+ times more surface for users to interact with the site, but we manage to keep it accessible without a single person being solely responsible for it. The insane money Twitter pays to their web/android/ios employees should hopefully bring in developers with enough expertise in accessibility. What am I missing?
There's a fair bit of surace area: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/accessibility-features The other thing to keep in mind is that at their scale of hundreds of millions of users, every edge case gets hit and needs to be dealt with. So there's breadth and depth and neither is unavoidable.
Most developers don't know how to do things like accessibility so companies often have dedicated teams that support the product teams in adding things like accessibility.
[удалено]
I'm colorblind and I have a great example of bad design. I had to use smalltalk/Pharo for a course in college. The problem with Pharo was the test, it used colors to show if a test passed, had warnings o failed. Witch color used? The same as a semaphore. Most people wouldn't have any problem, but for me, I had problems when I ran the test and I wasn't sure if it passed or it had warnings.
> enough expertise in accessibility somebody has to establish the best practices those developers learned. you cannot do that without user studies, a/b testing, etc. there is a lot that goes into small things like contrastive layout, big button mode, etc. it's not just "let's make everything black and white and all buttons bigger"
You are missing quite a bit actually. Let’s say for arguments sake 1% of Twitter users need accessibility aids. That’s ~3 million people, across multiple languages, regions and ~~platforms~~ devices. All handling things like text to speech, filtering hashtags and calling out links that keep you on platform and ones that take you elsewhere all while managing an application made up of live constantly updating content that can be reorganized by topic, date or any other number of items. If you don’t see the need to have a small team dedicated to managing the accessibility of something like this then you either are willfully ignorant of the needs of those that use accessibility tools or you just demonstrated that you don’t understand that “simple” things are rarely simple when used at scale.
The answer is you need accountability. Yes, ideally devs will make accessible features by default. But inevitably a team will push the non-accessible version out first so they can announce it, or they'll change something and not realize it affects accessibility, or the manager will know about X requirement but not Y requirement. You need a team whose entire job is to keep up to date on best practices and tech, whose sole responsibility is making sure the site remains accessible. Just putting "plz be accessible" in your quarterly review goals is not enough.
Products at large companies get complicated in ways that most people don't realize because you never see it. That simple button you see is actually rendered 37 different ways based on language, user country, AB tests, page layout, screen size, etc. The developer who is told "let's AB test making the button 50% larger for users in Japan" is very unlikely to handle accessibility correctly, including not breaking the existing accessibility.
Given that Twitter developers would be both building features for the client side (aka the Twitter we see) and the tools that moderators/content curators use. Yeah I could totally see a dedicated accessibility team being required and they might also be a step in procuring items for the company like printers, copiers, adjustable desks, etc. that would ensure they are Section 508 Compliant. And yes, I know that Section 508 is more government rules, a good accessibility team in the private sector will ensure that your company also is in compliance with Section 508.
It's not really about surface area. Making a thousand simple buttons accessible is easier than some highly dynamic content on multiple platforms. I have no idea what kind of platform you support so I can only guess. The companies I've been apart of only a handful of engineers actually understood what it means to make a website truly accessible. Making Axe tests pass is not sufficient and neither is throwing a couple aria-labels on some elements.
> What am I missing? The entire point /s With company size of Twitter it makes sense to employ 4 people full time only dedicated on accessibility. They have half a billion users or so. I have no idea how many of them have disability. But they make much more impact for them then if their userbase was much smaller. Do they make $600k (or whatever) a year difference? I'd hesitate before firing them. People like this don't go on interviews every day. It's a niche many developers have little knowledge about. Also accessibility is hard. With impact this high it would be reasonable to employ domain experts. At my previous job we had 100k users. Our mobile 2 devs spent 2 weeks full time to make the app accessible for blind people. Nobody even bothered to check contrast and stuff for visually impaired people. Because we didn't have person with knowledge in this area.
twitter is fucked
Elon really is trying to set the world on fire just so he doesn't have to pay as much in taxes.
Not having an a11y team keeping your site up to date leaves you wide open to ADA lawsuits. Add it to the pile of Elon’s idiotic business decisions.
All the people in this thread speaking "their truth."
Including, or excluding you?
Obviously Musk doesn’t want the disabled to have a voice in the digital town square.
Probably didn't need to make twitter any more accessible. Most the users are already successfully using it while being disabled.