Twitter could turn off the delete feature for high-level public figures. Twitter could do so many things! But employees don’t care to act

i don't think twitter particularly wants to shit on one of the most important and loud demographics using it

I’m talking about what Twitter employees want, not Twitter management

hire me and I will take actions on Pinboard's behalf no problem.. LOTS of actions..

Step zero, rewrite codebase in literally anything other than PHP! :)

I think if you get the privilege of being verified, maybe you get the responsibility of no backsies.

Twitter is the poster child for analysis paralysis. Everything goes through weeks of experimentation there. After slow ass code review

again, I’m talking about concerted collective action by employees to get stuff done outside the “process”

But noto will bite their head off at tea time

How would this work? Even if employees build features they can't ship w/o mgmt approval. Also, -1 on assumptions about what employees want.

the point of collective action is you don’t need management approval. You obtain it by organizing around a demand

How does this ship without approval? How does the public use if it doesn't ship?

do you really not understand how vanilla employee collective action works, or are you just baiting me?

I must not b/c I don't understand how this could work. Please illustrate or point me to examples. Employees can't push code unilaterally.

you organize around the demand, when you have a critical mass of coworkers, you present it to management. If they refuse, you walk

So that still needs approval to ship, which is what I'm saying. Bottom-up emp desire, and there is plenty, isn't enough to get to the public

if it’s a management priority, it will get fast-tracked. The missing piece here is motivated management. The lever is employees

I agree with analysis, but not conclusion. I was there for 5 years. Big reason I left is I don't believe bottom-up change is feasible.

Even if bottom up change is easier than I believe, employee opinion isn't what drives Corp. Many actions taken despite prevailing sentiment

two separate questions are, is it feasible in principle (easily, lots of industries do it), and will tech workers organize (nope)

Agreed on both points

rare Twitter consensus! We did good.

This was heavily debated re: politwoops. Team in charge said deletes were also speech and would have chilling effect if prevented.

I wish there was at least a way to prove a tweet once existed at that address. Now people must screencap and we know that's problematic, too

in terms of process or review, it works just like any other feature. The additional step is forcing management to back it

Now we're at Unionization or similar. Absent a CBA, employees could still agree to quit their jobs in unison but that's a massive commitment

And I don't think it's fair to say employees don't care to act just because they won't quit their job.

nobody is talking about quitting. The whole point of labor law is to protect employees acting in concerted from losing their jobs

I took "If they refuse, you walk" to mean quitting.

Guessing their job ads don't say "perform ownership of features from design to production"

I like the first premise. Might be a good idea.

Why would you think that twitter employees would be in favor of doing that?

Seems like the company has no passion or vision

Bluecheckmarks cannot delete or edit tweets.

Nobody can edit tweets now.

the least they could turn off the 'like spam'

I tweeted a github project that lets you use Lists as a queue of miscreants to block. Within hours my account was unable to add to lists.

For anyone still thinking they were 'neutral'. No. They are actively supporting the Kek crowd tweeting about lynchings and gas chambers.

Should be a feature of verified accounts: you want the special mark, then you give up the ability to sanitise your history

If you want immutability then you should have put a blockchain on it /s

Y'know, "employees" read this and it hurts. We do care, we do act, and we do so many things. It needs positive reinforcement, not dismissal.

you don’t do effective things, and time is limited. If you want help organizing, I’m eager to help. But I won’t praise flailing

I will defend engineering to the hilt here. Your analysis is significantly reductionist. We all discuss regularly. We work hard on issues.

Not doubting work ethic or engineering – but Twitter management and policy is objectively terrible. Ethically bankrupt now– soon financially

If emps are tired of this, they can organize to insist upon change from mgmt, else they are either complicit, or don't know their own power.

I worked there for 7 years and the spirit of what you are saying is correct even if people are criticizing your precise word choice

Original 140 employees (all gone now) did a lot of Grassroots things that were great. The spirit of that is mostly over, AFAIK.

For every thing Twitter ships there are things they don't because of internal arguments. Don't expect any bold product changes anytime soon

But I will defend employees because it is not their fault. It is the fault of the structure of the company and the incentives they measure.

I was always annoyed when they hired anybody for the board or management that didn't Tweet regularly

Censoring four letter words, while giving a pass to hate speech (provided it's not directly threatening) is ethically questionable.

Selling horribly mistargeted ads, such that advertisers are pilloried by users (EG Comcast NN spam) borders on business malpractice.

I'll gladly pay you a couple bucks a month for a better experience. Many won't, but some will. TAKE MY MONEY!

the missing ingredient is coordinated, collective action. Instead I see Twitter people acting independently, haphazardly

Look harder.

organize

bellend

no offense but you're really not in a place to be flip with how much damage this platform has done and how irresponsibly its been handled

Is that what you see? You're not understanding what is being worked on, or the passion and care behind it then (and not looking deep enough)

I see otherwise intelligent people leaving the most powerful tool at their disposal—collective action—untouched

Sounds like a terrible idea. All users should be able to control their own tweets.

Ideally yes. But in the real world I guess public figures would simply switch to another platform that lets them cure their history.