Former Twitter Exec: Twitter Is ‘Just an Ass-Backward Tech Company’ – IOTW Report

Former Twitter Exec: Twitter Is ‘Just an Ass-Backward Tech Company’

A former Twitter executive claimed to Vanity Fair that the social network is “just an ass-backward tech company.”

Breitbart Tech: In the Vanity Fair article, which analyzes Twitter’s Head of Trust and Safety Del Harvey, several anonymous former Twitter employees discussed the social network’s problem with censorship and rule-enforcement.

On the topic of Twitter’s use of Ruby on Rails for its backend, which makes it more difficult for the social network to enforce rules and censorship, the executive claimed if Twitter ever knew it would become so big, they “never would have built it on a Fisher-Price infrastructure.”

“Because this is just an ass-backward tech company, let’s throw non-scalable, low-tech solutions on top of this low-tech, non-scalable problem,” the executive continued, criticizing the social network’s attempts to work awkwardly with the old technology.

The former executive also criticized Harvey’s tactics to censor “trolls” on the platform.

“There was no real sense of urgency,” they declared. “It’s a technology company with crappy technologists, a revolving door of product heads and C.E.O.s, and no real core of technological innovation. You had Del saying, ‘Trolls are going to be a problem. We will need a technological solution for this.’”

“You had this unsophisticated human army with no real scalable platform to plug into,” the former executive proclaimed. “You fast forward, and it was like, ‘Hey, shouldn’t we just have basic rules in place where if the suggestion is to suspend an account of a verified person, there should be a process in place to have a flag for additional review, or something?’ You’d think it would take, like, one line of code to fix that problem. And the classic response is, ‘That’s on our product roadmap two quarters from now.’”  more here

15 Comments on Former Twitter Exec: Twitter Is ‘Just an Ass-Backward Tech Company’

  1. lol Burner, I used to upgrade bank networks way back before Y2K, and we’d haul out big, clunky IBM stuff, mostly 4700, and then we’d install nice, new PC’s with big color monitors and all sorts of fancy software. But all of the tellers still ran their transactions in a green screen 4700 emulation window. Seems there was nothing which could improve on that. I bet they’re all still running 4700 emulation today.

    Remember QDOS? “Quick & Dirty Operating System”

    Ah well, we’re still getting the job done with B-52’s, so who am I to kvetch?

  2. Vietvet, I hope nothing happened to the lifeguard who schooled lil’ Hogg’s boogie board boyfriend. I think the lifeguard showed amazing restraint in not shoving that boogie board down in the dirty diapers and half-eaten burritos, and calmly strolling away.

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