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Bluesky CEO responds | 2023-07-22 Letter to the Community
(blueskyweb.xyz)
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NO! No bugs! Be perfect!
Seriously though, I've seen way dumber shit in "production" ready code.
I won't use Bluesky, but this happens all the time. I also don't see the issue.
I've told folks before, once and last time in front of developers (they didn't find it funny) , that all code is shit. Not because they're bad at it, but because it's impossible to account for EVERY possible factor. They always make a better idiot. US: "Here's this square." Them: "I cut the corners off to fit it into the round hole and it no works!"
Failing to attempt to design and impliment an important feature at all is not the same as a bug. Unless I'm missing something they aren't saying "we did have systems in place to prevent people creating accounts with intentionally offensive usernames but we oopsed so it didn't work as intended until we fixed it." They're saying "it either didn't even occur to us our software needed that or we decided we just don't care so we didn't even try to do it until people pointed out that we were missing this important thing at which point we started working on it."
So, either they somehow just missed that this is something they need (which they really shouldn't have and suggests they aren't thinking even slightly about user conduct on their platform) or they did and decided they wanted to see if they could get away with just not doing it.
I understand it's easy to get lost in the core functionality of making the thing go but you can't lose sight of the actual intended outcome like this.
I suspect it may be a bit more along how you're describing here -- we expect some user experience patterns to already be in place, if not considered, like not being able to select inappropriate handles. Former Twitter folks should know 'better.' From the outside looking in, it tracks.
I wonder if the Bluesky team, right now at least, is more engineer / dev heavy, and they have not brought on UX folks to help drive a product design that considers patterns we'd be used to experiencing. They may be operating pretty lean.
An idea, at least.
I would say it’s likely they are very lean. From what I’ve heard it isn’t more than a few people closely working with Jack Dorsey full-time right now. Here’s a blog post from last year with some hints as to the size of the core team.
While they definitely know better, it’s a closed beta and most of the users have already been vetted prior to invitation. The fact that someone made a bad name means they were testing viability, which is what a closed beta is for. A team of even forty or fifty people working on a fresh project have plenty of other problems and issues to address, even if username filtering is an important one.