crowsby

I would caution some patience and suspicion on this story.

• Zillow says that the sale information was a mistake and has since been removed.

• Meanwhile, this headline is sourced from a straight-up clickbait site reposting a story from a news website with a history of mixed factual reporting.

We all get the fun brain chemicals coming out when a big juicy story like this appears and validates our worldviews and we can’t wait to share and amplify it, but spreading misinformation is bad, m’kay?

This is what I believe too. With interest rates rising, companies have been under a great deal of pressure to show profitability, and especially with Reddit aiming for an IPO, it seemed (superficially at least) a great idea to badger their userbase into adopting their mobile app, where they could be monetized to a much larger extent.

So of course they made the conditions of using their new API incredibly onerous.

The whole point was to discourage developers from using it. And then by cherrypicking a handful of select 3rd-party developers to offer more amenable terms to on the downlow, they can show that they were just being reasonable good guys, and doing their best to work with everyone, and that it must be the developers at fault if they decided to walk away and abandon their users.

So yeah, they’ve managed to get their app center stage, and the only minor tradeoffs have been:

• Launching/boosting a fleet of competitors (lemmy/kbin/squabbles/discuit/tildes/etc)
• Driving their very talented 3rd-party app devs into making apps for said competitors
• Creating a massive breach of trust between Reddit Inc and its unpaid volunteer mods
• Squandering any remaining goodwill Reddit once had in the tech community
• Driving away folks who enjoy using 3rd-party apps
• Ruining the image of the CEO
• Negatively affecting the overall community to the point where it’s both a more hostile and unpleasant site, and simultaneously less moderated.

I agree with the author in that balancing actual work vs. meta-work like writing tickets/documentation/scoping tickets is always going to be a pain point regardless of the project management system in play. Jira can be fine in that regard, but it also gives PMs & managers an opportunity to tinker with things and “improve” workflows in the glorious name of adding value.

It reminds me of the old quote about democracy: “Jira is the worst form of project management software except for all the others”.

I work in data analysis and reporting on various feedback systems is part of my regular role. Every company’s data culture is different, so you can’t simply say “X is the reason why they’re doing this”. It could be:

• Maybe they are incorporating the data into agent/product reviews.
• Maybe they are trying to guide product & feature development on a quantitative basis
• Maybe at one point a product manager wanted to be “data-driven”, so a feedback system was set up, but now it’s basically ignored now that they haven’t been with the company for over a year and nobody wants to take ownership of it. But it’s more effort to remove than just leave in place.
• Maybe it’s used when we want to highlight our successes, and ignored when we want to downplay results we don’t like

What I’ve found is that there are a lot of confounding factors. For example, I work for a job board, and most people use the Overall Satisfaction category as more of a general measurement of how their job search is going, or whether or not they got the interview, rather than an assessment of how well our platform serves that purpose. And it’s usually going very shittily because job searching is a generally shitty process even when everything is going “right”.