Comment by hmokiguess
16 hours ago
This sort of stuff to me is an example of fear within an organization. Whenever I see engineering resources allocated towards self promotion and branding rather than quality and features for its users it shows how leaders want control over narratives.
It's equally possible there was one engineer with some free time who thought it would be cool.
Implementing a watermark isn't a thing anyone thinks is a cool feature they want to try out.
what do you mean, it's a very normal cool thing that everyone loves
Sent from my Ryobi Riding Lawnmower
I mean. I read this and immediately thought it was a cool thing I'd like to try out
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This is correct. I was tired of Bluesky screenshots looking bland, no culture of fear needed
It's probably silly to make OP's judgement of any of these implementations in isolation, but you can sense a real fear about the growth (or lack thereof) inside Bluesky. Fiddling with the presented metrics (likes count getting moved ahead of reposts), promoting total user signups while being silent on collapsing DAUs. They are promising a lot at once with AI custom feeds from Attie and subreddit-style communities that smells like feature creep.
Your indicators that we're afraid about growth is that we're shipping features and experimental new products?
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Adding a watermark, how radical, dude
And such engineer would have enough organizational clout to just ship it without going through anyone?
That's how a modern organization works. You trust your colleagues will do good work, and will ship something useful and there's not really "someone to go through".
I agree this can be defined as cool and very very likely someone did this on their free time/prompted Claude on the side.
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Bluesky has <100 employees so it could be possible
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Yes actually Sam often ships random fun things he feels like doing.
You're fun
Marketing, like every other functional part of a business, requires technology and engineers. This has nothing to do with fear, you just don’t respect non-engineering work as critical to running a business.
Someone spending half a day on a feature that places the app's logo in the screenshot so people seeing it can know where it came from is "fear within an organization"? You've got to be kidding lol