In a nut shell, this simple and often said saying exemplifies the recent change Twitch made to its web browser UI, where it relocated some of the information elements from below the video, to the top of it.
The above is the change that no one probably asked for. Yes, it is actually in a “beta/experimental” test of sorts but more about that later. The following is what it has been for ages (a reversion done with a few lines of code or one of the Twitch browser extensions, FFZ).
The change was received poorly enough that people began posting on Reddit as well as Twitch’s own UserVoice site where one post managed to gain enough traction for it to become the designated feedback; one that is 3K votes and several hundred comments since December 11th.
The moderators on the Twitch sub Reddit needed to begin removing postings about it (and making a note of it in the megathread; the bulk of the comments regarding the UI change was relocated into the new megathread).
Here is one reason it’s not the smartest thing to push an experiment to production. You end up pissing off a broader demographic of your user/customer base when there is no provision to opt-in/opt-out of this test. Additionally, beta/experimental tests should have a clear definition for what is trying to be achieved and what sort of feedback they are looking to receive from participants along with a mechanism for providing targeted feedback regarding that change.
Instead, they decided to just push this out to production to everyone using the web browser to access Twitch. Part of it wreaks of some mid-level manager trying to make themselves relevant in the organizational chart. The other more glaring part is the absolutely rudderless “leadership” from the top on down. I’m sorry if this comes across as harsh, but executives make a good sum of money to run these businesses (it isn’t a freakin charity that people are spending their money to support). Clancy of course has been under pressure from his overlords at Amazon corporate to stop the bleeding of money at Twitch. This isn’t anything new since it started under his predecessor, Shear. A large portion of the money drain isn’t just the infrastructure part (we know bandwidth costs money); lot of it has to do with many of the ridiculous tailored contracts for “top tier streaming talent” (aka the 1%). Guess where a good portion of Twitch’ revenues end up being funneled to?
It’s the usual excessive expenditure in an industry that tends to let hubris go to an extreme before someoone has to make the hard call to reign it in (startups that went through this normally ended up requiring more “adult supervision” to accomplish this). Many of us who started our career in tech witnessed this during the “dot com” era where companies had those unlimited free food/drink, parties on Friday’s (Apple HQ used to have these weekly “beer bashes” that included food and entertainment that simply became known as the “bash”). Many SV companies eventually downsized or completely eliminated the perk because of the Wall Street influence of having to show constant quarterly and year-over-year revenue growth (IMHO, that part has also gone to an excessive level where corporate responsibility to their own employees and the communities they operate in have gone out the door; looking at you Walmart where many of your rank and file employees have to apply for government assistance — but that is a rant I’ve written about before on my old blog).
I’m in no way advocating for a completely shareholder point of view either (I haven’t owned Amazon stock since the early 2000’s and have no regrets not picking it up again despite its gains because that is another corporation that abuses its rank and file workers on the retail side). My point is that anyone in senior management/c-suite, should and needs to do better because they aren’t getting paid peanuts. And just because they have this facade of being down with the demographic culturally, doesn’t mean they are your friend either. I’m just being realistic about these lines.
Sure, there is the usual corporate inertia of trying to institute changes to right the ship (so to speak). As most know, Shear stepped down and it was Clancy who needed to implement an initial reduction in force as that initial cost cutting measure. He then instituted changes including eliminating Partner’s automatic access to the 70/30 revenue split (existing Partner’s were of course grandfathered in and would not be subject to the new Partner Plus program for an interim period of time) where new Partner’s would receive a 50/50 split and would require to earn 350 points from paid subscriptions).
That change wasn’t very well received resulting in a modification a few months later (opening it up to Affiliates [which should’ve been the norm years ago], splitting it into two levels where level 1 gave a 60/40 split and required only 100 points for 3 consecutive months and level 2 unlocked a 70/30 split and required 300 points for 3 consecutive months). Note that only paid subscriptions counted towards those points (not gifted subs). The Plus program in each incarnation is good for 1 year once qualified (requires constantly meeting this qualification). Put simply, there is a time provision (for which Twitch calculated receiving a certain amount of revenue given the points requirement over 3 consecutive months).
Bottomline, this move was done to put up an artificial wall to keep the payout to 50/50 for as long as possible (and the same for 60/40). The current Plus Level 2 makes little sense for most small channels unless you are a creator who naturally pulls in a lot of subs (to make that grind of 300 points over 3 consecutive months pay off). In the meantime, the platform itself continues with being deficient in many areas (you know, the money they’ve been making gets funneled into these unrealistic contracts for those top 1% versus instead of being reinvested back into improving the core foundation of their infrastructure).
This is of course something that Clancy inherited. But he’s a scientist/engineer trying to run the entire Twitch business (and that lack of business acumen is showing). If Twitch were a tech startup, someone like him would be a better fit to drive some of the technical vision for the company. But Twitch was acquired by a corporate giant (Amazon) where the executives at that parent company mainly only give a damn about their yearly bonuses (and don’t want these parasitic drains from subsidiary units to affect that).
Going back to this simple UI change that no one really asked for and that a fairly vocal number of users are not happy with: someone posted in the megathread that Clancy was streaming and didn’t even know about this change (since viewers were obviously chiming in about it).
Not knowing about these things isn’t an issue (an executive shouldn’t have to be micromanaging things IF they have competent layers of people below them to make the proper decisions). When decisions result in subpar designs/features that aren’t well received though, then you have a problem that goes straight up the corporate ladder. While I think it is fine for him as CEO to be streaming and also doing these meetups with content creators in various regions (aka embracing the Twitch culture), the use of that time becomes questionable when you don’t see it manifesting itself into positive changes for the platform and its ecosystem. Is it cool that a CEO is hobnobbing with the regulars? Sure, but as CEO, that time should also be showing itself in decisions that one can see as positive/impactful changes. Instead, we see price increases for subscriptions and poorly implemented designs. If the community aspect of Twitch wasn’t so strong, you know that many would just bail from the platform (unfortunately, the other options aren’t better).
What I see from the outside is plenty of half-backed designs (this UI experiment is just another); especially with how poorly the mobile frontend is for really basic things like moderation, creator/streamer dashboard/tools. And they keep pushing out poor functional features/solutions (Stream Together as an example is not even quarter-baked for mobile use) in beta where certain parts of it requires hoop jumping. Clancy does live IRL as well and you cannot tell me his setup is solely reliant on Twitch’s software/backend.
Tangent time: there was a point early on when Jobs (return to Apple) advocated for employees to begin using the companies own products/services (on the enterprise side, that was ultimately challenging because until 2002, the company didn’t have their own rack-mountable hardware server line [with mission critical features] that ran OS X Server until the Xserve was released). Prior to that, parts of Apple did try to appease Jobs (as interim CEO) by using Mac hardware (in a RAIC – redundant array of inexpensive computers) to run some services (one of those was an early version of their system status site). Yes, doing this highlights the deficiencies and areas that need to be addressed if you want to have viable solutions that those demographics you are trying to sell solutions to, want to use.
As someone who worked on OS X Server, I even used the product for my home server (firewall, file and email services). But there was no way in good faith that I could sell a company on using this as a mission critical solution for running their entire business (if they were looking for a complete turnkey mission critical setup on the product) until there was that hardware to back it up. And that was only a small part of it (because there are also things like service level agreements and support; a foreign concept in a company that was mostly consumer focused). By contrast, Sun Microsystems (later acquired by Oracle) could sell their scalable solutions because they had that type of environment and structure (along with “eating their own dog food” years before the dot com bubble began). But I digress…
The above (where Clancy was streaming and didn’t know about the change )… well it’s been several days and the experiment/test UI is still in place despite the growing number of votes and comments regarding it. He received direct feedback about the change/the negative reception to it and the fact that we can simply revert it with an extension, shows it to be a change that didn’t require (one of their web devs) much time/effort to do. Thus what good is it having an accessible communication channel to the CEO via his Twitch streams when it doesn’t result in an actual public response by the company as to why this experiment is being done plus addressing the negative reaction to it. This is BASIC corporate PR at this point (once an executive is aware of something, you address it publicly as quickly as possible). It also doesn’t reflect well on Clancy as CEO. It’s like who exactly is in charge at Twitch? My answer would be the manager who okayed pushing out this garbage of an experimental test to production. I normally don’t like being harsh like this, but things like this deserve to be critiqued without the sugarcoating.
Some would argue that Clancy is at least not like an Elon Musk and we’re lucky in that regards (Musk has an oligarchs agenda and would destroy any business if that business could be used for that agenda like what he did with Twitter). Yes, Clancy isn’t in that same league (he’s not a billionaire nor making that level of compensation). But he is still being compensated at a decent amount (despite a prior joke comment that he wasn’t making much than some hourly waged individual). At the end of the day, he is the one with that executive title and is responsible for how well that entire “boat” is running as its captain. Right now, Twitch has people rowing that boat in different directions (aka rudderless “leadership”).
UPDATE: I didn’t even notice there was a pull down for the truncated titles (which looks awful from an aesthetics point of view). You need to hover over the area to get the the pulldown arrow to display; it then proceeds to obscure a small part of the top portion of the video. Actually clicking it to reveal the entire title + tags, obscures an even larger portion of the top of the video.
I’m not going to mince words… this is pure knucklehead territory for whomever thought this was remotely a good implementation even for an experimental test. How long this experimental test lasts before it is either pulled or actually is finalized, will determine how much more poorly I view DJ Clancy as a “leader” of this company. Man, I thought the critiques I used to write about gaming was negative inducing; enough to the point where I pushed myself away from that. I’m seeing a similar type of thing here (the saving grace are the content creators that I engage with; if it weren’t for that, I’d just go beyond the previous deactivation and delete my account off of Twitch).
