2 
Twitter is bragging because it didn’t go down on Election Day. The info-bloat peaked at 327,452 tweets-per-minute last night, and not a single Fail Whale appeared! High fives all around! Way to… work like you’re supposed to.
Because, reading Twitter’s own statements and the commentary by some of the press, it appears that you all should be grateful that Twitter didn’t collapse in on itself. After years of crapping out constantly, Twitter didn’t crap out yesterday. Not crapping out—even while you weren’t supposed to crap out in the first place—is what counts as a raging success nowadays.
Yes, maybe that’s the benchmark of excellence now. Here, Twitter. Take a medal for not sucking.
After all, the tech world is now pure beta culture. It permeates everything—software, hardware and internet services. The planet is bursting with half-baked products and features full of bugs and pathetic excuses.
The bad news: It’s not them. It’s us. It’s entirely our own fault. Instead of rejecting those beta products and services, we grab them with our greedy little hands and suck on them. We see the obvious bugs and, instead of returning the product or deleting the app, we learn to live with it. We work around it. We’ve taught ourselves to accept—even be happy with—substandard shit.
We gave Apple free passes for Antennagate, Siri and Maps. We give Twitter a free pass whenever a white whale flies to the skies. We lived with Microsoft’s ubiquitous Blue Screen of Death and the Xbox 360′s Red Ring of Death for years. Or Sony and its multiple Playstation 3 bugs. Or Google and all its beta crap. Don’t get me started on RIM. The list is endless.
As long as the company issues a letter from the CEO saying “Yeah, we suck, sorry about that! We’ll be sure to fix it someday. Thanks for buying, suckers!” everything is good. And then, if by some miracle the bug actually does get fixed, we’re ecstatic, grateful because our product doesn’t suck quite as much. Stockholm syndrome. Silicon Valley syndrome.
It’s just sad. And it’s been like this for so long; I’ve been hammering at the point since 2008:
Personally, I’m tired of all this. But I’m mostly tired about the fact that it seems that we all have given up. Tired because now we see “upgrades” as an opportunity to protect our investment, but in reality, it’s laziness and a poor job on the manufacturer part that we have accepted without questioning. Instead of calling foul play and refusing to participate, we keep buying [or using their services].
That’s the key: We have surrendered in the name of progress and marketing and product cycles and consumerism. Maybe those are good reasons, I don’t know, but looking at the past, it feels like we are being conned. Deceived because the manufacturers of electronic products have taken our desire to progress faster and even embrace the web beta culture as an excuse to rush things to market, to blatantly admit bugs and the rushed features sets and sell the patches as upgrades.
TL;DR: Stop bragging about not sucking, Twitter. You and everyone else. This is nothing to be proud about. This is how things should be from day one.
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You can live on the technological edge and sometimes get cut, or you can stay in your cave and hope someone perfects fire that won’t burn you before you die of cold.
Okay, I normally have a go at Jesus ‘haterz’ but this article is truly, truly terrible.
I disagree. Although I’m not a Jesus ‘hater’ I sometimes find a lot of his articles weak but this one I agree with the main point.
We, as technology buyers have over the last few years become willing to accept ‘betas’ or half-finished products and it is puzzling to me why.
Personally I wouldn’t buy a car with a known ‘issue’ like brakes that work at 75% efficiency or fly in a plane that is a ‘beta’ design that will aid the manufactures to build a better one after a few crashes and yet we buy phones etc with issues and just accept it. Weird indeed; maybe it’s because they don’t put us at risk generally, unlike my examples.
Idea to test hypotheses: A phone company should bring out a phone with a 20,000mAh battery (ten times the power/life currently) which may ‘shock’ you occasionally, ranging from a small static-type shock all the way through to serious pain and announce it as a ‘beta’ issue.
I think that’s because half finished cars and planes can kill you, like you admit. And both cars and planes do have teething problems! Life is full of risks, I guess I’d rather have 99% of the product 5 years earlier, since it take a lot longer to fix the final 1% than the first 99. I agree with beta, but he is bemoaning all mistakes, not just beta-based.
Like I just said to another commenter on this post, I actually thought this was a decent opinion piece. Can’t please everyone.
I normally appreciate his articles, this is probably the second article of his I’ve ever gone ‘nah’ to. I suppose that just shows quite how hard it is to please all your readers.
It’s pretty much impossible, yeah.
I just wish Diaz would go away, his rants become increasingly tedious
Actually, I thought this was one of his better ones. Each to their own, I guess (I know it’s fashionable to hate on his posts).
damn, missed another fashion ‘stage’
Well I don’t see much people “excited” because twitter or whatever else “don’t suck”. Generally people have more important things to get excited such as their careers, social life etc. Well maybe with the exception of the people who queue for buying new gadgets…
“Tired because now we see “upgrades” as an opportunity to protect our investment, but in reality, it’s laziness and a poor job on the manufacturer part that we have accepted without questioning. Instead of calling foul play and refusing to participate, we keep buying [or using their services].”
if upgrades and updates are laziness, is this pretty much an upgraded 4 year old post?