Put down the mic

Thoughts on ‘feedback via Twitter’

Imagine you’ve planned a fabulous web development conference with two fellow colleagues in the industry, Susan & James. It is now running without any problems but you are still very frustrated because it hasn’t been an easy time preparing for this conference. James really didn’t do the things you believed he was supposed to do and the conference has suffered as a result. It is time for the final keynote, you have 600 attendees present in the conference room as you grab the mic. You realize that this is an opportunity to tell everyone what a shitty job James has done! You can vent to an audience and you might even get a few laughs at his expense. James is in the room though so he will be very upset and embarrassed if you say anything.

So do you say anything?

I would assume not, because you’re a decent human being. I would assume that you would have a quiet word with James and explain your grievances privately instead of airing them to the entire conference.

I’m going to ask you to imagine another scenario now. Imagine you’re using a website or app that happened to be built by another James. The site is super buggy. The scroll is janky and some of the buttons aren’t very responsive.

You compose an angry tweet calling out the site for its terrible performance to be posted to your 600+ followers.

Do you post it? Have you posted it? Have you done this several times? I know I have.

Do you think the two scenarios above are different? What if I told you James is ‘in the room’ in the tweeting scenario? Because he is. I have been James. Many of us have been James.

Some people have built their entire careers on writing books and giving talks and generally telling us how not to build the web. For the rest of us web creators in the real world we build projects under hard constraints. Constraints that include budget limits, short timelines, client needs, business needs, audience or simply the needs of our direct superior. The end result is websites and products that are left wanting in certain areas. And as people who care about the web, using websites that are imperfect makes us angry.

We get angry because we care. I understand that. I know we all just want to make the web better. And I want to make it clear that I’m not suggesting we should stop having opinions on how to build the web. I am suggesting that what we do with those opinions is very important.

Full disclosure: part of the reason I feel so strongly about this is because I have been on the receiving end of a lot of ‘feedback via Twitter’. At Active Theory we do some things that anger people, including but not limited to: purely JavaScript generated markup, ‘animating everything’, making people rotate their phone to a preferred orientation, and taking a somewhat greedy chunk of the CPU. I’m on the internet and I’m active in the web community. I see most of the blog posts, reddit posts and twitter comments that call projects that I and my colleagues have worked on ‘stupid’, ‘slow’, and ‘pointless’. Every single time it feels like a slap in the face.

Here’s a crazy suggestion: if you see something you don’t agree with, maybe you could do something productive with your opinion instead of blowing hot hair in to the twittersphere. If you have a problem with a website, find out a way to contact the owners and send them your thought out (constructive!) criticism via email. If you want to complain about my work feel free to email me, and I can take on your opinions and have a meaningful discussion with you on why we made the choices we did (spoiler alert: it has something to do with timeline, budget & client needs).

If you find problems in an open source project, maybe you could make a pull request and try and fix it! If people are building Front End frameworks that you disagree with, try contributing to one that aligns with your belief how things should be done. If you think someone’s open source efforts are ‘dumb’ or ‘pointless’, maybe just keep that opinion to yourself.

I’m not trying to be the girl that does not even go here suggesting that we bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles that everyone would eat and be happy. I’m just challenging you to stop and think about what else you could do before putting another web professional’s work ‘on blast’.

Can you somehow contact the person responsible before telling everyone else?

Before you set down to write your “X things not to do in Y design” blog post complete with screenshots of work to be shamed, can you ask yourself if there is a way to make your point without stepping on others?

Can you log a git issue before complaining publicly about a project’s shortcomings?

Who are the people you follow on Twitter? is your timeline filled with negative ranty opinions or is it filled with useful advice and/or encouraging messages? Who do you want to surround yourself with and emulate?

I ask you to think about this because if you can’t take the time to find an appropriate avenue for feedback, but can take the time to craft a perfectly witty and mean criticism of another person’s work in 140 characters or less — I would suggest you are not improving the web, you are just being an asshole.

I’d like to hope that together we can make our industry a little kinder and more constructive. That we can put down the mic and instead have real personal conversations about what we can do to improve. If we put our own selfish desire to feel superior aside for a second, it can only make the web a better place to work and be.