[Aurornis]

> It's wonderful that Luis von Ahn says in interviews that he tries to prevent teams from cluttering the app, but it seems like he lost the battle.

This is classic PR spin. Do one thing, publicly say you’re not doing it. Try to get the benefit of good intentions while doing the opposite.

The CEO doesn’t lose any battles with the product managers. He could reverse the changes in a matter of days by calling a meeting or sending an email.

What’s actually happening here is they Product Managers are responding to what gets rewarded at the company, which ultimately comes from the CEO.

[amsilprotag]

A CEO has the power to do anything, but employees have the power to collectively, quietly sandbag if they don't like the leadership. I think the AI effort led to a broad disillusionment, causing an unwillingness to put extra effort into their work. Across the company, everyone starts to take the path of least resistance. The CEO senses his influence waning and becomes more accommodating to avoid further morale death spiral. So situations can arise where a CEO would like a cleaner product (no one likes to ship garbage), but has lost the political capital to make it happen.

[Aurornis]

> The CEO senses his influence waning and becomes more accommodating to avoid further morale death spiral.

If you read the article you’ll see how the CEO wrote a memo about how productivity expectations will rise and started cutting contractors in favor of AI.

To suggest that this CEO was afraid of reducing morale by asking employees to put fewer pop-ups in the app is completely backward.

I don’t understand why you’re so intent on defending this particular CEO as trying to maintain morale when we’re quite literally in a comment section for an article where the CEO made a drastic anti-employee move that everyone could have seen was a morale destroyer.

It’s also hard to imagine a situation where the people making the app really, really want to pollute it with pop-ups and other junk, and they have to band together to resist the CEO’s efforts to make a good app, and then on top of all that the CEO rolls over and lets them do it despite wishing they wouldn’t.

The simplest explanation is that the employees are building the app and setting direction as mandated by executives. The app we see is the result of what executives are rewarding and asking for.

[amsilprotag]

Maybe you are right that I give too much benefit of the doubt. I have been following the saga and I believe the AI turn was a bad move on every level. That's why I stopped using the app. But I can still believe that the CEO doesn't want to ship the cluttered garbage that is the present app. I think the pop-ups are a net-negative even purely financially with churn outweighing subscriptions. So my model for the situation is that he spent his credibility on AI, which was bad, and now doesn't have the credibility to spend to change the metrics that guide every team's behavior, so the company decays entropically. Maybe the clutter comes from the CEO trying to up subscriptions, but based on the first 10 years of the app, I believe he has better taste than to do that, so I look for a more complex explanation. Again, may be giving too much benefit of the doubt.

[edit: thinking about it more, I think I have built up a lot of goodwill with the app over the years, and it's a strange mental process for years of goodwill to evaporate over the course of a few weeks]

[sumeno]

> But I can still believe that the CEO doesn't want to ship the cluttered garbage that is the present app.

If the CEO truly wants this he should resign because he is at best a completely ineffectual leader. The reality is he wants more money so he wants to pack as much engagement bait into the app as possible to juice numbers as please investors