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Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

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241–250 of 1001 posts

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#241
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> turned out that G. Hotz is just another midwit like anyone else I understand your point, but I think this sort of discourse leads people down the wrong path. G. Hotz is a pretty smart engineer. What he lacks at twitter is probably not engineering ability, but organization ability. The problem is likely not that the individual engineers aren't smart, it's that they end up working together to make each other worse th…

Making big promises and then underdelivering seems like his MO in general. His AI hardware startup went from "AMD makes quality AI hardware but bad software, I'm raising money to completely rewrite the entire AMD software/driver stack to make it better for AI, how hard can it be?" to him complaining to AMD about buggy drivers and AI tooling (when the whole point of his company was throwing all that out and writing ne…

His M.O. and that of everyone in Elon's orbit. That's how we got DOGE: a bunch of people of well below average skills and intelligence who nevertheless believe themselves to be the masters of the universe promised to radically improve government efficiency and greatly reduce waste, but found out that the government has been wound as tightly as possible by a bunch of hardened bureaucrats who paid attention in school, know how to use slide rules, are aren't ruled by "vibes".

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's worth less than half of what he paid for it, lost 30 million users and went from being the default microblog to facing real competition in daily active users from ~~bluesky~~threads ( https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail... ). Building what X is today from nothing would be an incredible accomplishment but building what X is today out of what Twitter was in 2022 is still a pretty miserable…

https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats You can judge for yourself whether bluesky is a competitive threat.

That link errors ("Failed to fetch" banner on the page) for me. Perhaps hugged to death, but I would be interested in the DAUs/MAUs if they're available.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search is a pretty solved problem if you are willing to invest the resources to create a inverted index of all the text you want to search. An inverted index of all tweets would be pretty expensive. Creating text embeddings for semantic search would be the next stage and even more expensive.

It is very much not a solved problem. Because the implication behind search is not "well the result you need is technically in the result set", it's "the result you need as at the top", and that remains an extremely difficult problem for anything but a trivial scale.

Good support for regex and boolean operators helps a lot with that. But that requires user skill.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More and more I think Musk managed to his take over of Twitter pretty successfully. X still isn't as strong a brand as Twitter where, but it's doing okay. A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there. The only issue is that Musk vastly overpaid for Twitter, but if he plans to keep it and use it for his political ambitions, that might not matter. Also remember tha…

Same opinion. I absolutely hate what he did to Twitter and never in my life I will call it "X" - BUT - it looks to me as if the engagement is thriving. Edit: clarified that the engagement is thriving

Estimates are that its revenue has decreased by half. Even if Musk decreased operating expenses enough to keep or even increase profits, a 50% drop in revenue is not at all a good sign for the health of business.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same opinion. I absolutely hate what he did to Twitter and never in my life I will call it "X" - BUT - it looks to me as if the engagement is thriving. Edit: clarified that the engagement is thriving

Thriving? Its valuation has tanked since his purchase and last I read they’re still actively losing users.

Yes I know. But the platform has lots and lots of engagement. Stagnation did not happen. Quite the opposite.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both things can be true: Valuation did drop during her tenure, AND she was not to blame. Therefore the praise is weird, because she seemingly neither helped nor hurt the business.

> she was not to blame. Fall guys bear some of the blame in the fall. My long-held [0] personal theory - borne out by everything Musk has done, and by who bought Twitter - is that it was bought to curb the possibility of large positive social movements along the lines of OWS or BLM. Enabling that can entail being useless at your supposed job, while doing your actual job (which deserves some amount of blame, from a nu…

It's conspiratorial thinking to assume that everything that happens in the world is perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight. Maybe a formerly-brilliant but drug-addled rich guy just bought a social media platform with bad fundamentals at the height of its valuation and then mismanaged it while flailing around with other ventures and political adventures. Occam's razor.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Politically correct" in the US context means essentially the same thing as "woke". In both cases, the word or phrase was adopted first by progressives, then by critics of progressives to refer to progressive beliefs and sensibilities. It is surprising to find someone that doesn't know that, but would be less surprising if you don't live in the US.

> It is weird that “political correctness” has been taken to mean, like, being polite and nice to people or something. > "Politically correct" in the US context means essentially the same thing as "woke" I think it is (hopefully?) obvious from my comment that I actually do understand what it means in the US context, I was describing the odd situation WRT the US meaning and the origin of the phrase https://en.m.wikipe…

I knew about the Soviet use, which is why I qualified with "in the US context".

Every use I've ever heard from a US speaker -- almost certainly over 100 uses, going back to when Reagan was President or maybe a year or 2 after Reagan -- is a reference to progressive beliefs and sensibilities regardless of whether the progressives are in power or not.

You are introducing your own definition of a phrase that everyone currently agrees on the meaning of. When this is done for no good reason, it is harmful because everyone relies on language to think together, so when the meaning of words get muddied unnecessarily, we get worse at thinking together.

What, pray, is your reason?

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#249
post #50

X has been nothing short of an exercise in brand destruction. However, despite all the drama, it still stands, it still exists, and it remains relevant.

I certainly wouldn't call it brand destruction, a lot of people returned to X and while the branding has changed, I certainly wouldn't call it brand destruction

They had managed to get a verb into relatively common speech and their revenue has collapsed since the Musk take over I'd say it's pretty thoroughly destroyed.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#250

One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster. She never had any say and worst part is she was not even a good fall guy, it was clear who’s pulling the strings. The most immaterial and inconsequential hire ever. I love all the replies on Twitter thanking her but during her time the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising. Remarkably inept.

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