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Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

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651–660 of 1001 posts

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#651
post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it. I thought more people would see a guy doing ... that salute, or things like the antisemitism in Grok in the past few days and say "no", but a huge number of people seem to be able to rationalize things away. I'm with Wil Wheaton https://bsky.app/profile/wilwheaton.net/post/3ltkjyzjb4k2p

I am seriously restricting my inbound and outbound reach by boycotting X. It's a hit I can afford to take, but for some people they'd be making a very foolish choice when that's where their audience and the content they want to read is.

NPR found that they really didn't lose much:

https://bsky.app/profile/carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3l...

But sometimes you have to make some sacrifices in life over your principles.

And the more people move, the easier it is for everyone else.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#652
post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am seriously restricting my inbound and outbound reach by boycotting X. It's a hit I can afford to take, but for some people they'd be making a very foolish choice when that's where their audience and the content they want to read is.

NPR found that they really didn't lose much: https://bsky.app/profile/carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3l... But sometimes you have to make some sacrifices in life over your principles. And the more people move, the easier it is for everyone else.

NPR's audience is very different from mine (AI researchers and thinkers) though. Some communities seem to have managed the move wholesale: all the cartoonists I like switched, for example.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#653
post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The media gets their news from Twitter and Twitter drives the questions the media asks. It's indirectly a bigger factor than you give it credit for.

The vast majority of his base, and a majority of his voters, doesn't even trust legacy media unless it agrees with Trump. Even Fox News is routinely under fire not by Trump, but by his fans and Republicans broadly. I very much doubt there was a different set of questions that would change peoples' minds about him after how his first term went.

I think you're confusing the majority with the most audible.

The silent majority imho exists and is still the one deciding, not political activists on social media of both ends of the spectrum in their respective echo chambers.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well sure if you give up on moderation, and close the platform to people who aren't signed in, and shut off the API then yes you didn't need the people supporting those parts of the platform. And I guess if you consider "the place with the MechaHitler AI" as good branding there's no arguing with you that it's doing just as well as Twitter.

I don't agree with the direction Musk has set for X, but businesswise it's not doing worse. Twitter was a financial catastrophe before the take over, so you didn't need much improvement. Moderation was a financial drain, the API didn't make them any money and none of the users seems to care all that much about the platform not being open to users without an account... because they all have accounts and wasn't able to…

Well, the HitlerGrok thing happened yesterday...

I ask this genuinely and without any intent to cause offense: given your name, are you a bit?

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#655
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.

Relevant to who? My employers marketing has stopped using X and posts now on LinkedIn exclusively (we do B2B software).

My partners workplace does consumer marketing and only TikTok (for young people) and Facebook (for old people) are truly relevant anymore. If a customer has lots of money to waste, they'll also do Instagram and YouTube.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has it tanked? X is still running, it still has millions of users.

The site is incredibly broken. It returns API errors randomly and shows profile tweets out of order. It's on Pintrest levels of broken.

I believe showing tweets out of order on profiles is a feature to show the most engaging content to unlogged in users.

It's annoying as hell

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#657

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…

I cannot see how it was a success. 1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error. 2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche. 3. The firings did not go well. X has struggl…

I’m pretty lazy about curating my feed, but I do a little. And I never see any porn bots and only rarely any spam accounts. Political stuff, yes, but I don’t mind and it’s not a ton, in fact my feed has a lot more insightful analysis than advocacy. I still get a lot of “breaking news” that I’d otherwise have to be very active on Facebook to get, especially regarding other countries.

I guess that’s just TL;DR: YMMV, but I do think there are a lot of people on X who find it very useful and don’t run into the problems you listed.

As for Elon’s overpayment, I have thought about actually paying for an account, which I never would have done on Old Twitter.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#658

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…

I cannot see how it was a success. 1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error. 2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche. 3. The firings did not go well. X has struggl…

3. Didn’t go well? I don’t remember twitter (x) crashing for days or data erased. Means that organizations don’t need that many people. One thing I learned from this is to not trust so called “experts” or loud voices.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posted the Wikipedia page, do you really think I don't know how long ago Tay was? I don't think the capabilities matter if we're just talking about chat bots being racist online. Also IDK what you mean by third+ flavor? I'm not familiar with other bad Grok releases, but I don't really use it, I just see it's responses on Twitter. Also do you not remember the Google image model that made the founding fathers differe…

To catch you up, this happened 2 months ago - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...

Yes, I had forgotten about that. Was super weird and forced into conversations from what I saw.

Definitely a bit of a trend now with mecha hitler...

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