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I'll be stepping back from leading product for X

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Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He had the good fortune to cut just as AI was beginning to mean you needed fewer software engineers for the same level of output. And yes, software companies across the industry had accumulated in many instances people whose business was not, and was sometimes orthogonal to, building software.

How is this guy who keeps starting or taking over and fixing wildly successful companies always this lucky?

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Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X

#92
post #78

People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there seems to be even more internal stuff he's improved that we haven't seen.

Yeah, my experience of Twitter has improved dramatically since I deleted my account and disavowed it completely. I don't even visit the domain. If I need to visit a link, I'll change the domain to xcancel.com instead. Now THAT is an improved web experience!

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Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X

#93
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is indeed the greatest communication techonlogy if you do not count the telegraph, the telephone, the television, radio, almost every single aspect of the internet, etc. It beats shouting from your window in reach and carrier pigeons in needing less birdfeed, though.

> the telegraph, the telephone, the television None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions. Seriously: x disintermediates and offers distribution in a way no other communication tech does. Granted you can always post a blog or whatever, but X's ambition to be the "town square" is a valid one and it does achieve it in notable ways, even if there's still 100 years worth of improvement nee…

> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions.

That's not great. That's hideous.

Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X

#94

People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there seems to be even more internal stuff he's improved that we haven't seen.

Markedly not my experience at all, haha. I stopped using it.

Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X

#95
post #41

There's a lot of negative about twitter here, especially related to timeline being shit. I'd like to give a different perspective - it's an algorithmic feed like anything else, it surfaces what you engage with. There are good niches on it. My feed is a mix of designers and AI engineers - not leaders, but people on the ground making things. There's definitely been weird things politically with it, but content wise it…

That sounds like bad design.

If you get hit by a car once, that doesn't mean you want to get hit by a car more times in the future.

What ends up happening with this algorithm is that the "for you" page is dominated by posts asking open-ended questions for engagement. You want to see game clips or screenshots, but every recommended post will ask "What game do you like the most?" or "What character of game X do you like that most?" A question that the author isn't really interested in knowing, asked only to farm engagement from passerby users.

I think that's a really ugly situation all around and a failure of how the system was designed. People should be able to just tell the algorithm what they want to see without secret trackers that promote perverse incentives.

Also, for twitter in particular, buying a subscription is pretty much buying ads on the For You page. Since users can choose to hide the blue checkmark that indicates they are paying for preferential treatment, that means, effectively, that those are promoted posts that aren't marked as "promoted" like normal ads would have to be. I think that's illegal.

Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X

#96

People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there seems to be even more internal stuff he's improved that we haven't seen.

I initially didn't abandon xitter, because I still had a bunch of accounts I followed and BlueBlocker blocked the worst accounts, however it got so bad this year that I stopped visiting at all and eventually installed the xcancel plugin

Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X

#98

People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there seems to be even more internal stuff he's improved that we haven't seen.

That must be why xcancel exists, because it was such a pleasant experience.

Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X

#99
post #29

In 2022, Twitter / X was supposed to have completely shut down according to many doomsters at the time. It is clear that many in [0], [1] and [2] also would like to ask the same question why Twitter / X still hasn't shut down. Turns out almost 4 years later, we are going to waiting even longer for the collapse. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984823 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34214903 [2] htt…

Assertions that Twitter/X was surely going to shut down after the Elon Musk acquisition were wishful thinking on the part of two groups of people:

1) political progressives who liked the way the pre-Elon-Musk management of Twitter engaged in political censorship on the platform (i.e. anyone using the term "nazi" with respect to Twitter or Musk)

2) software engineers who saw a bloated software company summarily fire a bunch of software engineers who the new leadership thought were mostly doing unimportant work, and really wanted it to be true that this was going to tank the company, because it was bad for their job security if it turned out that Twitter didn't actually need that many software engineers after all.

Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions. I take it you didn't watch much daytime television? Or YouTube? X is not designed or moderated in a reputable, accountable or unbiased fashion - and neither was Twitter. X's ambition to be a "town square" is a solipsistic delusion that even Dorsey managed to avoid (despite all the mistakes he did make). 100 years worth of improvement isn't…

Daytime television was intermediated by tv producers. Youtube's algorithm prevents big channels (or even little channels) from saying scary words like "suicide" so they play games like saying "somebody un-alived" themselves. I'm surprised HN hates X so much as a cess-pool of wrong-think: that's what you get when you let people say anything to anybody. The great challenge that X has taken on is trying to surface the u…

I think your assumption that HN hates X "because of wrong-think" is clouding your judgement. There is a long list of reasons to hate X.

For example, paying users get top spot in replies to tweets, which instantly meant spam bots with paid accounts posting completely unrelated replies on anything popular while real users who aren't trying to make money off twitter disappear at the bottom.

This isn't even complicated 4D chess user interaction design. Anyone with 2 neurons to rub together could see the obvious and immediate effect of such policy. If it's dropping the ball with something so obvious, how can you trust it to handle any situation more complex?

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