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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

#141

Post by jknoepfler »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #90
dagmx wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your assessment. My twitter feed pre and post Elon’s takeover changes dramatically. Pre his takeover , it would more reliably show me my niches of design, technology, gamedev etc After his take over I’d start seeing more and more boosted content from frankly abhorrent individuals. The whole blue check mark thing being paid instead of truly verified also messed with the algorithm. I’m sure it’s doable…

My feed suddenly started showcasing far-right lunatics and grifters. It didn't settle down until I blocked them all - which was drastic, but did the job.

were you able to block Elon?

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

#142

Post by kennywinker »

dmix wrote: post #105
solid_fuel wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web experience has improved? You can’t even view a thread any more without being logged in or using a 3rd party site. They’ve actively made the web experience unusable for most people. But considering they’ve also drastically reduced the quality of content on the platform, one could say they’ve done casual users a favor.

Funny enough, one of the first thing Elon's team did after buying Twitter was remove login gating. There was a big bottom signup CTA on the old Twitter. Then at some point I guess they realized why the old Twitter team did that in the first place (financial pressure for targeted ads) and went harder in that direction to also push for subscriptions. I still disagree with it, since it's a poor first experience. Replyin…

Tearing something out only to re-build it a few months later is classic tech industry move fast and break things hubris.

Most things exist for a reason, and if you don’t know the reason that doesn’t mean it’s a bad reason - it just means you don’t know the whole story.

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

#143

Post by claytongulick »

I recently had my account hacked - it was a pure lurker account, I only scrolled elephant videos and such, and never posted or did reactions or anything.

Someone logged in to my account from a state I'd never logged in from before and posted a bunch of spam for an hour.

X perma banned my account. They told me I was banned for life, and any account I ever tried to make in the future would be banned. I appealed, explained that my account had obviously been hacked. It was denied.

So, ok.

I went and canceled all of my business subscriptions to Super Grok, and removed any business relationship I have with them. I've been banned for life, after all.

After a couple months, I have to say, it's been a total positive development. I miss the elephant videos, but I absolutely don't miss the constant background anxiety from political outrage/engagement farming. I liked grok, got some laughs from unhinged mode, but don't really notice not having it anymore, lots of good options out there. Hell, I get 90% of what I want (better search experience, summaries) from Kagi.

It's wild to think that people are going to be relying on X for financial stuff now.

Hope their accounts don't get hacked.

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

#144

Post by mypalmike »

tayo42 wrote: post #73
762236 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild to me how many replies are like this. I like X. HN, on the other hand is miserable, with censorship through down votes of unorthodox thinkers (PG would be completely down voted if he were to post here anonymously).

What unorthodox thoughts get filtered out by downvotes?

It’s “censorship” when he gets downvoted for extreme right wing commentary, like supporting the complete elimination of USAID for one example.

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

#145

Post by celticninja »

mmonaghan wrote: post #57

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.

It's a far right cesspit run by the worlds most egotistical racist asshole, so if you think the experience has improved that says a lot about your character and political affiliation.

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

#146

Post by bigyabai »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #38
bigyabai wrote: post #12

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 agree with the other commenters here - your assumption that all of us hate it for "wrong-think" is precluding your judgement here.

Twitter was also not a good social media, in my opinion. Jack Dorsey was a pretty clueless leader and ostensibly talentless businessman. The platform was mostly loved ironically by jaded millennials, and the entire thing became a laconic quip-off between minor celebrities and brand representatives. It set the stage for LinkedIn-tier corporate cringe content that became a tentpole of late Twitter and now X too. Celebrities fled the site for personal use and left it as a political shit-slinging platform for C-tier online influencer personalities to rile up their audiences. The universal appeal that made Twitter interesting for bored idiots was completely abandoned in favor of this new ragebait paradigm. Worse yet, X is just as debt-ridden as Twitter was, so Elon is walking around to political haymakers just like Chris Poole did when his forum was bleeding cash: https://boingboing.net/2026/02/05/epstein-met-4chans-founder...

People like you existed back in the Twitter days too, insisting that it was valuable to ignore the site politics, trending topics, livestreams, crypto/NFT features and focus on the minority of positive content on the site. Those people were frankly deluded back in 2016, and you're equally as deluded trying to convince people that a cash-poor federal honeypot is tolerable now because the Hawk Tuah girl uses it to interact with her audience. You're the target audience for this slop, and you bit it hook line and sinker like a Facebook mom.

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

#147

Post by gilthelander »

solid_fuel wrote: post #83
mmonaghan wrote: post #57

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.

The web experience has improved? You can’t even view a thread any more without being logged in or using a 3rd party site. They’ve actively made the web experience unusable for most people. But considering they’ve also drastically reduced the quality of content on the platform, one could say they’ve done casual users a favor.

All of your complaints are true of present-day Reddit.

It has become completely unusable.

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

#148

Post by jfaat »

tyre wrote: post #49
saagarjha wrote: post #8

I guess he decided he had ruined the platform enough. Before he joined X had already implemented the login wall stuff that only let you view a single post, by the time he left it would show a tapping animation trying to beg you to install the app, open the App Store immediately if you interacted with anything, and put up a bunch of popovers. I hope that his changes increased engagement in the way he had hoped.

Nikita was always a bad hire. If you look at his history, he’s really good at growth hacking apps to pump-and-dump into acquisitions. He hasn’t proven himself in building lasting products. His last app, Gas, saw meteoric growth from some truly impressive growth hacking on children, but then got acquired by Discord and very soon after tanked. Same with whatever he’d sold to Facebook. His (and others’ defense) to criti…

> truly impressive growth hacking on children

I haven't been more viscerally disgusted by a phrase I've read about tech in a while. Astonishing word choice.

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

#149

Post by pessimizer »

tamimio wrote: post #133
mmonaghan wrote: post #57

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.

>improved What?! I don’t use twitter much but in the few times i open it, it’s basically un-browsable, a complete utter shit: the performance, the UI, the overall experience is just worse. Just open a tweet now with a video in it, without being a user, and report back your “improved” experience.

You can't be implying that twitter's UI suddenly became shit when Musk bought it. It had become the worst popular site on the web years before.

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

#150

Post by umeshunni »

lesuorac wrote: post #112
JuniperMesos wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You don't think he tanked the company? Twitter used to be profitable. Now, it needed to be folded into xAI to survive. Then that combined mass needed to be folded into SpaceX to survive. Then that combined mass needed to IPO to survive. Sure, Elon can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Doesn't make it not a tank.

> Twitter used to be profitable.

Twitter posted a profit in only two of its eight full fiscal years (turning profitable in 2018 and 2019)

In its last year (2021), Twitter reported a net loss of $221 million on $5.1 billion in revenue.

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