There are some of us who are old enough to remember Twitter’s true time of “unprecedented growth.”
I miss old Twitter.
I'll be stepping back from leading product for X
151–160 of 323 posts
Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X
#152People 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.
There was a burst of improvements over the year after Musk bought it, then it stagnated. The Hasbara bots are drowning every conversation about any subject. I'm sick of hearing about Mamdani or roofs.
Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I wonder when the re-building part is going to start for all the stuff that DOGE tore out.
Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The login gating on Twitter was relatively recent (within a year or two, IIRC) before Musk took over, and also relatively mild. Non-logged-in users could still read most tweets, conversations, lists, etc. It was annoying and user-hostile though. When Musk's people took over they very briefly removed any login gate, then very soon after they completely blocked all meaningful non-logged-in access to the site. Which is…
It was a pretty shithouse experience as a non-logged-in user before Musk, but it's a worse experience now.
Timelines were all over the place before Musk got his hands on it. And if timelines are all over the place, what's the point? (that was always my view as someone who's not logged in - and as a 'town square', I would have thought that getting its message(s) across to as many people as possible would be a goal. But no, it's just another in-club like all the others. Fuck 'em, walk on by).
Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X
#155As a random lurker, since Nikita took over I mostly only see racist, misogynistic, and pornographic content other than Elon Musk's tweets.
Twitter used to be a better place than this. I hope he is happy with the engagement that he brought on to the site.
Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The login gating on Twitter was relatively recent (within a year or two, IIRC) before Musk took over, and also relatively mild. Non-logged-in users could still read most tweets, conversations, lists, etc. It was annoying and user-hostile though. When Musk's people took over they very briefly removed any login gate, then very soon after they completely blocked all meaningful non-logged-in access to the site. Which is…
X has gone harder on login gating than the old Twitter they adopted for sure. Reddit also started going in this direction. Instagram has had it for a long time.
I suspect selling APIs for AI is playing a big role in that.
Reddit locked down their API around the time X started forcing logins (july 2023).
Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X
#157Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X
#158Haha, he seemed to do a pretty good job in the end. I stopped posting on Twitter the week Charlie Kirk got shot because I didn't want to watch a guy shot and Twitter is less controlled about this stuff. I've since gone back to read because it's definitely a good source for AI news, which I am interested in. He was given a couple of bum deals haha. The link deboosting one is something he kept going around telling people they didn't have to do but Elon's decision there stuck and now everyone does the "link in comments" thing. Watching him go around saying "hey, btw you don't have to do that" to everyone prominent was quite amusing. Did he have a social media intern dedicated to doing just that?
Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X
#159X has been great lately for me, especially compared to any of the big alternatives. Things like having auto translation, community notes, a followers tab that actually works, and account location are all fantastic.
My experience with X is you get back exactly what you seek out and put into the platform. If you are engaging with toxic political nonsense, engaging with clickbait negativity, or try to farm engagement with hot takes that's the posts you get back. If instead you simply follow PEOPLE you find interesting, ignore the noise, block the really bad, within a week your feed is cleaned up and fun to go through.
Honestly those who are still crying about X and Elon are coming off like clingy ex-lovers who can't accept that the other side isn't thinking about them anymore. Move on if you don't like Elon or X, it's fine, be happy elsewhere... we don't need to listen to the belly aching.
Re: I'll be stepping back from leading product for X
#160one recent UX change that sucks is app reload always shoehorning you into the "for you" feed instead of your own timeline -- something that previously worked since the beginning
That has always been a recurring issue on Twitter's mobile app for the last decade. They are forever trying to balance the algo feed with the following feed. The clear separation between the two is the correct course IMO. I remember when old Twitter removed that option and tried to merge the two and it was far worse.