I'll be stepping back from leading product for X • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by SilverBirch » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 7:34 AM UTC

afavour wrote: post #3

https://xcancel.com/nikitabier/status/2085105586966827343#m The most consequential change in recent years has been to pay users for posting controversial content. For me that killed the service. Anything else is secondary.

It’s been pretty clear for a while that Nikita has been looking at the ways twitter is bad- foreign accounts stoking hatred in the west for cash.

He started putting in ways to change it and put in better incentives (not monetizing this rage baiters, disclosing country of origin). The problem is, the people he screws by doing that are the exact accounts Elon Musk loves, do every time he wanted to make a change cat turd would go screaming to daddy. Hence why I find it so unsurprising he’s quitting.

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

#242

Post by DaSHacka » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 7:39 AM UTC

dashundchen wrote: post #127

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irrationally? The man fired tens of thousands of American citizens from their jobs on a whim, disproportionately veterans. Failed at his ultimate goal after firing everyone, and then just left. Seems very rational to hate someone who messes with your livelihood to stroke his ego

Is also partially responsible and yet for the death of hundred of thousands of people around the world, if not more via the gleeful "deletion" of USAID. Musk is an evil narcissistic stain on humanity. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/chikungunya/quick-takes-death-tol...

[flagged]

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

#243

Post by DaSHacka » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 7:40 AM UTC

ScoobleDoodle wrote: post #225

HaloZero wrote: post #192

I will give him credit for launching country-of-origin. I'm really curious if it's been effective at all for users to get signal. I don't use X anymore since Musk bought it but though it was an interesting choice.

Was the account origin feature removed soon after release?

Not sure, but it's active as of now FWIW

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

#244

Post by theshrike79 » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 7:45 AM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #237

LaurensBER wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they all blocked each other in the purity battle I listen to a bunch of (far) left podcast to balance out my media consumption and the amount of bickering about purity is both amusing and slightly scary. Both the wide span of subjects (from racism, to sexism, to ablism, there's something new every day!) and depth ("it's not my job to educate you and here are 5 books about lived experiences that you should read befo…

Aye. My (literally, and self-proclaimed) communist former partner noted left-wing infighting. The Monty Python Life of Brian scene about The Popular Front of Judea ("he's over there") are, according to her, totally accurate in spirit. Ironic, the right does strength through unity, the left talks about it and then argues with itself about who else used the phrase; the last time the left really did it was when trade un…

Jameela Jamil put this out pretty well: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOvh4_UDHGy/ (sorry for the instagram link, couldn't find the original clip)

Basically the gist of it is that if you want to be "on the left", you need to have the exact, correct, and up to date opinion on every single micro-issue or you're literally a fascist hitler paedophile and will be ostracized.

Meanwhile "on the right" as long as you agree on maybe one or two bigger things and you can deal with or tolerate the rest while you move on with winning elections.

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

#245

Post by theshrike79 » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 7:48 AM UTC

ScoobleDoodle wrote: post #225

HaloZero wrote: post #192

I will give him credit for launching country-of-origin. I'm really curious if it's been effective at all for users to get signal. I don't use X anymore since Musk bought it but though it was an interesting choice.

Was the account origin feature removed soon after release?

There were some changes when "american_patriot_47" style political accounts were discovered to be from Sri Lanka or India.

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

#246

Post by Freedumbs » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 7:50 AM UTC

vhiremath4 wrote: post #228

X has gotten significantly worse for me. For what it's worth, I am not super anti-Elon or super left-leaning, and I only say that because I'm sure a lot of people may think I'm biased because of some political leaning. I'm really not. The service has just gotten worse, and I feel like I see enough people saying it's gotten better for them and I don't know what to make of it (maybe I'm going through some sort of psych…

How far left do you have to be to oppose white supremacy?

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

#247

Post by modeless » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 7:50 AM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #118

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.

Setting aside any feelings about Musk, ad quality, or even product direction choices like locking down public access... I'm not sure I agree. My experience of Twitter was that the web app was reasonable and reliable. That reliability seems to me to have been collateral in the transition, a bunch of things broke, famously 2FA for a while, a few redirects broke in the domain switch, the public access lockdown also pres…

Twitter was famously unreliable for practically its entire existence. Don't remember the "fail whale?"

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

#248

Post by peyton » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 7:52 AM UTC

LaurensBER wrote: post #202

conradfr wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In France the left is slowly coming back to X ahead of the presidential election because they noticed they speak in a void (journalists don't care about Bluesky) and also they all blocked each other in the purity battle. They still hate Musk though. Personally I think they all suck for different reasons.

> they all blocked each other in the purity battle I listen to a bunch of (far) left podcast to balance out my media consumption and the amount of bickering about purity is both amusing and slightly scary. Both the wide span of subjects (from racism, to sexism, to ablism, there's something new every day!) and depth ("it's not my job to educate you and here are 5 books about lived experiences that you should read befo…

> Perhaps this is a modern replacement for religious fundamentalism for some people

I would say it’s narrower, loosely a sort of heresiology. It would be motivated by a strong internal sense of insiders vs. outsiders. Which isn’t saying much, but I think that’s that.

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

#249

Post by gnoll_of_gozag » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 7:58 AM UTC

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 the social in a social media website that matters the most. every decent person is gone and what's left is bots, hucksters, vapid influencers, slop, racists, soyjakparty, pedophiles, proanas, personifications of the dunning-kruger effect and children who send eachother death threats over shipping the wrong roblox characters. there's a persistent aura of misery over everyone's heads

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

#250

Post by modeless » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 8:07 AM UTC

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.

The login wall predates Elon BTW https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289263