Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 1001 posts

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#571

Post by aorloff »

rtkwe wrote: post #306
guywithahat wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this X doomsday talk is pretty isolated to reddit/other minor social media sites. The site itself is doing fine, and maintains a strong investor/startup ecosystem, with a slight fall in usage after the election (which isn't uncommon for Twitter/X). My understanding is that a few advertisers threatened to leave and then returned after a few days/weeks. It's a private company now so I don't know what their reven…

It's growing... but from an all time low. Estimates put it at half of their ad revenue pre acquisition. A lot of advertisers did actually leave and seem to have largely stayed away or their CPM numbers are just way way down both of which are pretty bad. Also X isn't funding Grok, it's a separate B corp with funding of it's own, it's just been tightly integrated into X, so it doesn't really say anything about the mone…

My very first thought on the news that Yaccarino is leaving is that Twitter needs a new CEO who can sell some shares.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#572

Post by arp242 »

apwell23 wrote: post #457
regularjack wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your ban was deserved

why is that ? btw i am indian too. It was in /r/askindians

The "perceived as" could be interpreted as a genuine "perhaps this is what they think?" or just as "empty language", in which case you're effectively saying "they're all scammers and mass migrating here to steal our jobs". I'll assume you meant the first, but with loads of flagged comments in the queue and many people who do genuinely mean that sort of thing, it's easy for moderators to misinterpret things.

I once called out a blatantly racist post and used "the n-word" while doing so. Admittedly not my finest moment, but I was fed up (the content was something along the lines of "I think this is called ethnic cleaning. Why don't you just admit they're all n----s to you?")

I got banned for my "racism". For calling out racism. The racist post that called for ethnic cleaning was left standing as that was lengthy and used polite language.

For the hasty moderator with tons of flagged comments: one is a wall of text and scans okay, the other used a bad word so could perhaps be racist. 537 more flagged comments in the queue. Ban. Next. It is what it is.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#573

Post by Lu2025 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #383
dctoedt wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think there is some blame for not standing up to Musk and leading better. That seems in the same category as saying there's some blame on her for not working harder on basketball in her youth and so never becoming a WNBA Finals MVP. (Narrator: Um, no, she's not nearly tall enough ....)

I'm just not sure her complete lack of power to stand up to Musk is a defense. If a controversial rich guy offers you a CEO job that consists entirely of laundering his reputation by pretending his decisions are your own, you have a social responsibility not to take it. I'd be more sympathetic if she were some random person who couldn't otherwise dream of an executive level pay package, but she was the head of ads at…

> a social responsibility not to take it

She was paid $6M a year + undisclosed stock package. A lot of people will set aside their morals for this amount of money.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#574

Post by snorrah »

blymphony wrote: post #557
martinpw wrote: post #497

The Economist always comes up with good tag lines for stories. In this case: Linda Yaccarino goes from X CEO to ex-CEO. https://www.economist.com/business/2025/07/09/linda-yaccarin...

What are other memorable tag lines from them?

I don't know, why don't you go have a look?

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#575

Post by Intermernet »

egorfine wrote: post #245
Forgeties79 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thriving? Its valuation has tanked since his purchase and last I read they’re still actively losing users.

Yes I know. But the platform has lots and lots of engagement. Stagnation did not happen. Quite the opposite.

When I finally left Twitter most of the engagement was obviously bots either repeating other tweets or spamming unrelated dross on high activity threads for engagement farming. The number is high, but the quality is negligible.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#576

Post by wasabi991011 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #398
jcranmer wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people I've seen who have talked about their engagement numbers--as measured by something like "how many visitors do we get to a story based on a Bluesky/Facebook/ex-Twitter/etc. link", so independent of the social media's self-reported metrics--have all reported that Twitter is generally among the poorest-performing social media sites. Especially if you're looking at it from a perspective of "how much engagement…

> The people I've seen who have talked about their engagement numbers Now do bluesky. X is doing fine. Turns out network effects are real.

Anecdotal, but everone that I've heard do those comparisons have done Bluesky vs X, and every time they've noticed better engagement ratio and higher quality engagement on Bluesky.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#577

Post by fourseventy »

fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #215
kylebenzle wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course I hate what Elon has done to Twitter but you're feeling previously that everyone was there was an illusion brought on by massive propaganda and manipulation of the conversation. The same thing has happened to Reddit now, well it feels more inclusive and open it's actually an incredibly controlled enclosed system that only allows one specific viewpoint. Now of course to the people inside that bubble it feels…

> liberal echo chamber It skews one way, but there's definitely a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find. It's also transitioning into an India social media site, just from sheer population numbers.

Nowadays Reddit is a far left echo chamber that will downvote you into oblivion for voicing an opinion as controversial as "men can't get pregnant"

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#578

Post by epakai »

overfeed wrote: post #212
steveBK123 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's gotta be more than that too though. Maybe training data other companies won't touch? Hidden prompt they aren't publishing? Etc. Clearly Musk has put his hand on the scale in multiple ways.

> Maybe training data other companies won't touch That's a bingo. 3 weeks ago, Musk invited[1] X users to Microsoft-Tay[2] Grok by having them share share "divisive facts", then presumably fed the over 10,000 responses into the training/fine-tuning data set. 1. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1936493967320953090 2. In 2016, Microsoft decided to let its Tay chatbot interact, and learn from Twitter users, and was praisin…

That tweet seems like the bigger story.

I've seen lots of deflection saying Yaccarino chose to retire prior to Grok/MechaHitler, but the tweet predates that.

Even more deflection about how chatbots are easy to bait into saying weird things, but you don't need to bait when it has been specifically trained on it.

All of this was intentional. Musk is removing more of the mask, and he doesn't need Yaccarino to comfort advertisers any more.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#579

Post by Lu2025 »

desichix1 wrote: post #528
fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> liberal echo chamber It skews one way, but there's definitely a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find. It's also transitioning into an India social media site, just from sheer population numbers.

> It skews one way, but there's definitely a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find. It's also transitioning into an India social media site, just from sheer population numbers. This happened on Quora until almost all western users left. Initially it was nice to have diversity of users and opinions, but then people started using Indian parlance that only other Indian users could understand (s…

> started referring to salaries as crore, relationship advice would reference Indian actors

Crore is a funny word, I should use it more often. English is an international language now and no country has a monopoly. We should take contributions from everyone.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#580

Post by snypher »

gitremote wrote: post #437
mrtksn wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think she ever was a fall guy, Elon run a poll on should someone else be CEO of Twitter and lost the poll. It was quite entertaining, He didn't seem happy with the outcome and probably had to pay CEO level salary due to the stunt.

"The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon in which women are more likely to break the "glass ceiling" (i.e. achieve leadership roles in business and government) during periods of crisis or downturn when the risk of failure is highest." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff

Is this what happened at Reddit? I feel like they made some unpopular changes and used Ellen Pao as a patsy.
Post reply on HN