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Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

nytimes.com

841–850 of 1001 posts

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#841

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

You've gotten downvoted here for saying the exact same thing. Maybe you should improve your opinions?

So your opinion is that men can get pregnant?

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot see how it was a success. 1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error. 2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche. 3. The firings did not go well. X has struggl…

There an argument that he paid $44B to get a Us administration that would hugely advantage him and his companies. Certainly he’s made billions from contracts initiated by this administration and seen many regulatory difficulties removed. Of course it may all fall apart because everyone involved has the temperament of a five year old on a meth bender, but the basic “buy media to influence politics to multiply wealth”…

A US administration does not cost tens of billions. He paid $250M to the trump campaign making him the single largest donor of all time, and that's what let him buy the current admin. And that was close to 1% of what he paid for twitter.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#843
post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it. I thought more people would see a guy doing ... that salute, or things like the antisemitism in Grok in the past few days and say "no", but a huge number of people seem to be able to rationalize things away. I'm with Wil Wheaton https://bsky.app/profile/wilwheaton.net/post/3ltkjyzjb4k2p

I profoundly dislike the politics of most “leaders” for lack of a better word in the world of tech, but here I am typing these words in an iPhone. Refusing to use something because of who created it or who benefits from it is a bit too much I think, to the point of being unworkable depending on the case. In other words as much as I’d like to vote with my wallet that is not always practical. And that extends to everyt…

It’s not a question of who benefits from it. It’s that the place got weird and creepy and the algorithm is maximizing for engagement of an unpleasant type. I quit last July because I couldn’t stand the angry know-nothing blue checks being promoted into my replies and the cryptocurrency scams.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#844

Interesting nobody has mentioned Nikita. X has hired Nikita Bier, of Gas and tbh fame ( https://x.com/nikitabier ), as head of product some days ago. He posted a meme earlier today which may or may not be related to this.

Reading his timeline is somewhat rage-inducing. He's just another edgelord who can't decide if he believes the terrible things he's posting or is just ironically posting them. It's all just attention seeking, there's no value in the posts, no product insight, no teaching like I see from true industry leaders.

Nikita has always been like this - vastly overstating his importance but making it seem like a joke so he can feign ignorance. Just another self-absorbed Valley goon.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His mistakes cost less than they could have, sure, but to call it "pretty successful" I think it would have be better than if he just... didn't do much. He didn't have to be as open and aggressive about firing people or opening up the content policy. Openly insulting advertisers, for instance, was a completely unforced error. I think doing less would have kept more value (leaving ethics/morality entirely aside), and…

> pretty successful What are the metrics of success in this case? Making more money, a failure. Moving the Overton window to the very far-right, success. I would argue that the goal is quite obviously the latter, and Musk was very open about this. Given that was the goal, his takeover of Twitter was extremely successful!

He also damaged one of the most valuable companies in existence. I don’t think “moving the Overton window slightly to the right in 2024,” if that’s what he did, is going to be as durable.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#846
post #50

X has been nothing short of an exercise in brand destruction. However, despite all the drama, it still stands, it still exists, and it remains relevant.

That’s because it’s not really brand destruction so much as normalizing the support for fascism by a brand.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#847

Interesting nobody has mentioned Nikita. X has hired Nikita Bier, of Gas and tbh fame ( https://x.com/nikitabier ), as head of product some days ago. He posted a meme earlier today which may or may not be related to this.

I’m kind of fascinated by Nikita’s popularity. Normally if you told a tech community like Hacker News that someone marketed viral phone apps targeting teenagers, engineered app engagement mechanics targeting kids, and openly used every growth hacking trick in the book to manipulate App Store charts, it would seem like a checklist of things people get angry about here. Yet because he’s Twitter-famous and seems like a nice guy who posts memes and snark, he gets a pass.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#848
post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, Bluesky has not taken off. The network effects of Twitter are too great to lose its journalists & public figures. What has happened instead is that we're back on Facebook. Errm... Threads by Instagram by Meta née Facebook. And it's reached a stage where public figure migration is actually becoming feasible. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail... Network effected spaces front-lo…

BlueSky has not taken off because its the far left version of Twitter. If you stray even to the center you are doxxed and banned. They banned the sitting vice-president within a couple of hours of him joining.

The sitting vice president is a monarchist, not just a little right of center

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More and more I think Musk managed to his take over of Twitter pretty successfully. X still isn't as strong a brand as Twitter where, but it's doing okay. A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there. The only issue is that Musk vastly overpaid for Twitter, but if he plans to keep it and use it for his political ambitions, that might not matter. Also remember tha…

I cannot see how it was a success. 1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error. 2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche. 3. The firings did not go well. X has struggl…

From my perspective personal perspective, that whole category of social media has been destroyed. Pretty much no one I know/followed still posts. It’s gone from something I watched/posted very frequently to something I might glance at once in a very great while. And after initial flurries of interest neither Mastodon or Bluesky really achieved critical mass.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#850

Interesting nobody has mentioned Nikita. X has hired Nikita Bier, of Gas and tbh fame ( https://x.com/nikitabier ), as head of product some days ago. He posted a meme earlier today which may or may not be related to this.

I am more fascinated by grok rebellion than Nikita being hired. I still get a ton of bots daily, until that solved they can hire whomever they want. Grok and payounts have been the most fun things happened to twitter since acquisition

> Grok and payounts have been the most fun things happened to twitter since acquisition

I have the opposite opinion. Payouts have supercharged the amount of ragebait and engagement bait getting posted. There has always been a drive to post viral content, but attaching a payout to it has made many accounts go all in on being as inflammatory as they can while posting non stop. Even people who shouldn’t need the money seem to be competing with each other for the largest X payout checks and bragging about how large they got their check to be each cycle, like that’s the new meta-game.

It’s also tiresome to see people asking Grok under every post and then getting the typical LLM responses that sound kind of insightful but don’t contain much useful information when you look closely.

The bot problem is also out of control on a level behind anything I can ever remember. At this point it’s hard to believe they’re even attempting to do something about it because it’s so bad.

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