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Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

nytimes.com

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Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#901

Post by varelse »

emodendroket wrote: post #857
Aurornis wrote: post #847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For everyone getting angry about those things there are three people who’ve personally had a hand in them, I imagine.

[dead]

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#902

Post by PaulHoule »

defraudbah wrote: post #885
Aurornis wrote: post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

> It’s also tiresome to see people asking Grok under every post ha-ha, this is true, but I also find it hilarious and I don't mind people with tons of followers monetizing it. If I see a person bait-posting - I can unsubscribe any time.

The trouble is the effect it has on the community. Ezra Klein has caught up to where I was two and a half years ago and has done some great interviews with the theme that 'Twitter activism really cooked the left'

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-c...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas... (https://archive.ph/e1KnM)

Musk did the left a real favor by evicting them but he may never have the self awareness to realize that he scored an own goal. It's not a left-wing vs a right-wing thing, it's a high-D vs a low-D thing

https://darkfactor.org/

or rather a system or a culture that rewards superficial narcissistic interactions (e.g narcissism is a developmental arrest according to Kohut and Kernberg) and avoids any real listening, discussion or deliberation that might build empathy and produce lasting change. (Look how Black Lives Matter turned a major concern of black people in America across space and time into a... flash in the pan)

Given that the likes of George Will and William Kristol were driven away by Trump long ago and even Rudy Giuliani and Elon Musk thrown under the bus it's not clear the right is even going to realize it got cooked by Twitter. Where are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nisbet and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._I._Hayakawa ?

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#903

Post by jmcqk6 »

giingyui wrote: post #695
davidw wrote: 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…

> 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.

Having a hard and fast rule that can always be applied about this is impossible. We're just too interconnected and interdependent, and there are too many unknowns.

That doesn't mean we can just ignore it and not think about it. We owe it to each other to still do our best, even if it's not going to be perfect.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#904

Post by Bender »

lupusreal wrote: post #127
Bender wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not defending Elon or the infobot but my theory is that by leaving that LLM unfiltered people have learned how to gamify and manipulate it into having a fascist slant. I could even guess which groups of people are doing it but I will let them take credit and it's not likely actual neo-nazi's, they are too dumb and on too many drugs to manipulate an infobot. These groups like to LARP to piss everyone off and they ofte…

I'm out of the loop, why is it an "infobot" and not a chatbot?

In 1999 there was a perl chatbot called infobot that could be taught factoids, truths, lies. It would learn anything people chatted about on IRC. So I call LLM's infobots.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#905

Post by amitrip »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #852
mvdtnz wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think twitter made even 1% difference in 2016 I urge you to go and touch some grass. This stuff doesn't matter.

Trumps ability to control the narrative is pretty much wholly based on his tweeting skills. He is legitimately a top tier tweeter up there with @dril and the likes. It is incredibly entertaining and end of the day that’s what politics is about now.

[dead]

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#906

Post by mlindner »

afavour wrote: post #894
Aurornis wrote: post #847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a split in the Hacker News community between the "traditional" hackers who look down on this kind of stuff and "growth hackers" who actively encourage it. In my experience X leans much more heavily to the latter.

[flagged]

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#907

Post by mgdev »

JeremyNT wrote: post #453
mrweasel wrote: post #130

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…

As a business it's a failure. As a way to influence public opinion? It's almost invaluable. For the world's richest man, that's a bargain at half the price.

Profitable operations, doubling previous adjusted EBITDA. [0]

While not a yet an ROI-positive takeover, on an incredible valuation growth trajectory from the post-acquisition low. Likely to be positive the minute xAI meaningfully monetizes Grok. [1]

Gains strategic access to global training data, and real-time human sentiment. [2]

Incredible built-in distribution for new AI-powered products. [3]

Literally tipped the scales in an election, a role typically reserved for traditional media companies. [4]

Yes, a total failure of a business. /s

[0]:https://x.com/Austen/status/1887363437518270757

[1]:https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/12/the-xai-x-merger-is-a-good...

[2]:https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-says-xai-will-u...

[3]:https://digiday.com/marketing/with-600-million-users-xs-lind...

[4]:https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/07/x-formerly-twitter-becomes...

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#908

Post by mapt »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #876
HDThoreaun wrote: post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A monarchist? Can you explain what a monarchist is? I would think having the position of Vice President would largely imply one is particularly not a monarchist.

JD Vance is/was the personal assistant to Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire who believes we need to get beyond the weaknesses of democracy & egalitarianism in order to preserve the sort of freedom that billionaires need to have. Thiel and Musk are also the financial & political patrons of Mencius Moldbug / Curtis Yarvin, who AFAICT is the person to reintroduce the idea of non-electoral monarchy/autocracy as a credible goal to politics, out loud.

> In his blog Unqualified Reservations, which he wrote from 2007 to 2014, and in his later newsletter Gray Mirror, which he started in 2020, he argues that American democracy is a failed experiment[10] that should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations.[11]

Thiel runs Palantir, whose specialization (again: competing with Musk) is making the authoritarian, panopticon dystopias of science fiction more physically feasible with AI analysis of large volumes of arbitrary data. A system like West Berlin where every third person is informing on their neighbors to a human Stasi officer is horrendously inefficient firehose of data, almost impossible to administrate effectively, and Palantir aims to fix that. Palantir was responding to a market demand from the resurgent US intelligence agencies for this sort of administration for COIN / counterterrorism / occupied territory in Iraq & Afghanistan.

https://zeteo.com/p/peter-thiel-jd-vance-trump-maga-broligar...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-...

Thiel in his VC hat has also been deeply involved with ycombinator.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#909

Post by ceejayoz »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #896
ceejayoz wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 2017 "long tweets" are actually 280 characters. So, longer. > The "subscription feature" is a content creator one, while I meant paid blue check. I consider the paid blue checks a negative, not a positive. > "Community notes" had not been publicly launched before Musk did As with the long tweets, this then becomes a pretty minor tweak. > The "native video" feature you mention is Vine, which had been discontinue…

> So, longer. Yes, an order of magnitude longer.

If you were asked "what have you accomplished over the last couple of years" and your answer was "I increased the maximum character count config setting", do you expect a raise from your boss for the great work?

If you wanna make the case for "Musk accelerated innovation at Twitter", more is required than "you can make longer posts" IMO.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#910

Post by isolli »

davidw wrote: post #638
makeitdouble wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people were betting on X going under in some way or another within a year. From that POV, it's survival in itself can be seen a success for Musk. I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.

> 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

Bluesky is not better (see for instance [0]). I think no one has cracked how to properly run a microblogging website.

[0] https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/did-i-publish-the-private...

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