Linda Yaccarino is the new CEO of Twitter

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657050349608501249

by lopkeny12ko • 3 years ago

484 922 3 years ago

belter7• 3 years ago

The FT got the scoop: https://www.ft.com/content/edfead7f-27b5-441b-8971-8a161bad4...

"@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology."

Looks like he found somebody to have the CEO title, while he keeps deciding the product strategy. So still runs Twitter while saying he kept the promise from his Twitter poll...

gsatic• 3 years ago

Someone else to deal with summons from govts.

That said spam seems to have dropped and recommendations I get are pretty interesting so hope that continues.

atonse2• 3 years ago

This is actually a smart model given Musk’s strengths have always been in building things and not in the day to day running of companies.

They are different skill sets.

It’s worked remarkably well to have Gwynne Shotwell run things at SpaceX (she’s an awesome COO and also an aerospace engineer). I have wished for years that he do that at Tesla.

Having an ad exec run Twitter will take care of all the “how do we pay the bills” part of running the business while he does the “fun” stuff of focusing on product.

Update: Updated Gwynne Shotwell's title to COO, not CEO (and fixed spelling of her name).

greenyoda• 3 years ago

Having an ad exec run Twitter will take care of all the “how do we pay the bills” part of running the business while he does the “fun” stuff of focusing on product.

And apparently, Twitter has millions of dollars in bills that it hasn't been paying. See this other interesting article, posted today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35918253

sebzim45006• 3 years ago

Shotwell is COO, Musk is CEO

nostrademons8• 3 years ago

It's an awkward structure to have the executive chairman and/or majority shareholder take a position (usually CTO or CPO) elsewhere in the org chart, because it means that that person is simultaneously the boss and subordinate of the CEO.

It can work - most famously, this was the structure that Google had in its golden years (2001-2011) with Eric as CEO and Larry & Sergey as presidents of Product & Technology, respectively. It also was sort of the structure of Apple with Steve Wozniak as an IC & founder. But it puts the CEO in a very awkward spot where they're in charge of the organization but not really in charge of the organization, which in turn requires leadership with great humility. That's not really what Elon is known for.

The structure of SpaceX or Facebook or Apple 1998+, where you have a visionary CEO and then strong COO under them that makes the trains run on time, is much more common and less fraught with conflicting reporting lines.

dwater• 3 years ago

To make money she has to sell ads, to sell ads she needs to make the platform palatable for advertisers, which means going back to pre-Elon content moderation, which he clearly doesn't want to do. Her title might as well be VP of Sales given the power dynamic he's communicating.

athenot• 3 years ago

Indeed, these are 2 different skill sets. But wouldn't that be a Chief Operating Officer then, instead of a CEO?

Veserv3• 3 years ago

Musk is not a engineer and has never been good at making things. What he is good at is marketing and raising ridiculous gobs of money which he plows into various companies. All credit for engineering successes at those companies is entirely because of the leadership of those companies, like Gwynne Shotwell, and despite Musk's interference which we have seen time and time again to be actively detrimental to engineering success.

That is not to say that Musk's interference is "bad" from a company valuation standpoint as he clearly has a pretty good idea of what features he can effectively market to customers, it is just that those features are not markers of good engineering or actively detract from good engineering. For instance, selling FSD to the general public despite it not working is a criminal engineering decision, but it has done wonders for cash flow and their stock price.

bobsil16• 3 years ago

Musk’s strengths have always been in building things

*Hyping things, pumping stock, raising $.

arcticbull2• 3 years ago

This is actually a smart model given Musk’s strengths have always been in building things and not in the day to day running of companies.

Are they? The majority of his successes came from investment, not from building.

[edit] I think his superpower may be wealth, like iron man.

andrewjl• 3 years ago

In the case of both Apple and Meta the (then, in the case of the former) founder-CEOs delegated the "how do we pay the bills" thing to a trusted COO instead, a markedly different approach from what Musk did.

frellus3• 3 years ago

Elon just wants to build things, have autonomy and also dictatorial control of the process. He doesn't care about how things are monitized (although in the case of Twitter, where he didn't build it from the start, he has to worry about it quite deeply).

There is nothing more complicated in his decision here. Elon is a visionary and a builder. That's all his ventures.

belter7• 3 years ago

What is the vision for Twitter?

afavour12• 3 years ago

That doesn't work with Twitter, though. You can't just build stuff with total autonomy without worrying about how it'll make money when your company is in a deep, deep financial hole.

Because of the way Elon bought the company it needs to make a shit-ton of money and fast. Elon can't just sidestep that responsibility by vacating the CEO role.

guyzero• 3 years ago

He just wants to design products without caring how they make money?

That's how money-losing products get designed.

donmcronald• 3 years ago

Elon is a visionary and a builder. That's all his ventures.

I don't understand how people view him as a product person. How is he making the product (Twitter) better?

Taking away an existing feature like verification and selling an objectively worse version back to people doesn't make the product better. Strengthening the silo effect by banning talk about competitors doesn't make the product better. Charging $50k / month for business verification doesn't make the product better, especially for businesses users.

I thought Twitter might improve because I believed the rhetoric about Musk being a product person, but I don't believe that any more. All of his moves have been short sighted cash grabs.

Is there a single thing about the (technical) product that's improved since Musk took over?

tootie7• 3 years ago

Personally, I think he just wants attention. Twitter was already built when he showed up. So was Tesla.

atestu• 3 years ago

WSJ yesterday for what it's worth: https://www.wsj.com/articles/linda-yaccarino-in-talks-new-tw... Good writeup

And to add to your comment:

Mr. Musk, who has been CEO since buying the company in October, said his role will shift to executive chairman and chief technology officer. But Mr. Musk also made clear he wasn’t about to yield control over the platform, saying he would maintain responsibility for product, software and system operations.

tootie7• 3 years ago

He's only handing off the fiduciary duty. Basically he'll do what he wants with the platform and make someone else figure out how to make money with what he does.

caycep• 3 years ago

From what I can see of where his interests are, and his attention span...does he really WANT to deal with reliability/uptime/systems engineering? Seems like a poor fit (AFAIK, the businesses that do well have Gwynne Shotwells at the helm who are good at milking him for selective insights, then insulating the staff from his worse impulses...not really a great fit for the DNA of a cloud services company)

mcguire• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff

justinator• 3 years ago

Glass Cliff.

yumraj• 3 years ago

So effectively the COO, but with the title of CEO.

nazka• 3 years ago

So they have 2 COOs basically… and he is still acting as a CEO in the spirit of it.

lencastre• 3 years ago

Technically the truf

ryanisnan• 3 years ago

This is almost doomed to fail. Imagine being a puppet CEO with almost no control of your product.

neom• 3 years ago

It was interesting to see Amanda Silberling try to sus this out through deduction, Elon follows 30 women and of those 30 only so many are qualified:

https://twitter.com/asilbwrites/status/1656764510311514113

rkuykendall-com• 3 years ago

Try? I would call giving 5 names and being right is a win.

srameshc• 3 years ago

Hiring a new CEO won't erase the bad policy decisions that Elon made and what he stands for. Jack Dorsey has a better chance of success since he knows the game. However, I am truly hoping Mastodon or federated social network will succeed.

lazyeye7• 3 years ago

What if they aren't bad policy decisions and his critics are too short-sighted?

dorkwood4• 3 years ago

I agree. People are saying no one wants the blue check mark anymore because it is no longer “cool”. I say give it time. It will become cool again once people realize all the features they can get for only $8.

input_sh2• 3 years ago

Twitter has no policies anymore, it's all one guy's whim that subsequently gets translated into a "policy".

jmclnx• 3 years ago

Per the link seems she believes in science in regards to vaccines. So I guess this is an improvement I guess. The thread in there are some rather nasty comments.

TurkishPoptart2• 3 years ago

What is he thinking? Putting this person in charge, with her ties to the global censorship-obsessed WEF, seems contrary to Elon's mission to make Twitter a place for free speech.

dbbk4• 3 years ago

I mean you could apply "What is he thinking?" to almost anything he's done with Twitter. Which leads you to the obvious conclusion... he does not think.

kgwxd2• 3 years ago

Elon's mission to make Twitter a place for free speech

How much unambiguous proof does he need to provide before all people realize his stated mission is not his actual mission?

frellus3• 3 years ago

And what is his actual mission?

runesofdoom5• 3 years ago

Doing one thing and saying you're doing something else is an astonishingly effective tactic.

sonofaplum2• 3 years ago

He's thinking that he needs to repair his advertising business because subscriptions have been an enormous, costly flop.

typon• 3 years ago

global censorship-obsessed WEF

Can you elaborate on this? How is the WEF tied to global censorship?

scythe• 3 years ago

Previously, Linda Yaccarino helped launch Peacock, the NBC/Comcast streaming service that was provided free with our Internet connection for a few months. I would have to give this strategy credit: we actually watched it quite a bit. Unfortunately, the Peacock UX is quite bad, since resuming an episode often simply doesn't work and jumping forward forces you to watch commercials twice. So we may not end up subscribing when the free period ends.

If this was Yaccarino's decision, that's good marketing. But you need some follow-through as well.

seshagiric• 3 years ago

It does seem like Peacock's success was a factor in her getting chosen as Twitter CEO. I find it hard to believe there's any nefarious intent e.g. finding a scapegoat. Its more like there are not too many takers for the job and they had to go with the best possible choice.

weinzierl• 3 years ago

When I go from Musk's Tweet to Linda Yaccarino (@LindYacc) I see a tweet that starts with "If we abandon our history [..]" and ends with "You’re unable to view this Tweet because this account owner limits who can view their Tweets. Learn more"

Why does it say I cannot see a tweet in a tweet I can see?

sonofaplum2• 3 years ago

She quote tweeted a tweet from an account that was later probably set to private

sp332• 3 years ago

The text you can see is a quote-tweet. You can see the comment she added, but the tweet she quoted is from a private account.

JosephRedfern• 3 years ago

Most likely because she quote-tweeted a another tweet, originating from a private account.

majikaja3• 3 years ago

I don't understand how other people can tolerate using Twitter.

I just want to view people's comments in a compact form - one line per tweet, even if RSS or equivalent is not supported. How do people have time in their day to scroll down the page to see all the tweets (&ads) on their timeline when they're following hundreds/thousands of people? If I can't integrate it into my RSS reader realistically I have <15 minutes per day to spend on such a platform.

paulgb2• 3 years ago

Fun fact, early in Twitter's life, RSS was supported. There was even a brief period where it supported XMPP! I remember following along with 2008 election tweets in Pidgin.

belter7• 3 years ago

Fun fact, many years ago, Google had a SOAP interface. But it got removed as machines are not interested in Internet Ads. :-)

How time flies...

Edit: http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/12/google-deprecates-their-soa...

adamiscool8• 3 years ago

Tweets are often rich media and aren't designed to be one line, but Twitter has a Lists function that does basically this if you're willing to make manual groupings of users by topic.

Palomides• 3 years ago

there are two ways to use twitter: curate a small number of follows you read most tweets from, or follow many and treat twitter more like an endless river to sample from

majikaja3• 3 years ago

Yeah I figure that's how people use it - for entertainment or sampling user sentiment. It's not even good at the latter because the act of following often is in essence cherry picking and the sample size from scrolling is so low.

Something so cripplingly limited shouldn't have a near-monopoly...

the-printer• 3 years ago

My assumption is that we shouldn’t underestimate the volume of nonsense that a person can tolerate when their attention span has been reduced to banana skin fiber over the course of their lifetime. Combine that with the addictive qualities of the platforms and a desire to harvest maximum stimulation with minimal effort.

Recently I noticed how overwhelming some posts on HN can appear. 400-500 comments, the top rated comment alone splinters into 78 sub-narratives and criticisms. Contrarily I feel like parsing this takes a lot more effort than Twitter. People put a lot more effort in their HN comments compared to a Tweet, and we are held to a different standard here in terms as what we say and how we say it. Also consider the fact that Twitter offers a variety of content while HN offers one primary form (text; I’m purposely excluding what links that are shared offer and am discussing primarily the core of the HN experience which is the conversation on the actual site).

I say all of this to say, how do people have the time in their day to even scroll here? When you follow nobody (unless you subscribe to some users comments with an RSS reader, an option I’m becoming more fond of) and you actually have to do a lot of reading and thinking as compared to a deluge of Tweets that can be grasped in a matter of seconds.

On one hand, this is what makes HN an exceptional website in a way. On the other hand, what makes Twitter appealing to others is what makes it exceptional compared to other websites and why it’s doubtful that the majority of its user base will leave, unless the layout changes.

Overall, I think topics like literacy, intellectual curiosity, taste…and a lack thereof, contribute to why Twitter is either appealing and unappealing (I don’t tweet).

majikaja3• 3 years ago

how do people have the time in their day to even scroll here?

Yeah this site can be a massive time-waste. I try to only scroll through a thread if it's of significant interest to me or I'm on the train or something. Some days that effort fails and I spend too much time passively consuming trivia from here when I should be working. When it comes to non-tech topics I don't think the level of discussion on this site is particularly high but the quality of prose may give the wrong impression on first glance.

I get several thousand items in my RSS reader inbox each day (including HN headlines) - no way can I read a significant portion of that. Thankfully most news articles have limited new information beyond the title.

ecliptik• 3 years ago

The Twitter frontend Nitter [1] has RSS built in for posts. I don't think it can do full threads, but it's a compact read-only design is much easier to read than proper Twitter.

Unfortunately the public instances can get overloaded and really slow.

To get a more real-time like experience it's better to stand up your own instance and put it behind something like Tailscale so only you are using it.

1. https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

afavour12• 3 years ago

Twitter's answer to this is to use an algorithm to prioritize the content the user is mostly likely to want to see. Certainly, I never read every unread tweet in my feed.

Ironically that same algorithmic approach has been subject to complaint from all sides, with "shadow ban" accusations thrown around, including by Musk himself. So it's now less effective than it used to be, in the name of "equality".

abdullahkhalids• 3 years ago

Effective twitter usage is about maximizing the signal to noise ratio. Aggressively unfollow accounts that have low SNR.

A few hundred accounts will give you enough high quality tweets for <15 min a day.

tgv• 3 years ago

The appeal of twitter is the fame. They may look down upon traditional media, but it's those that give twitter users their megaphone. If you've got 1000 followers that may or may not glance upon your tweets, that nice. But to see your opinion broadcasted as the voice of the people, that's attractive.

prh8• 3 years ago

He's going to continue running Twitter into the ground while now being able to make her the scapegoat for it. Typical glass cliff

nprateem2• 3 years ago

Well that might be a strategy if it wasn't his own money he was burning.

ldjkfkdsjnv• 3 years ago

Dude havent you come to terms with the fact that hes competent? Twitter never went down after firing all those engineers?

chucky_z• 3 years ago

Twitter never went down because of those engineers and the great work they did. Elon has been making all kinds of shit up as he goes. He is not an engineer, and never will be one. He can be a great businessman (and at times -- he has made great decisions for businesses.) and be a terrible engineer. He seems to be stuck on the latter even being possible.

theturtletalks2• 3 years ago

Turning Twitter into pay-to-play will look “competent” in the beginning, but we’re not sure how it’ll work in the long run.

Lately, it looks like lower level (non-twitter blue) users have no incentive to come up with new content. If they do, high level users (twitter blue) will regurgitate it to their audience and it’ll be amplified to the top. Before, the playing field was level.

flerchin• 3 years ago

Yes it did.

__jem• 3 years ago

The vibe on Twitter has become totally noxious since bluechecks started getting promoted under every single tweet. I'm still on there because of inertia, but from my feed there are plenty of people like me waiting to jump ship to bluesky. Twitter's brand is toxic now. Maybe they'll make up the difference with users coming over from Parler or whatever, but I doubt it.

lesuorac• 3 years ago

Whats the definition of down?

Twitter has had many outages; the objective stability of the webpage is worse after acquisition than before.

bobsil16• 3 years ago

Elon’s hourly clown show? What are you watching?

d236• 3 years ago

By his own admission the value of Twitter has dropped 50%, and he has suggested bankruptcy is on the table. This will be a case study of bad management in textbooks for decades to come.

jimhi3• 3 years ago

Bad tech CEOs all have the same playbook. Google “glass cliff.” Elon will step down and have this new CEO execute all his most unpopular decisions. Then he’ll swoop back in and be CEO again hoping to be the hero. Reddit did this. Yahoo did this. The lamest part is it kind of does help their image.

nprateem2• 3 years ago

What unpopular decisions are left?

closetnerd• 3 years ago

Ya I think he's actually unlike most other CEOs. The man does super unpopular decisions in front of everyone.

gtweg• 3 years ago

Reverting to the status quo before be bought the company and limiting free speech again to attract advertisers.

When Tucker Carlson announced that he'd post his new show on Twitter, Musk already sent a cryptic mail saying that Carlson would be subject to the same "community notes" as everyone else.

We'll see how it goes, I'm just getting vibes that everything will be reverted to a standard SV company.

fullshark• 3 years ago

Returning verification back to the previous system and admitting it was a mistake.

mbreese• 3 years ago

Didn’t @jack kind of do this too?

But it’s different when the founder/CEO is replaced only to return later. That’s a Steve Jobs play. When the CEO takes a new role, but still owns the company, that’s completely different (and certainly fits here).

x3n0ph3n3• 3 years ago

And Bob Iger at Disney.

nancyhn4• 3 years ago

What in the world has given you the impression that he's afraid of making unpopular decisions?

junipertea• 3 years ago

Not sure you can do anything more unpopular than lay off 80% of your workspace, saddle your company with 13B debt and drive away advertisers only to bet everything on a $8 subscription paid by right wing simps. Like, what else unpopular would he need a scapegoat for?

supergram• 3 years ago

Twitter has 400m users. At $8 that's $3.2b/month, $38b/year. This might be a decision most social networks didn't take, and an unpopular one, but if it works it can have massive payoff.

drcongo2• 3 years ago

I bet he's gonna give it a go though!

pclark• 3 years ago

Who was the bad tech Reddit CEO?

pooper• 3 years ago

I think they are talking about Ellen Pao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Pao

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_Ohanian

[...] He was also a partner at Y Combinator.
[...]
On July 2, 2015, Reddit fired communications director Victoria Taylor, an administrator who coordinated celebrity interviews from Reddit's New York office. In protest, volunteer moderators of the IAmA community set their forum to private, effectively turning it off, and other volunteer moderators followed suit because of "anger at the way the company routinely demands that the volunteers and community accept major changes that reduce [their] efficiency and increase [their] workload".[40] The following day, a moderator of IAmA posted that "Chooter (Victoria) was let go as an admin by u/kn0thing [Alexis Ohanian]",[41] an assertion that was not widely reported on.[42] Media outlets such as Variety blamed interim CEO Ellen Pao for the dismissal. Harassment, which was already being directed toward Pao in relation to other controversies, intensified and she resigned a week later.[43] However, on July 12, former CEO Yishan Wong informed the Reddit community that Taylor was fired by "the CEO's boss" and accused Ohanian of scapegoating.[42] In the aftermath of Pao's resignation, Ohanian elaborated on his role in Taylor's dismissal, countering that even though the AMA/IAmA changes came from him, he still reported to Pao.[44] In 2017, Pao criticized Ohanian for avoiding the fallout by attending Wimbledon in the days immediately following Taylor's firing.[45]

xeromal3• 3 years ago

Ellen Pao. She fired Victory who was very popular for running AMAs (Ask me anythings) with a lot of high powered people. The popularity of those dropped a bit after that and they were never the same.

Edit: Someone clarified below that Knothing took responsibility for firing Victory but Pao definitely took the heat for firing victory on top of nuking several popular (edgy and outright bad) subs

Dma54rhs• 3 years ago

Everyone parrots the same glass gliff term they recently learned but Musk has actually a good track record putting women to lead companies and them very much succeeding.

jimhi3• 3 years ago

Because he has an outdated leadership playbook for Twitter. He has had a good track record and he also runs his other companies surprisingly well. I think this decision is set up for the new CEO to fail.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 3 years ago

Who are these people?

What is this, a track record of 1? 2?

This doesn't seem like the type of thing you can do enough times to have a "track record" of.

sharkweek2• 3 years ago

How do I sign up to volunteer as one of these sacrificial lamb CEOs? Because I'd absolutely love to fail at something and then get paid a bunch of money to look bad for a few months before people forget and I can retire into the sunset.

JumpCrisscross4• 3 years ago

How do I sign up to volunteer as one of these sacrificial lamb CEOs?

Be an executive at NBCUniversal in advertising, Twitter’s revenue engine, and also be on their CEO short list.

nostrademons8• 3 years ago

First step: get a title where it wouldn't embarrass the board to put you in the CEO position. This could be founder of a hot startup, or an executive at a competitor, or CEO of a smaller company.

Getting there is left as an exercise for the reader.

enumjorge• 3 years ago

Elon’s circle is lousy with people begging to be that sacrificial lamb.

faaabio1618• 3 years ago

HN is the only place where you get real answers to that question!

mrguyorama13• 3 years ago

Be already rich and connected.

lazyeye7• 3 years ago

I cant think of a CEO for which this comment is less accurate than Elon Musk.

colpabar5• 3 years ago

Can you explain? I find these threads fascinating because seemingly everyone has such ironclad logical reasons for thinking elon is actually just a big stinky doodoohead. Can you try to convince me?

antipaul• 3 years ago

Did SpaceX do this? Who’s been their CEO?

Edit: lol, I guess she’s the President and COO, not CEO. Dunno if the point still stands, or not…

jimhi3• 3 years ago

Not the same. Hiring a female CEO can and should happen often. But when a company is publicly failing, this is a tool used by male boards frequently enough to have its own Wikipedia page.

nancyhn4• 3 years ago

Elon has a strong track record of hiring great women leaders, like Gwynne and Shivon.

I would give him and Linda the benefit of the doubt before jumping to any conclusions.

_Microft• 3 years ago

That’s Gwynne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX btw. Maybe the best that could happen to SpaceX. The other one is Shivon Zilis. What role does she have nowadays?

throwaway4736• 3 years ago

Shivon’s role is to be a public simp for Elon and to raise his kids.

osmsucks• 3 years ago

Mother to 2 of his 10 children?

blueboo• 3 years ago

There are indications to the opposite. What you have pointed out is that he has hired two female executives across the dozens of individuals in his portfolio. Better than zero, I suppose.

Meanwhile:

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/12/14/former-spacex-engineer-e...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/one-tweet-elon-musk-captures-...

https://www.reuters.com/business/tesla-subjects-women-nightm...

starkparker• 3 years ago

Goes right into the textbook definition of "glass cliff". Musk still gets to sabotage the product, the CEO gets to be the chief executive of whatever Elon thinks is dull but not the company, and she still gets fired if things go sideways and Elon keeps doing whatever he's doing.

chasd00• 3 years ago

Musk still gets to sabotage the product

when is this going to happen? It's been a while now and seems to be the same twitter as usual.

smcl5• 3 years ago

Top replies to tweets are from blue-checks (nowadays, generally the worst posters) so to see any good interactions you either have to scroll pretty far or have used a blocklist. Twitter Blue is now completely tarnished - even if you just want to pay $8/month for the ability to edit posts or include longer videos in your tweets and don't care about "verified" status you're going to be lumped in with a really odd group of people and mocked for your blue check (i.e. he turned a consumer choice into an unpopular political statement). I'm not personally a heavy user anymore (moved to mastodon when they killed Tweetbot's API access), but either there's a lot of downtime or I've been really unlucky when I have returned as I've encountered a lot of issues with accessing the app - being completely locked out for a couple of days once. Also he unbanned a bunch of really pretty shitty people, who have picked up where they left off in directing their substantial following to abuse whoever they feel wronged them (usually someone in the LGBTQ+ community).

It's still largely usable as a service, but it has absolutely gotten worse and to describe it as "sabotage" is definitely not a stretch.

hn_acc_2• 3 years ago

Success is a lousy teacher. Mr. Musk has been dreaming about his "everything app" i.e. X.com for a very long time. The fact that he thinks the sinking Twitter ship will bring it to fruition is laughable.

obblekk• 3 years ago

I think this is exactly the right profile for him to have hired. She led advertising (sales) at a top 3 media publisher. This is probably Elon's greatest area of weakness, and she's particularly good at it.

I imagine this will be a bit like SpaceX where Sales and Ops is done by someone very good at that, and engineering is done by Elon.

It takes a realistic, self-aware person to hire someone who's better than them at their weaknesses, and is harder done than said.

rscho2• 3 years ago

Engineering is done by Elon?

sebzim45006• 3 years ago

I'd hope so, he is the lead engineer of a company which is currently on a ~200 mission long streak of successful missions to space.

Figuring out how twitter should work seems easier than that.

dmix3• 3 years ago

Took a while to find someone actually discussing the hire instead of the usual “is Musk an engineer” debate for the 1000x time on HN.

tric• 3 years ago

Here's the nitter link:

https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1657050349608501249

A few days ago, Twitter started requiring cookies when not logged in.

theshrike79• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff

The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon of women being likelier than men to achieve leadership roles, such as executives in the corporate world and political election candidates, during periods of crisis or downturn, when the risk of failure is highest.

WestCIDR• 3 years ago

I could care less about who is in charge of Twitter or if there is such a platform.

Twitter is a private corporation and therefore has no legal obligation to provide nor promote "free speech." To imply that it has this authority is to flatter it, over-state its power, and misrepresent it as having any interest in or obligation to the US Constitution, which it clearly does not.

That said, prior to Musk, the Twitter owners/leaders behaved terribly by "de-platforming" voices and sources of information. In so doing they debased themselves, demonstrating that they have no moral compass and demolishing what little trust there was in the technocracy and its faux institutions.

Musk claims to intend to restore "trust" in Twitter (I guess for those naive bubble people who obediently believe everything they read on the Internet). I could care less if he means what he says.

But Musk's stated positive mission is there for all to witness. So I don't get why he's being pilloried for it. What's all the clamor about? Just another stage-play from the Drama Dept, I imagine.

hartator2• 3 years ago

Seems like a boring ads-friendly pick, she was leading advertising at NBC for the past 11 years?

nimbius• 3 years ago

call a spade a spade: this is a last-ditch effort coming about six months too late.

In the seven months since Musk bought the company he singlehandedly fired nearly every employee, accidentally locked the remainder out of the headquarters, turned blue-check validation into a living nightmare for international brands, un-banned some of the most notorious and repugnant users from white nationalists to bigots and racists, mis-branded news outlets as state-sponsored, threatened to open a news agency to impersonation on his platform, cancelled most of the API, and tried to extort the very brands his platform depended on in a cash-for-validation scheme that backfired spectacularly.

This is 44bn of musks backing investors finally waking up to the fact that the willy-wonka they trusted to shepherd a communications platform was in fact just a billionaire heir to an emerald mine on track to grift them out of their dosh for his own petty feud with 'the libs.' Frankly its astounding theyre permitting musk to continue to do anything at all, albeit i suspect his new r&d role is about as authentic as his college credentials.

sixQuarks3• 3 years ago

You are severely misinformed. You just repeated all the BS talking points from the MSM. Stop reading clickbait and actually follow the guy closely if you want to know what's going on.

fckgw2• 3 years ago

It's literally a list of all the things he actually, factually did. Maybe you're the one who is misinformed?

swalsh• 3 years ago

have to agree, I love new Twitter. No complaints, it's working great for me. The content matching is just fine... and as a blue subscriber I seem to actually get interactions when I post, which makes me want to keep posting.

colpabar5• 3 years ago

Just two more weeks and it's gonna collapse this time I swear!

runesofdoom5• 3 years ago

It's going to collapse when the lawsuits from the former employees (from the C-suite down to janitors) catch up, and when the fines from the FCC and EU hit.

That could be 3 months or 18, but it's going to happen unless there's a complete about face at Twitter.

Culonavirus• 3 years ago

Let's see:

- $$$ from the blue (new thing)

- $$$ from subscriptions (new thing)

- $$$ from almost all advertisers returning

- effective $$$ from cutting the workforce by a small stadium worth of people

- ad revenue sharing in development

- long form video in development

- streaming video/podcasts in development

- encrypted dms being tested

And that's all there or coming in hot over the next few months. Pretty damn good for a company that apparently just barely operates if you listen to its detractors.

Over a couple of years it will morph into #1 news and media site on the planet (it's not really a social network).

FredPret5• 3 years ago

You not agreeing with his choices != Twitter is doomed.

I've noticed zero difference as a too-frequent daily user. In fact, Twitter seems more fun now. Plus, community notes are sorely needed. In addition to all that, I'm also seeing an uptick in activity on my business account.

BryantD3• 3 years ago

Community notes existed way before Musk, FWIW.

sputr• 3 years ago

I used to have a lot of fun reading Twitter while watching eurovision.

It's way worse now. It may be less content. Or it's showing me less relevant content. Or it may be due to eurovision apperatly dropping hashtags from onscrean promotion.

But the end result is, it's worse.

zzleeper2• 3 years ago

I used to be addicted to Twitter, checking it 10+ times a day at the very least. Now the content I get is awful, and I only end up there whenever I follow someone else's link :/

gisely• 3 years ago

So fun much scrolling past all the blue check morons at the top of all the replies to any popular post. No changes at all.

CameronNemo• 3 years ago

Twitter isn't doomed. But rumors are that it is even more of a money pit than before, now that numerous advertisers have left the platform or reduced their spending.

The hiring of a mass media ad-exec seems to support the validity of those rumors.

caconym_• 3 years ago

I've noticed zero difference as a too-frequent daily user.

I assumed this was how it would go for me too, but after the change to elevate tweets and replies by blue check accounts I actually stopped using it because now, every time I look at it, it's just an orgy of the dullest and most ignorant and intellectually dishonest people in the world posting the worst crap I've ever seen. Last time I checked twitter.com the tweet at the top of my timeline was somebody "questioning" whether a recent mass shooter's multiple tattoos of nazi iconography could reasonably be interpreted to mean that he was in fact some flavor of neo-nazi. And so on and so forth.

I don't follow any of these fucking people! and I don't want to see this shit. It's absolutely soul-draining.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who'll say I'm using Twitter wrong, blah blah, whatever. I don't really care—all I know is I was enjoying using it in the way its UX encouraged me to use it and now it's horrible and I've stopped, probably for good. I do wonder how many others had/are having a similar experience.

amyamyamy2• 3 years ago

I completely stopped using the app after his choice to elevate blue check replies instead of relevant ones. The app genuinely made me angry and it felt like my curation was pointless, especially since it would keep feeding me drivel from people I didn't follow

stronglikedan• 3 years ago

And it's a better than ever experience for the average Twitter user such as myself, so a win-win all around!

erk__• 3 years ago

How has your experience on Twitter gotten better over the last half year?

And are you sure that you are "The average Twitter user" since I am not even sure what that really means.

downWidOutaFite3• 3 years ago

Every popular political thread on there is now a blue-check right-wing echo chamber. I guess if that's your personal political bubble it feels great, but I don't think that's the "average" user.

theturtletalks2• 3 years ago

Pay-to-play is better now?

GaggiX• 3 years ago

I believe that I represent the average user, and in my opinion, Twitter has become worse than before, especially regarding the comments section. It appears that comments are no longer sorted by relevance, but rather by whether the user has paid for Twitter or not.

saberience• 3 years ago

The "Elon had it easy because he had a fortune from emerald mining" is total bollocks. He was certainly not "rich" when he came to US and was in university here, and when he badly needed money at the beginning of Tesla and SpaceX there was certainly no secret backup of "Emerald Mine" money.

I'm not sure where this rubbish conspiracy came from but if there was Emerald Mine money there wasn't much of it. You may not like to hear it, but Elon's big start came from the success of X and Paypal which then bankrolled the beginnings of SpaceX and Tesla, it wasn't from a rich daddy.

ep103• 3 years ago

Elon's big start came from the success of X and Paypal

Funny you mention this as why he was self-made, where by all accounts he was considered an awful coder in this Paypal position, and was only able to be in the country (illegally) at the time, or secure this job, was because of his family's money and connections.

warent3• 3 years ago

This is certainly the image he would love people to have: a humble immigrant from the poor South Africa, hustling his way into the American dream.

The reality is that he is from a wealthy, well-connected, post-apartheid white family. They funded his coming to Canada, the US, University, and getting first business off the ground. The reality is that he has had a silver spoon his entire life.

afavour12• 3 years ago

You're correct that Musk isn't a "billionaire heir to an emerald mine" but his own father has said the emerald mine was real and that it helped pay Musk's living expenses at college:

Errol went as far as to say that emerald money paid for his son's move to the US, where Elon would go on to attend the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School on scholarship — with, apparently, emerald-generated cash in his pocket for living expenses.

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-dad-emerald-mine

when he badly needed money at the beginning of Tesla and SpaceX there was certainly no secret backup of "Emerald Mine" money

That's not personal wealth, that's company investment. Just because you (or your family) doesn't have spare money kicking around to finance a space rocket company doesn't mean that you're not personally rich and able to pay for things "regular" folks cannot and have connections they don't.

coliveira• 3 years ago

Elon received a lot of money from his Father during his college years, and the very reason why he was in college in America is that he was bankrolled by a South African entrepreneur. Without this father he would be nowhere close to where he is.

jeffwask• 3 years ago

I'm not sure where this rubbish conspiracy came from

Umm... his father.

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-dad-emerald-mine

throw310822• 3 years ago

The funny thing about it is that, even if the emerald mine had been real, it would explain maybe 1/10000 of Musk's wealth. If those who talk about the "emerald mine" had managed to multiply the wealth of their family by 10000 they would consider it an incredible success.

throw934• 3 years ago

Because he said it himself? Why else would anyone come up with such specific source of income? Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20140413112637/https://www.askme...

His dad invested $200k at 10% at a later stage. I'm pretty sure it qualifies as rich daddy. Source: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211064937004589056

Btw Musk had little to do with the success of X. The revenue of PayPal was merely $61 million at the time Musk was fired as CEO of X.com(later PayPal).

dragonwriter2• 3 years ago

Elon’s big start came from the success of X and Paypal

To which Elon contributed, AFAICT, money (both directly and in his ability to scare up capital), not management.

He was forced out as CEO of X when they had no product success, X bought the company that owned PayPal and briefly brought him back as CEO then forced him out against six months later, after which X renamed itself after its one successful product, which it had acquired.

zamalek• 3 years ago

if there was Emerald Mine money there wasn't much of it.

You don't go to an American University as anything but a very rich African, or as a sponsorship. Source: I am a born African. I sure hope it was emerald money, else his father has some explaining to do to SARS.

james-redwood• 3 years ago

I'm a former Rhodesian (present day Zimbabwe) who moved to South Africa after things went south in Zim. For context, I'm white, so it's not like I have a racial gripe against Musk. Elon went to one of the fanciest private schools in the country's capital and lived in one of its richest suburbs. Yes, technically Boys High is a public school, but people from outside South Africa don't know what the Model C school policy was. His father was extraordinarily wealthy and if you do read interviews by both Elon and Errol, they both admit this. His mother was an international supermodel and his family was generally pretty well connected in the greater scheme of things. The entire story about him struggling during college (where he went to an Ivy League university paid for by his father) is complete bullshit. I don't dispute his ingenuity in starting Zip2 (funded by his father too by the way), but he wasn't starting from the bottom with no help - that's the grossly inaccurate part that Elon still pushes for optics and people who are too stupid or unaware of how SA works lap it up.

khazhoux• 3 years ago

And even if he had been fabulously wealthy since childhood, it still wouldn't discredit his accomplishments. There's how many tens of thousands of mega-rich kids right now who won't do a single thing of note with their lives?

la64710• 3 years ago

It does not matter if Musk had an emerald mine or not. For sure he turned a diamond mine (Twitter) to a shit pool. Do you trust him to be the CEO of your company? Ask yourself. I personally want a level headed guy.

awill• 3 years ago

This is very well written and made me laugh. When you're objective about it, it's all accurate, and pretty shocking. What's shocking to me is that Elon could be so successful at Tesla, and fail so spectacularly at Twitter. Of course the skills are different, but the general skillset of being a COE and not making stupid business decisions should be universal.

Also, he claimed Twitter was losing millions per day and that's why he had to fire everyone, when in reality, the millions per day in loses were interest on the loan he'd used to buy Twitter. So he created the problem, and then blamed that. Pretty shocking.

dylan604• 3 years ago

Isn't it in the news now or very very recently that Tesla isn't really run by Musk as much as people might think?

alexose• 3 years ago

I wonder if part of his "effectiveness" is that he seems so willing to burn everything down. As long as he preserves this image, he can maintain a level of control that other CEOs can't. Kind of the CEO version of the Madman Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory

spaceman_20204• 3 years ago

Has he really failed at Twitter?

Twitter was pretty awfully run even before he bought it. Their business metrics were absolute crap for a business of their scale and in the pandemic environment.

The jury is still out if new Twitter has failed or not.

dale_glass• 3 years ago

I think the answer is pretty obvious: the skills are wildly different, and Musk obviously didn't even understand what he's supposed to be doing at Twitter.

Tesla is relatively simple: you've got to make cool cars. They have to work and people have to want to buy them.

SpaceX is relatively simple: you've got to make rockets. They have to work, and be cheaper than the competition.

With Twitter it seems he doesn't understand that there's nothing to build really. The software's already there. Twitter's main job is purely social, trying to please a whole bunch of governments and advertising agencies, as well as understanding why people post there and how to make them post more. There's no straightforward technical test to it, it's a delicate social balancing problem, and one awfully ill-suited to Musk's typical "move fast and break things" approach.

tehjoker2• 3 years ago

I agree with all this, except for the part where he accurately described US media as state sponsored. The US state works for US corporations and US corporations own the media. Also, NPR does get some public money.

Lendal• 3 years ago

Less than 1% of NPR funding is from govt. Tesla and SpaceX get far more public money than NPR does. $7500 per vehicle subsidy. Lucrative NASA contracts.

vkou• 3 years ago

Considering that amplifying alt-right populism was half the point of buying Twitter, you shouldn't list that as a con of his tenure.

ChildOfChaos• 3 years ago

Yet, twitter has been going along just fine, despite all the negative press, nay sayers and nonsense you have been talking about.

Not to say Musk has been a little careless with his communication through all of this, but still, people want to sit in front of there computer and think they know better.

mrtksn• 3 years ago

Musk has some good ideas among the bad ones, I'm kind of happy with the developments. It was fun to watch removing pieces of the company and infrastructure, it was fun to see him expose himself as Free-speech NIMBY. It was fun to see how much people are willing to pay for status. All the risks about the fascists and media manipulations? Well, all those had been realised already, Twitter was horrible place. It kind of improved actually.

If everything goes south, It's on the Musk and company's tab anyway. So, en expensive drama to watch on some rich people's dime.

whywhywhywhy• 3 years ago

he singlehandedly fired nearly every employee, accidentally locked the remainder out of the headquarters

And yet the site still works and engagement is up.

mis-branded news outlets as state-sponsored,

BBC is state sponsored as long as they larp as an arm of the government with their fake “TV Licensing” arm with threats of government punishment for not paying. If they want to stop doing that then they can claim independence but while they use government powers and police to fund themselves through threats, they’re state sponsored.

lerchmo• 3 years ago

The emerald mine + hand wavy dismissal of his achievements is pretty wishful thinking. You can be totally repulsed by his behavior and trolling. But he has taken a few giant swings and hit them out of the park.

nwatson• 3 years ago

Elon should not walk into any Saudi embassies or consulates. Anywhere. Any time.

rozal• 3 years ago

Tldr for above comment: I hate Elon so much

JyB• 3 years ago

I seriously cannot tell if this comment is supposed to be taken as sarcasm.

0xDEF• 3 years ago

The @CommunityNotes feature is genius but it's too slow on disinfo related to the Russia/Ukraine war and it doesn't work against people like AOC and Tucker Carlson who have big extremely loyal fanbases that mark notes as "not needed".

samstave8• 3 years ago

Where exactly did that $44 billion go? With the tax incentives Twitter had from SF, and the massive layoffs... There was a fuck-ton of money that went somplace... to where?

compiler-guy• 3 years ago

The shareholders.

Anyone who had stock in Twitter got a big pile of cash.

pclmulqdq5• 3 years ago

To all the former owners of Twitter. Twitter never controlled it.

zdp7• 3 years ago

The 44B was to buy ownership of Twitter. It went to the shareholders.

kaynelynn• 3 years ago

To the previous shareholders of Twitter to compensate them for the shares.

SkyMarshal5• 3 years ago

This is 44bn of musks backing investors finally waking up to the fact that the willy-wonka they trusted to shepherd a communications platform was in fact just a billionaire heir to an emerald mine

In his investors’ defense, Elon had a singular track record prior to Twitter. And his proposal to turn Twitter into X, aka US—based WeChat, was not a terrible one. It was an expensive investment, but there was a plausible positive outcome.

His complete and total bungling of it all would have been difficult to predict in advance based only on what was known then. He is seemingly oblivious to the unintended consequences and second order effects of both his actual decisions, and their rash and heavy-handed manner. It’s odd, and not surprising they forced a professional CEO on him.

ericmay• 3 years ago

The thing is he really could have done it. But he went "rich person crazy" and lost it all instead. Really sad to see. Marc Andreessen said something like " Taylor Swift announces her concert on Twitter and then you go buy the tickets on Ticketmaster - why not buy them on Twitter?"

100%

Andrew_nenakhov• 3 years ago

I, for one, believe that Twitter is better now than it was before. But I'm a free speech proponent, and very not in favour of a previous approach of banning and muffling anyone who fell out of party line.

I think the stance on this issue greatly influences how one perceives changes at twitter.

stainablesteel2• 3 years ago

what's crystal clear to me is that your specific echo bubble (we all have one), advertises constant negative press about him. it doesn't make it real, twitter is booming and people love him more than ever

i hope you someday find the happiness to stop micro-observing everything about what elon is doing in his day to day life

citizenkeen• 3 years ago

In the seven months since Musk bought the company he singlehandedly fired nearly every employee, accidentally locked the remainder out of the headquarters, turned blue-check validation into a living nightmare for international brands, un-banned some of the most notorious and repugnant users from white nationalists to bigots and racists, mis-branded news outlets as state-sponsored, threatened to open a news agency to impersonation on his platform, cancelled most of the API, and tried to extort the very brands his platform depended on in a cash-for-validation scheme that backfired spectacularly.

Which one of those claims wasn't real?

matwood• 3 years ago

twitter is booming and people love him more than ever

Booming with cat and dog torture videos?

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cat-dog-torture-video...

dahwolf• 3 years ago

Exactly. The list of talking points are a Mastodon meme. Catastrophizing everything into fascism.

concordDance22• 3 years ago

That's an amazing gish gallop you have there. Every single entry being misleading, wrong or lacking important context.

jackmott423• 3 years ago

Only correction I would add here is the emerald mine is a red herring, if it existed at all Elon didn't get any significant money out of it.

syngrog663• 3 years ago

most of what you said rang true. except the "wealth from emerald mine" attack. that appears to be a myth

his big score was PayPal, and it seeded what followed. Tesla and SpaceX very early almost wrecked him financially

we can criticize his Twitter shenanigans. but he's clearly a workaholic, highly effective, and helped put humanity in a better place (via SpaceX and Tesla, anyway

wbharding• 3 years ago

Wow, a much more vitriolic first comment than I would expect from HN. The last six months has not lacked for Musk-hating enthusiasts howling “Twitter is dead.” But when I look at Google Trends, its story is that interest in Twitter is almost identical to where it was 5 years ago. Doesn’t seem so dead to me?

Have Musks changes have been net positive or negative? No shortage of internet opinion on that Q. Regardless of one’s personal feelings on it, it seems hard to dispute that Twitter moves faster than before. I consider that no small feat given how much legacy code and bureaucracy the company had at the time of his acquisition.

If he can free more of his time by making this hire, I am looking forward to seeing whether that translates to even faster iteration times. pg and all the others I followed are still there, so still plenty of potential to create quality entertainment/learning w less regret than Facebook

908B64B1972• 3 years ago

cancelled most of the API, and tried to extort the very brands his platform depended on in a cash-for-validation scheme that backfired spectacularly.

Rumor has it they lacked the manpower to actually keep the API running and it was a last-ditch attempt at getting rid of bots. Same bots who flocked to the platform after the layoffs started since people in charge of mitigating these were fired.

Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand. In a few week Twitter lost half of it's top 100 biggest advertisers [0] and it doesn't seem they are coming back.

What's crazy to think about is that, despite being "bloated" Twitter managed to have profitable quarters pre-acquisition.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advert...

bryan0• 3 years ago

I'm not a regular twitter user, but do people really get decent information from this platform? The comments to this tweet are a cesspool of anger and conspiracy theories.

jeffbee• 3 years ago

Why would this tweet ever come to anyone's attention? I see tweets of people I follow, a few hundred users, most of whom I know in real life and the rest of whom are experts in fields of interest.

madeofpalk6• 3 years ago

Musk is the most followed user on Twitter. On average, it seems like it would come to the attention of 'most'.

sixQuarks3• 3 years ago

There's incredible content that is found on Twitter. It takes time to curate your feed though, but once curated, I would say it's definitely in the top 3 best sources of info on the internet.

dorkwood4• 3 years ago

I follow artists and developers who post interesting things they’re working on. It’s the best place online I’ve found for this content.

manicennui• 3 years ago

I do the same and don't have the complaints that many people have. I never check the trending hashtags and recommended nonsense. I unfollow anyone who gets involved in and retweets a lot of Twitter/political drama (they are free to use their account how their like, but I don't need this sort of thing in my life).

delecti2• 3 years ago

Twitter recently implemented a change to prioritize replies from Twitter Blue subscribers over all others, so the replies you're seeing first are all people who paid for Twitter. That means they're either people who support Elon, or people for whom Twitter is a significant part of their job, either way they're likely to be terminally online and probably insufferable. The top replies to any prominent account tend to be awful these days.

jltsiren• 3 years ago

Back when the Science Twitter was a thing:

Start by following people who do interesting stuff. Avoid the ones who post every day, because it doesn't scale. Once you are following a few hundred accounts, the frequent posters will drown out everyone else and the signal-to-noise ratio will be terrible.

Don't read the comments. Approximately 100% of them are garbage. Comments from the people you follow will appear in your feed anyway.

If the people you follow frequently retweet stuff from someone, consider following them. But only if you find their posts interesting and they don't post too often.

I guess this should still work, if the people you want to follow are still on Twitter.

dredmorbius• 3 years ago

This has been my experience across a number of platforms other than Twitter (I've not used it in any significant fashion).

On Mastodon (and previously on Google+), my strong advice is to use lists, and to essentially treat those as priority rather than topical classifications.

Usually that ends up being three tranches, high, medium, and low interest, where the high-interest list is about 10--20 active profiles (with time there may be inactives which accrue, though my tier-I list remains about 40--50 profiles). The 2nd and 3rd tiers are less selective, generally if someone doesn't seem to rate tier-I I'll bump them to II, and if they're getting too annoying there, to III.

Mastodon has the option to limit boosts (retoots) and replies by profile, so toggle those if someone's a good primary source but is overly profligate in their amplification.

More on lists generally: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/109305354126509106>

I rarely view either my own "Home" stream (all profiles I follow) or the local instance / global federated streams.

Fuckwits get blocked: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019> It's AMAZEBALLS how much s/n improves when n is explicitly filtered.

On post/response type platforms (Google+, Diaspora* (yes, it's still around), good hosts are key, and what you're looking for is someone who posts interesting prompts and hauls out the trash in terms of low-quality comments. (HN's moderation team does a generally excellent-job-at-scale of that here ... present thread notwithstanding.)

Highly-voluable posters are almost never worth following directly --- what they lack is a self-editor, and you'll usually catch their interesting stuff through boosts or the equivalent. There's phenomenon I've noticed since the days of print newspapers where the highly-curated selected syndication of content gives a tremendously distorted view of the representative quality of a publication: when you're reading at the far end of a highly-selective filter, the crap and cruft has been cut and blocked. Prolific posters may achieve occasional hits and high notes, but the wheat::chaff ratio is often very, very low.

Similarly, there are profiles which post rarely but almost always with high salience. In a strictly streams-based view, these tend to get lost.

Another useful tool is directed search. Google+ actually had useful search at several points in its evolution (though it rather famously launched without any). HN's Algolia tool is a key value point to this site, and I mine both my own and others' content frequently, as well as search either articles or concepts as they appear or occur to me, with varying levels of success but at least the possibility is there. Occasional gems to appear. The Fediverse has taken a generally adversarial approach to comprehensive search (largely a futile effort as Alex Stamos has pointed out, and I strongly agree), though there are hashtags which can be searched, pinned, and/or followed, and some limited full-text search (your own toots, followers / local instance) which is quite useful. Platforms lacking effective search (Reddit, for comments, Diaspora* at all, Ello (back when it was more alive) in any useful sense) are severely handicapped. Yes, the feature can be abused, but it's also highly useful.

shaman1• 3 years ago

For me it's a good place to follow the latest developments happening now in AI

luckydata• 3 years ago

he hired a COO and called her CEO

prng2021• 3 years ago

So if Twitter fails, she’ll be the one to blame. If it succeeds, do you think she’ll get the credit or will people assume it was all his doing?

flavius29663• 3 years ago

So if Twitter fails, she’ll be the one to blame

not really, it's still his Twitter

patrickmay2• 3 years ago

I think it's a win-win for her. If Twitter pulls out of its nosedive, she'll be seen as a genius. If it splatters all over the ground, everyone will blame Musk and agree that she was put in an impossible position.

I just hope she's getting paid upfront, given Twitter's current cashflow issues.

maximus-decimus• 3 years ago

Everybody seems to blame everything that goes wrong on Musk and everything that goes right on his employees, so if anything she'll get all the credit and no blame ever.

ratonofx• 3 years ago

IMHO, Twitter has so much network effect that it kept frozen in time lacking features. It's one of the best study case on MVPs as Craigslist, Reddit, Slashdot, 4Chan...

Musk just showed us how a "not anti-capitalism" product management, from top down, could make Twitter catch up and keep up on the Zeitgeist of Internet User Experience.

Twitter and part of the public discourse was saved, Musk companies can benefit a lot from the same leadership and governance model spearheaded by Google on the 'Alphabet move'.

It's sad that people just want to buy the media buzz and witch-hunting because 'it is too much power in one person's hands'. I don't see this amount of critical thinking about Sergey and Larry, Besos or Zuckerberg.

smcl5• 3 years ago

The biggest complaint I've seen hasn't been that it's too much power in one person's hands, it's that he's just been fucking around with the service and annoying people.

secretsatan• 3 years ago

Is this that thing where someone else is setup for the fall?

mr90210• 3 years ago

I truly hope she made a good deal and got herself a loaded contract because the challenge ahead is simply not worth it.

tinyhouse• 3 years ago

The only reason for her to get this job is to have her name known in public. No one knew who she was until now (not saying it as a bad thing). She is taking a sinking ship with lots of issues she won't be able to fix, like the thousands of lawsuits the company is facing. Now Elon will have someone to blame for the disaster he created. Google luck Linda, you'll need it.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

People have been screaming for him to step down as CEO of Twitter for a long time, and he's doing it. It looks like the general reaction in this thread is that this is somehow even more evil than not stepping down. What makes this either a catastrophic mistake, or a malicious act?

sebzim45006• 3 years ago

If Elon Musk (or one of his companies) cured cancer tomorrow a significant part of the population would find a way to hate him for it.

Larrikin2• 3 years ago

The more realistic outcome would be that Elon promises a cure for cancer is coming next year and repeats saying that every year until all of his competitors have caught up.

shmatt• 3 years ago

I think they were expecting someone who has been a CEO before. My money was on Marissa Mayer personally

cvalka• 3 years ago

I also had her in mind. Though she does not get social?

noelsusman2• 3 years ago

He doesn't seem to be stepping down from much of anything. It's an online social media company and he's still going to be in charge of product and technology, so what exactly is this new CEO going to be doing? This just looks like he hired a VP of Advertising and decided to call her a CEO for no reason. What kind of tech CEO doesn't control product and technology?

theonething2• 3 years ago

What kind of tech CEO doesn't control product and technology?

The kind that has a CTO to do that.

machdiamonds2• 3 years ago

A lot of people in this thread saying "Musk isn't an engineer." According to Jim Keller, John Carmack and others, this simply isn't true: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

AlexandrB2• 3 years ago

For me at least, this perception comes from the level of hubris that Elon exhibits in public. Statements like "At this point, I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth" is not something you hear from good engineers very often because it reeks of Dunning Kruger. Elon also frequently chooses to make statements with high certainty about areas far outside his expertise ("Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April") and consistency overpromises and under-delivers with some technologies (FSD).

So I don't know. Maybe he's a good engineer when he's not on camera. But as a public figure I think he's massively overexposed, largely by choice, and it's doing him no favours in terms of perception lately.

neurobama4• 3 years ago

But as a public figure I think he's massively overexposed, largely by choice, and it's doing him no favours in terms of perception lately.

I think you'll find there's a significant split in perception between, for example, the average American and the pseudo-elites who inhabit Bluesky and Hacker News. Or the latter and the average actual hacker, for that matter.

bena• 3 years ago

There's a difference between "an engineer" and "a good engineer".

So those saying he's not an engineer at all are probably wrong, but those saying he's a good engineer probably aren't correct either.

I think it's also the case where his misses are more evident. If you said "We'll get to Mars in 10 years", people will likely have forgotten you said that after 5 years, much less 2 years after your boasted time frame expires. So people credit you for big ideas while not having to deliver on anything. Every year, we've been about a year away from fully autonomous self-driving cars.

Complaining about twitter and saying how you'd fix it is easy when you don't control twitter. But actually fixing it is a different story once you have all the control.

Promises are easy to make, harder to deliver.

David_Axelrod3• 3 years ago

I remember my perception changed when I watched an interview with musk talk about the material science challenges of panel gaps on teslas. You can't have that level of knowledge unless you worked very close to the problem.

https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=1100

jackmott423• 3 years ago

I would characterize him as a bad engineer. Which for a CEO is a lot better than nothing, if one does not become too arrogant and stops listening. Which, by now he seems to have done. He clearly can do the math of rocket science, but that math is not actually super hard, but its still better than your average CEO he can do. He can understand math and physics based arguments.

But he has never understood people, politics, etc. Which is what twitter is all about.

javier123454321• 3 years ago

I don't know man. I'll often hear things to the effect of I can't believe how incompetent the developers of this app are, regardless of the complexity of the app.

andyjohnson07• 3 years ago

I think he has some instinctive proficiency at the intersection of product design and PR. I wouldn't consider him an engineer.

chippiewill• 3 years ago

Elon is just as much an engineer as Steve Jobs was.

That is to say, Elon is not an engineer.

dgs_sgd• 3 years ago

did you read the reddit thread and still come away with this conclusion?

biohacker85• 3 years ago

I don't know if he's a good engineer or not, but people that don't like him want it to be true and will propagate it regardless. All negative news or rumors about him--twitter is failing, his companies succeed despite him, SpaceX launchpad exploded, Tesla kills pedestrian, stock is tanking, etc..." grants a huge dopamine boost to these people. Unfortunately I understand this well as I have my own areas where this is true.

VikingCoder2• 3 years ago

"I know more about rockets than anyone at the company by a pretty significant margin."

That sounds way more like an arrogant micro-manager than an engineer to me.

The quotes I read there make it sound to me like he's about as involved as Steve Jobs was. Which is not a compliment, coming from me.

IMTDb• 3 years ago

Which is not a compliment, coming from me.

But a compliment for anyone looking at the final results rather than focusing on an incomplete and external perception of the process.

balaji1• 3 years ago

Engineers tend to perceive other engineers as micromanager? And it’s broadly actually true also?

Elon being a micromanager (assuming he is) can not be the only reason a rocket (re)flies each weekend.

theonething2• 3 years ago

You mean quotes like this?

Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.

Quotes like that give me the impression he's very much involved technically.

rchaud2• 3 years ago

A famous anecdote from the Steve Jobs official biography was where he was telling the CEO of Corning glass about the specifics of glass manufacturing. The CEO just smiled and played along, because they wanted Apple's business.

The custommer is always right; even when they bloviate well beyond their area of expertise.

77pt772• 3 years ago

He's definitely not a pure snake-oil salesman like Jobs.

darawk9• 3 years ago

The idea that HN commenters who have never met the guy have opinions that contradict the statements of John Carmack, Jim Keller, Tom Mueller, Andrej Karpathy, etc.

These people are not sycophants. These people do not need Musk. They have plenty of their own money. They are not speaking highly of him because they want a promotion, or they want to be in his good graces, or they're afraid of being fired.

You can still hate him for the way he behaves. You can still think he's a bad guy. But if you think your opinion of his talent or engineering depth is better than these people's who've worked with him, you should seriously reconsider your epistemic blind spots.

It's ok for him to be a good engineer and a bad person. Von Braun designed rockets for the Nazis and later the US space program. Nobody doubts his engineering brilliance.

TheAlchemist5• 3 years ago

I share your point of view, 100%.

As much as I don't like Musk behaviour lately, or how he try to picture himself as the founder of Tesla, it's really ridiculous to deny his achievements. And the money argument - "oh he just paid good engineers to create the companies" - is pretty dumb too - he wasn't that rich until 2 years ago, so why other billionaires didn't do the same thing ? Or all those other more talented engineers.

tootie7• 3 years ago

I can believe he's very smart, but he's also wildly irrational. He's also been caught out since taking over Twitter of broadcasting very inaccurate things about the state of Twitters software stack. Hyperfocus on the software is also definitely the wrong thing to be worrying about when it comes to running a content company and he's only made the product worse in his time there and has shown close to zero understanding what makes the site valuable.

asveikau5• 3 years ago

The idea that HN commenters who have never met the guy have opinions that contradict the statements of John Carmack, Jim Keller, Tom Mueller, Andrej Karpathy, etc.

Those people can also be wrong about stuff. This is just an appeal to the reputation of those names. It doesn't give weight pro se.

I don't have an opinion on Musk's skills as an engineer. I know I've seen him be very arrogantly and confidently wrong about things I know pretty well. That's a bit of a red flag trait that probably bleeds into other areas of his life and work. But also, i don't draw this conclusion out of hate or prejudice for the man. I don't care.

sethd• 3 years ago

So perhaps he’s a con artist?

gjvc• 3 years ago

Who?

AlexandrB2• 3 years ago

I have to admit to eating crow. I thought for sure that Elon was quietly hoping people would forget about the "Should I step down" poll and he was going to stay on as CEO. I was wrong.

For me personally it's largely academic at this point since I'm not coming back to Twitter without Tweetbot. But it's nice to see the follow-through on this one.

HellDunkel• 3 years ago

I am not returning either the vox populi polls were simply intolerable.

moskie• 3 years ago

Don't eat crow simply because he followed through on one thing. He's still a blatant liar and fascist, spewing bullshit about things like being a "free speech absolutist." Giving him credit on this one thing is playing into his hand by scrubbing his reputation in way that allows him to get away with his more insidious plans (e.g. making Twitter more right-wing).

dang7• 3 years ago

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. Regardless of how right you are or feel, it's not what this site is for and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

felistoria• 3 years ago

More right wing or just more neutral?

yalogin• 3 years ago

I think you are not eating crow. He had no intention of stepping down. He thought he would be loved and tried but realized he is not going to be able to pull through the management stuff. I think the poll and this decision aren’t related.

pie_flavor• 3 years ago

I admit to honestly believing the punchline was that the 'she' in question would be his dog, and then back to BAU.

jmkni• 3 years ago

Great! Good luck to her.

The negativity here is weird.

bluescrn• 3 years ago

To the left, she's failed the purity test already by following a handful of 'evildoers' on Twitter.

To the right, the WEF connection is concerning, and her commitment to free speech is in question.

But perhaps she just wants to make money from both sides of the political divide?

djur2• 3 years ago

How does "the WEF connection is concerning" differ from "fail[ing] a purity test"?

fraaancis• 3 years ago

Yeah, it is. The only glaring issue I see is that Yaccarino will definitely have to compromise by kicking some of the more radical people off the platform to get the high-dollar accounts advertising on Twitter again, which will draw fire from what is now the most visible user base. Or at the very least, reducing the "freedom of reach" I've seen Elon refer to. Otherwise, she seems to be a decent hire, catering to a lot of groups.

deepsquirrelnet• 3 years ago

I don’t find the topic of discussion very interesting, which is why I find the popularity and passion poured out here very interesting.

I feel like I missed something… Or dodged something.

rcme5• 3 years ago

Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app.

I wish this notion of the "everything app" would die in the West. Yes, China has a highly successful everything app, but it exists because the government wants a centralized place to control digital activity. Such a model makes no sense in the west. We already have an everything app, it's called "App Store."

So many apps try to this strategy. For instance, Snapchat added games to the app. Why would I want to play a game in Snapchat when I have a nearly unlimited selection of games in the app store?

mxkopy• 3 years ago

I think everything apps are actually sort of a logical conclusion for HCI. The one that my job uses has redundancies everywhere, i.e. a global search bar, multiple links to the same page spread across the website, etc. It's very disorganized, but I've also found it to be strangely useful.

Maybe take this with a grain of salt but when I'm drunk I hate backtracking through UIs and being hampered by organization. I think an everything app would be useful in that case. And in the same vein as "the average human has less than two arms", I feel like the average end user is basically drunk.

Klonoar• 3 years ago

Yes, China has a highly successful everything app, but it exists because the government wants a centralized place to control digital activity.

You say this as if political parties here wouldn't be interested in that. ;P

akiselev• 3 years ago

Not if they had to share with each other.

pembrook• 3 years ago

Along those same lines, the weirdest thing to me about the concept of an “everything app” is that it basically just describes an operating system.

iOS, MacOS, Windows, Android, Linux, etc. are already the “everything” apps.

Why the do we need an app that can do everything inside of an app that can already do everything?

It’s like wearing a hat on top of your hat.

I think your thesis about WeChat being more about a domestic choke point over the freedom of computing in China is largely correct.

pvillano• 3 years ago

We (consumers) don't need it, but companies like the idea of complete control over an app you never leave

kevinmchugh3• 3 years ago

Browsers also meet the everything app definition. The only gap I see is that there's not a single identity provider in front of Twitter, Venmo, and Robinhood, which seems to be Musk's vision. When you think of it that way it becomes clear it's about building a single social graph and the lock-in and surveillance risks become really glaring.

ajvs• 3 years ago

Because they want to monetise and own the entire thing, even more than the most successful "everything app" (iOS) already does.

MetaWhirledPeas• 3 years ago

Why would I want to play a game in Snapchat when I have a nearly unlimited selection of games in the app store?

I agree with you for that specific case: Snapchat games. But for a lot of other things, like payments (as Elon himself discussed doing) I appreciate some degree of convergence. Google has already done this sort of thing to a large degree and it's one of the reasons I like using their products. The reason it's desirable is convenience: using one UI and one login can be a pleasant experience.

Twitter has a long way to go though. I dislike their UI and my recent attempts to log in to their Android app resulted in me just deleting the app and using their web UI instead.

bryananderson2• 3 years ago

The payments thing is nonsense. Why would anyone want to use Twitter for payments when they could use a ton of existing options that work fine? Remember, Snapchat tried payments too. And that at least sort of made sense, since people already message their friends on Snapchat, and sending payments to friends is a common use-case. But Twitter?

He’s throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something sticks. Blue check subscriptions were a bust, so now he’ll try hiring someone to woo advertisers back. If that doesn’t work I guess he’ll try payments or something.

techolic• 3 years ago

but it exists because the government wants a centralized place to control digital activity

Speaking as someone who witnessed them from 0 to everything - it really has not much to do with that.

It has to do with how fast mobile payment swept through the country to be the connecting factor for all online services and it has to do with how easy it was and is for big players to out compete or swallow small innovators and harvest their innovations.

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

It already did, that was what CompuServe, AOL, and arguably Facebook etc. were. Musk seems to be calling back to things that were big when he was growing up. I don't think there's such a demand for the return of the internet portal.

hakanderyal• 3 years ago

I think that will turn out to be a great move for Twitter.

I don't get the negativity expressed by top comments.

Yeah things were hectic at the beginning, but Twitter nowadays is a much better product than it was a year ago for me. Find a good niche for yourself and it's a gold mine for socializing online with a bit of curating.

neurobama4• 3 years ago

I don't get the negativity expressed by top comments.

Lots of ideologically-opinionated users are mad Twitter no longer censors and bans their opponents. They're upset that their patrons who enforced this got fired by Musk. Much seemingly unrelated criticism flows from this.

As to the actual Twitter experience, I've always used a chronological feed and never understood complaints about the algorithm. Step one to not being bothered by an opaque algorithm's control of your attention is withholding that control in the first place. I haven't noticed any change in my daily Twitter browsing in this regard under Musk.

madeofpalk6• 3 years ago

Twitter no longer censors and bans their opponents

Unfortunately, Twitter still censors and bans their opponents.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/15/twitter-s...

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/elon-musk-twitter-st...

fernandotakai• 3 years ago

I don't get the negativity expressed by top comments.

feels like people want musk and twitter to fail just for the sake of it.

i, myself, want the platform to thrive, because i absolutely love the idea of twitter.

random_cynic2• 3 years ago

I don't get the negativity expressed by top comments.

Basically HN is where bored Reddit user comes nowadays as most of the relevant/influential users are still on Twitter (as you said you just need to curate the feeds well). So who really cares what Reddit know-it-alls think?

drumhead• 3 years ago

He's trying to turn it into the Fox News of social media, a hardcore or uses being bombarded with my pillow ads. Seeing how profitable Fox is he seems to want to follow that path.

cogitoergofutuo• 3 years ago

Too little too late. I left Twitter a few days ago after I saw some users complaining about animal torture videos showing up in their feeds and search suggestions, and this was on the heels of the footage of the shooting in Texas making the rounds.

It’s a completely unsurprising thing to see when you actively court channers after kneecapping content moderation.

Havoc• 3 years ago

Not GRD after all haha

ta8645• 3 years ago

IMHO, Twitter fundamentally needed a huge shakeup, which Elon has done. I've enjoyed and used my account more since he took over than in any of the years prior. Still, it's obvious a lot of people are unhappy with the changes; but it's hard to judge how many people are quietly happy with them. Personally, I hope for Twitter's success under Yaccarino's leadership.

thomasahle• 3 years ago

What changes have you personally experienced?

For me it's mostly been (1) seeing less content from people I actually follow (because prioritization of Twitter Blue subscribers) while my own tweets are shown less; and (2) awkward conversations with people, where I can type 280 characters, but they can respond with infinitely long answers.

TinkersW3• 3 years ago

For me nothing much has changed..

It is still a fairly slow and bloated site like always.

Need to add lots of filters to block all the politic garbage people spew, and mute anyone that repeatedly does this. Same as always.

patrickmay2• 3 years ago

Killing the APIs used by TweetBot and other third party products has made Twitter close to unusable.

nojonestownpls5• 3 years ago

As a previous non-regular-Twitter user, every time I checked in to see what the hype was about, it was full of people trying to create "personal brand"s and sounding very artificial. It had a very LinkedIn-ish vibe. Regular Twitter users probably had a very different experience, of course, but this average initial experience was a turn off.

There are still faux-experts shilling their brand on Twitter for sure, but recently it feels like there are a lot more authentic and casual chat that's easy to get into.

It may just be that Elon shaking things up and causing some people to move out destabilized existing cliques, thus making things more approachable to an outsider. But I for one am enjoying the current Twitter a lot more than the past one.

rcme5• 3 years ago

I never used Twitter much, but one change I noticed is that there is more "angry political commentary" than before. Twitter has always been politically polarizing, but I feel like angry comments pop up on every thread now. For instance, when Musk announced he had picked a new CEO and referred to to her as "she", one of the replies visible at the top was how this specific Twitter user didn't want to use a product run by a woman.

RoyGBivCap6• 3 years ago

(1) seeing less content from people I actually follow

This is the Following tab. It's only the people you follow. The "For you" tab is stuff from the edge of your filter bubble.

ThrowawayTestr2• 3 years ago

The community notes is the best feature added to anything ever

dorkwood4• 3 years ago

My personal experience is that I like the addition of the “following” and “for you” tabs, since they make a lot more sense than the sparkle menu that used to be in their place. Unfortunately, I can’t use the “for you” tab anymore, since it no longer contains any content for me.

StopTheWorld• 3 years ago

Still, it's obvious a lot of people are unhappy with the changes; but it's hard to judge how many people are quietly happy with them.

I follow a number of accounts on Twitter. If someone tweets, previously it seemed the replies which would float to the top would be the ones which were liked the most - like on HN - or perhaps from users that had the equivalent of good karma. Since the sale of blue checkmarks, now the replies which float to the top are from those shilling out eight dollars a month for the blue checkmark, and those top replies are usually inane.

Previously, well-known people would get a verified checkmark. One example talked about on the net is the singer Dionne Warwick, who lost her checkmark as she does not want to pay the eight dollars a month for it. There are two Twitter accounts calling themselves Clint Eastwood's official account - one has a blue checkmark and less than 3500 followers, one does not and has over 100,000 followers - I have no idea which is the real one, if either is. This also makes the platform less useful to use.

nailer15• 3 years ago

That seems like Clint Eastwood’s agent’s fault.

noelsusman2• 3 years ago

The decision to kill third party clients has cut my usage dramatically.

Beyond that, the decision to show every single reply from a Twitter Blue subscriber above any reply from a non-subscriber is one of the worst changes I've seen in a social media product. Elon chose to brand subscribing to Twitter Blue as a political act, so now below every tweet there's nothing but people who have agreeing with Elon's politics as a significant part of their identity.

It's not like Twitter replies were all that good before, and yet somehow he's made them significantly worse.

madeofpalk6• 3 years ago

The tricky thing about cutting third party clients is that those users were never counted as a 'mDAU' in their reports anyway. They could have brought other benefits (like 'power users' generating content to attract monetisable users).

jytechdevops• 3 years ago

second this, quietly happy. i know many that are as well. we just can't really voice it because people blow their lids if you are not part of the "Current Thing", which right now is hating everything that Elon touches.

syngrog663• 3 years ago

good she comes from advertising. seemed like Musk wrecked that aspect of Twitter. lets see if she has enough power to impact it given Musk is still the de facto boss

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

I’m going to guess that the either new CEO will quit in 12-18 months or Elon will drift away from being closely engaged with Twitter.

I don’t think any decent CEO will tolerate perpetual undermining and I don’t think Elon has a “medium” setting.

madeofpalk6• 3 years ago

What type of person would accept this CEO role? Surely the problems are known, so whoever accepts would be happy with them?

panick21_11• 3 years ago

Just like Musk will go away from being involved in Tesla that people claimed for many years. Or how all his leadership of all his companies always leave. Except his companies have much more stable leadership teams then their competitors.

andyjohnson07• 3 years ago

So Musk owns ~80% of the shares but Yaccarino is his boss? Good luck with that - I hope she's good at tightrope walking.

abvdasker• 3 years ago

I give her less than a year. The job description is to be the public face of Twitter's ongoing collapse.

RoyGBivCap6• 3 years ago

...ongoing collapse?

Every usage record twitter has broken has been since he took over.

johannes12343212• 3 years ago

He is also chairman. He remains in control. Just hired somebody to take care of ad customer relations, which is a thing he certainly can't do and have her a good title.

byyyy• 3 years ago

Can the CEO fire the CTO if the CTO isn't performing well?

If not who is really the CEO?

650REDHAIR• 3 years ago

The top replies to this tweet are batshit crazy and a great representation of why I nuked my Twitter account.

Twitter was never my favorite web property and I checked out a long time ago, but I would come back to read long form tweets, developing stories, and the occasional rant. Now? Few people I look up to are using it and I feel like every time I look at a reply it’s flooded with blue check marks spouting absolute nonsense or hate.

Are normal people still using it?

whalesalad• 3 years ago

totally vibe with this. feels like a community of incels, elon fanboys and jan6 type individuals now.

nailer15• 3 years ago

If all you follow are incels, Elon, and protesters then that’s who you’ll see. Tech twitter is the same as it ever was.

panick21_11• 3 years ago

Nonsense. I muted Musk and after the initial takeover shitshow. Twitter is mostly the same. A few tech people have left.

But in terms of my other interest, there is very little difference.

The idea that its not all nazis or whatever is complete nonsense.

sebzim45006• 3 years ago

Elon tweets have always had terrible replies, I have no idea if they are better or worse than it used to be. Probably about the same.

In general I think twitter is slightly better since the takeover. I'm sure that someone who follows and engages with different people could come to completely the opposite opinion.

dmix3• 3 years ago

Every major Twitter account has the lowest quality replies. Always has been.

It’s just like popular threads on /r/all on Reddit. Good luck finding something that’s not cringey, blowing things out of proportion, or a bad joke.

iudqnolq4• 3 years ago

Yes. If you stay away from high follower accounts and block/ignore blue checks it's still ok. But you're right, those comments are awful.

"she"
Well there goes the neighborhood
Twitter was nice while it lasted. Women are always the ones who usher in radical leftism

rch• 3 years ago

Blue check on the app: probably 70/30 negative, with all the negative comments focusing on Yaccarino's official WEF involvement. Zero gender based or notably biolus comments, even after going back to try to scroll down into the content you're describing.

Incognito on the web: all negative, mostly WEF new world order scaremongering, anti-woke hand wringing, and outright offensive comments.

tenpies• 3 years ago

The top replies to this tweet are batshit crazy and a great representation of why I nuked my Twitter account.

Ironically, if you had not nuked your account you would probably see better replies. Twitter does after all, tailor which replies you see first to your account and followings.

usr11062• 3 years ago

I have not nuked my account. But according to recent headlines Musk will do it for me because I have not logged in for 1.5 years or so. In some special occasions it was handy, but in general I would agree with the parent: Are any normal people still using Twitter?

isbjorn162• 3 years ago

She knows all the advertisers and can placate them.

I hope she has an infinite supply of lipstick because this pig will need it :|

zadler• 3 years ago

Twitter is doing great.

Xorlev• 3 years ago

There is no war in Ba Sing Se.

Just saying it doesn't make it true. Twitter has a long way to go to regain advertiser confidence, and Blue is barely a footnote.

dang7• 3 years ago

Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35920114.

isbjorn162• 3 years ago

With respect, you don't think it's substantive to point out that the new CEO has a rather tall job in order, using colloquial language?

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.

jacquesm3• 3 years ago

sCapegoat Executive Officer

Animats2• 3 years ago

Who's running Tesla right now?

Whomever is in charge of manufacturing over there seems to be doing well. It took Tesla over five years to get their manufacturing act together. (Which is what the manufacturing experts who quit in 2016 said it was going to take.) But they finally did, and at long last, cost per unit started to come down.

New product development, though, is not going well. The Cybertruck is still not shipping. Nor is the big truck. A Model 2 has been announced, but is not shipping. And, of course, there's Fake Self Driving, which isn't mentioned much any more.

Come to think about it, Tesla as a high volume car manufacturer now seems to work better when Musk isn't around.

ex3ndr• 3 years ago

How it is great? USS still not available on 100k+ car.

misiti3780• 3 years ago

a model 2 has been announced?

Animats2• 3 years ago

a model 2 has been announced?

Yes. Quietly.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/03/03/tesla-...

dang7• 3 years ago

All: could you please not post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? There are a ton of them in this thread, unfortunately. They're tedious and not what HN is for. HN is for curious conversation, not boo-vs.-yay celebrity wars or mudslinging (or mud wrestling for that matter).

If you're about to comment in this thread, please make sure you're up on the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and comment in the intended spirit.

thejarren• 3 years ago

I'm very interested in HN's perspective based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff relative to this news.

"The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon of women being likelier than men to achieve leadership roles, such as executives in the corporate world and political election candidates, during periods of crisis or downturn, when the risk of failure is highest.Other research has expanded the definition of the glass cliff phenomenon to include racial and ethnic minority groups."

mjfl2• 3 years ago

I think people who are angry with Twitter, really tend to overestimate how many people leave. Only 1/61 of my followers left twitter after Musk took over, and this includes a few outright leftist/communist types who stayed.

agnosticmantis• 3 years ago

I’m just gonna leave this here for the sweet irony and the sheer hypocrisy:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/business/media/elon-musk-...

ggm• 3 years ago

I found it interesting to wonder how viable a CTO he'd be if he had to accede to somebody else's directional drive, or a board.

I suspect he wouldn't do too badly because he is sufficiently technical to know when he's being snowed and is also quite driven.

The problem isn't that he has no technical ability. The problem is he is unwise, and somewhat of an autodidact, convinced he's right irrespective of evidence. Lacking a source of directing force he is prone to making irrational, personally driven choices.

He also miscommunicates frequent. I doubt his "C suite" colleagues would welcome it, and so his directorate or board would be edgy all the time. Being in control makes me wonder if he's surrounded by yes-men and fires anyone who tries to argue back.

rhaway84773• 3 years ago

Twitter promoting “cat in blender” when you searched for “cat” is the last straw for me. Whatever Twitter might do, whether good or bad, I’m absolutely done with that platform.

usr11062• 3 years ago

Hmm, why did I upvote this article?

I haven't been logged in to my twitter account for probably more than a year. And when I see an interesting tweet somewhere, my first thought is, why can't that person use a more decent platform?

steakscience• 3 years ago

Fancy name for a VP of Sales ;) That seems to be her real role while she reports to Elon anyway

Linda Yaccarino is the new CEO of Twitter

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