Building the Future of X

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2023/building-the-future-of-x

by lopkeny12ko • 3 years ago

46 106 3 years ago

blog.twitter.com

Finnucane• 3 years ago

Get out while you can, Linda.

meepmorp3• 3 years ago

Nah, there's a book deal on this a few years down the line, however it pans out. I'd be day drinking my way through it, though.

TheAlchemist• 3 years ago

It's pretty sad that a guy that created SpaceX and Tesla (ok, not entirely true for Tesla but almost) is now trying to satisfy his ego by listing "View counts feature location moved to the right side of posts" as proof of the pace of innovation...

theolivenbaum• 3 years ago

Scraping the bottom of the barrel for anything that can show "progress"

enumjorge2• 3 years ago

This is the cooperate equivalent of padding your resume with skills like “Microsoft Word”.

housemusicfan• 3 years ago

Put that in context when you consider all the "essential" employees he fired couldn't even muster that in the last 5 years. Which begs the question: what did these people do all day?

andrewstuart• 3 years ago

Twitter CEO, not sure that's a job I'd want, though presumably it pays well.

sschueller• 3 years ago

Well, it's X CEO now and I don't know if I want that on my resume especially since it seems to be a puppet position which you have you no say at in any way.

vidarh• 3 years ago

On the other hand, for anything short of bankruptcy she can trot out a story.aboit how it's only thanks to her heroic efforts it didn't go worse. Whether true or not. And how she's dealt with the backseat driver from hell.

ahahahahah4• 3 years ago

Idk, there might be a pretty decent supply of rich narcissistic fools. It could be that it's rather lucrative being the one to be the happy ceo for their dumb shit.

mmastrac• 3 years ago

This is one way to do wealth redistribution, I guess.

KRAKRISMOTT• 3 years ago

Wealth is being destroyed here, no additional value is being created. There's spending yes, but not value creation.

selectodude• 3 years ago

The money went from Elon to twitter shareholders. Elon having less money is value creation at its finest.

zabzonk• 3 years ago

as soon as you see "passionate", you know "bollocks"

PlunderBunny• 3 years ago

https://markmanson.net/screw-finding-your-passion

voz_• 3 years ago

There's no future for these clowns.

sergiomattei• 3 years ago

Twitter is a circus nowadays.

Barely any links load, ever. So many dead links, login requirements, infinite spinners of death…

DoreenMichele6• 3 years ago

Dead links do not a circus make.

Tell me: Is it safer for People of Color, LGBTQ individuals and such to be there? Because that used to be a huge circus.

I killed my "Oh, God, this was a bad idea" personal account and haven't yet figured out what to do with the account I have left. So I don't really know.

Which is to say the question is sincere.

kadoban• 3 years ago

Tell me: Is it safer for People of Color, LGBTQ individuals and such to be there? Because that used to be a huge circus.

Lol, no. Musk unbanned all the Nazis and says that "cis" is a slur, to give a small taste.

gorgoiler3• 3 years ago

To [our users] and the world over -- the future of X belongs to YOU – blaze your glory!

Did this go through comms? There’s a typo (you can use a double-hyphen instead of an em-dash but not both), two slogans where one would do, and an all-caps shout.

Above all that though, I’m not sure what blaze your glory means. Am I blazing a trail or path to my own glory? Am I setting fire to my glory?

To those who reply: do you agree?: speed your comments!.

idiotsecant3• 3 years ago

It's bold to assume this company still has communications people.

xwowsersx• 3 years ago

I see

To our passionate, growing communities of movie buffs, sports fanatics, tech trailblazers, and the world over

That sentence can't be correct.

"the world over" means "everywhere on the earth", e.g. "the love for music connects people from the world over" or "the Olympics unite athletes and fans the world over".

But Linda seems to use the phrase here to mean "everyone", as in "movie buffs, sports fanatics..., and everyone", which is just, well, incorrect. How did this pass the most basic review??

gorgoiler3• 3 years ago

That’s another good catch. (I’ve also adjusted my quote to show I abbreviated it.)

Also, the day part of the dates are a mixture of single-digit and zero-padded:

  6/1 | DoubleVerify brand safety
  …
  7/01 | Video feature update

The vertical bar separator, in addition to being somewhat nerdy, is missing a space on the last item:

  7/28| Ads Revenue sharing

Perhaps these errors are being used to encode a hidden message of some kind? “Help I’m trapped in a PR factory”?

meepmorp3• 3 years ago

They're still responding to press inquiries with poop emojis, right? Linda and maybe an overworked assistant are comms at this point.

jkestner• 3 years ago

I’m not sure what blaze your glory means

I assumed the boss made another 420 “joke”.

grecy3• 3 years ago

Did this go through comms? There’s a typo (you can use a double-hyphen instead of an em-dash but not both), two slogans where one would do, and an all-caps shout.

In all seriousness, do you want a company that spends its time and money vetting feature announcements, or do you want a company that spends its time and money building the thing that it is supposed to be building?

I would much, MUCH rather do business with, or buy products from a company with poor marketing and a fantastic product than the seemingly thousands of companies out there now that spend more on marketing than actual products [1]

[1] Note: I may have PTSD about this. The Telco I formally worked for commonly spent 10x on marketing a new product a service compared to what it cost to roll out, which was also many times more money than the product was ever forecast to bring in in revenue.

bagacrap2• 3 years ago

Sure, but this company's entire mission is enabling human communication, and grammatical non sequiturs just make them look clueless.

p.s. it's "every day", not "everyday"

gorgoiler3• 3 years ago

The chief executive of a public company should have impeccable writing.

You could forgive a founder for poor writing on the assumption that they are bringing something else to the table, but as I understand it Yaccarino is in this role as a professional exec.

karmakurtisaani• 3 years ago

I could see the line of thinking "If they can't get basic communication right, what else are they missing?"

tibbydudeza• 3 years ago

Autobots assemble !!!!! Sounds as cheesy as an 80's kids cartoon.

cooper_ganglia• 3 years ago

As someone who never really used Twitter before the LLM stuff started happening, and still I only pick it up once or twice per week, I've personally felt that I've had a better experience on there recently than I did a while ago. I appreciate the efforts Musk has made towards pushing back against the censorship of language that it seems like everyone nowadays wants to enforce, regardless of their background. I think he'd be doing better financially if he would shut up for 5 minutes, but hey, it's his money, not mine, haha.

Although, I would like to see humans make it Mars within my life. So c'mon, Elon, just keep your trap closed for a bit, let Linda do the talking for you, and continue to be the egotistic, megalomaniac manager in the same vein as Steve Jobs, and just make really good products, please.

eviks• 3 years ago

How can the censor-in-chief be pushing back against censorship?

jazzyjackson• 3 years ago

it's only censorship if the people I like are being silenced, otherwise it's just moderation

sdsd• 3 years ago

People are downvoting you because you're saying "Twitter okay" and the hivemind says "Twitter bad". Fwiw I had the same experience, I never cared about Twitter (had tried it a few times and just lost interest) and I've immensely enjoyed Twitter recently. So many weird people just putting ideas out there. TPOT and e/acc in particular are full of smart people I can't find elsewhere (I don't live in SF or even the US, so these aren't people I could access in my community).

I also agree that the real source of the drama seems to be Musk. People are annoyed at him so they have to say "Twitter bad" as a matter of principle.

Timon310• 3 years ago

People are down voting them for this bit:

I appreciate the efforts Musk has made towards pushing back against the censorship of language that it seems like everyone nowadays wants to enforce, regardless of their background.

Musks censorship is well-documented. There are only two ways one could sincerely make this argument:

- by fully ignoring Musks censorship

- by accepting it as good

Neither option makes the commenter seem honest or well-meaning, hence the downvotes.

akaru• 3 years ago

You must be a GOP fan, then. Because it has turned into a disgusting cesspool of disinformation, bigotry, and hate. Just like 4chan, the_donald, and voat before it. But dare you speak against Mr. Free Speech Absolutist himself, you’ll get the hammer.

arrakeen• 3 years ago

As someone who never really used Twitter before the LLM stuff started happening, and still I only pick it up once or twice per week, I've personally felt that I've had a better experience on there recently than I did a while ago.

so with the release of ChatGPT on 2022-11-30 being the watershed moment for LLMs, you're saying that you've been using twitter for less than a year? if that's the case, i got news for you buddy--you've only ever known the shitshow twitter

insin2• 3 years ago

Big "will this do?" homework energy, padding lists to make teacher's eyes glaze over

radicalriddler2• 3 years ago

I'm just having a laugh that there's still like 4 instances on that page alone where twitter is still a thing.

Bird for sharing. Twitter down the bottom of the page. Primary light blue color.

Also, for some reason the X on the favicon for this site is orange???

If you go onto twitter.com without being signed in, it says "Join twitter today"

What a laugh this rebranding is.

jasfi• 3 years ago

To be fair it's still in progress. It's debatable whether that's a good or bad thing. Given how strong the Twitter brand is, it could be a good thing.

But the question remains: what do you now call tweets? Such strong marketing in that verb.

ks20482• 3 years ago

In the app it says "Posts" in some places where it used to say "Tweets" (and Reposts for Retweets). I imagine most people will continue to use "tweet" though.

whoopdedo• 3 years ago

Also, for some reason the X on the favicon for this site is orange???

Add Reddit to the list of lawsuits.

bodge5000• 3 years ago

For me the favicon is still the bird (though inverted, so the surrounded area is blue and the bird is transparent).

radicalriddler2• 3 years ago

Favicons are cached by browsers (pretty much permanently in some). I opened a new browser and checked the page.

ks20482• 3 years ago

And of course this page is on blog.twitter.com. It seems x.com redirects to twitter.com, but I wonder what's stopping them switching it over? I suppose there's a million places in their code and other in systems where "twitter.com" is still expected.

Venn1• 3 years ago

Is the goal is to make the everything app minus the legacy microblogging bits? Trying to find patterns in chaos.

omoikane2• 3 years ago

It's amazing how they managed to spin rate limits as anti-spam features. Also, no mention of crippling twitter for non-logged in users.

distortionfield• 3 years ago

Rate limits are a valid mitigation strategy for bot spam. But I’ll agree, Crippling twitter for lurkers sucked.

andsoitis• 3 years ago

spin rate limits as anti-spam features

Rate limiting is literally a way to reduce bot attacks, which is a key tool in spamming campaigns.

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-rate-limiti...

omoikane2• 3 years ago

That is true of course, although I would think most competent rate limit implementations would set thresholds that deter bots while real users barely notice, unlike what was observed with twitter. Coincidentally, higher rate limits were a paid option. Spam might not have been the primary motivation for rate limits.

Elon Musk said it was due to "data scraping and system manipulation":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552324

ofek• 3 years ago

The level of schadenfreude in these comments is hitherto unseen. Whatever your view of the management happens to be let's not forget that small features or changes to large systems are not as easy as one might think. That viewpoint is literally a meme [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

ahahahahah4• 3 years ago

Oh, you mean like when that comma.ai doofus said he'd join Twitter as an intern and fix search in a month? And then musk enthusiastically brought him on to do that?

candiodari• 3 years ago

When you fire most employees immediately after doing a "leveraged buyout" with strong odors of it being a hostile takeover as well, you don't get to complain things are hard.

Elon Musk bought twitter with some of his own money, yes, but also by giving twitter a massive loan which it now has to (and can't) repay.

This is entirely his doing, and if he thought it was too hard, why did he do this? I mean, I know, managers do this sort of stuff without giving it much thought at all while pretending to play 5D chess, and I suspect Musk is no different.

Imnimo• 3 years ago

This is an embarrassingly defensive blogpost. Who are they even trying to convince?

enumjorge2• 3 years ago

Nothing says “we’re doing great” like having to remind people about every small thing you managed to shove out to production in the last few months. I’m surprised she didn’t include that they successfully managed to replace the toilet paper in the bathrooms.

plorkyeran• 3 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if they aren't managing to do that consistently.

ahahahahah4• 3 years ago

I mean they literally included just renaming a tab. Like, not changing any behavior, just replacing a string with another (well x times for internationalization.... but then again they probably fired that team and even if not it's certainly an afterthought to them).

notacoward• 3 years ago

I’m surprised she didn’t include that they successfully managed to replace the toilet paper in the bathrooms.

Did they? I'm pretty sure I heard that was a real problem, and that employees were bringing their own.

unsignedchar• 3 years ago

Gruber had a fun take on this

https://daringfireball.net/2023/07/translation_yaccarino_x

nologic01• 3 years ago

Shouldn't the url be blog.X.com ?

raisedbyninjas• 3 years ago

The site seems allergic to using the X.com URL. I found a link labelled Go to X.com and it redirected to twitter.com. Even just browsing the English pages, you're about 10x as likely to see the old branding.

gremlinsinc2• 3 years ago

go big or go home they should sell the Twitter name and domain.

meepmorp3• 3 years ago

Sell it to Meta, they rebrand Threads as Twitter, the cycle begins anew.

shalmanese• 3 years ago

This is all just a lame attempt to DDoS https://elonmusk.today/

insin2• 3 years ago

Missing:

8/02 | Twitter Blue users can now hide their checkmarks, completing our destruction of both what we mistakenly thought they were (status symbols) and what their actual use was (verification - now available in $1,000 + $50 × user flavor!)

simondotau7• 3 years ago

Blue checkmarks were absolutely treated as status symbols by many people, even if it was "mistaken" to consider them as such. While I do lament the loss of identity verification (hugely imperfect as the prior blue checkmark program was) I do see the abolishment of the status symbol as a sociological win that platform.

Perceval• 3 years ago

The whole drama over blue checks was like a live action remake of Dr. Seuss's The Sneetches.

CamperBob2• 3 years ago

You hate to see it. Or at least I do.

This guy was going to take us to fucking Mars.

sumuyuda• 3 years ago

I didn’t see mention of killing off third party apps.

igetspam• 3 years ago

Do we think Bon Jovi would be happy or sad about this?

Every use I can think of around "blaze of glory" is about dying in a gun fight. I'm reading this as a threat.

diydsp• 3 years ago

Overall, changes point in the direction of competing with youtube.

Building the Future of X

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