I’m kind of fascinated by Nikita’s popularity. Normally if you told a tech community like Hacker News that someone marketed viral phone apps targeting teenagers, engineered app engagement mechanics targeting kids, and openly used every growth hacking trick in the book to manipulate App Store charts, it would seem like a checklist of things people get angry about here. Yet because he’s Twitter-famous and seems like a nice guy who posts memes and snark, he gets a pass.
There's a split in the Hacker News community between the "traditional" hackers who look down on this kind of stuff and "growth hackers" who actively encourage it. In my experience X leans much more heavily to the latter.
> someone marketed viral phone apps targeting teenagers, engineered app engagement mechanics targeting kids, and openly used every growth hacking trick in the book to manipulate App Store charts
Just curious. Any YC companies that have engaged in these tactics?
Ironically, most of his stories were blowing smoke. He wasn't actually nearly as successful at any of that as he was at making up stories and convincing everyone how successful he had been at it. When dealing with a con artist, rule number one is believe nothing they say, certainly not about what they've done!
I have a suspicion some people might draw a distinction between financial crimes and exploiting children. I don't have a dataset for this at the moment but that is my suspicion.
Reading his timeline is somewhat rage-inducing. He's just another edgelord who can't decide if he believes the terrible things he's posting or is just ironically posting them.
It's all just attention seeking, there's no value in the posts, no product insight, no teaching like I see from true industry leaders.
It's Twitter, what did you expect? He has insights sometimes but not so many that he can post them daily, it is his personal account, not an education account. If you want growth hacking tips, follow something like this [0].
Nikita has always been like this - vastly overstating his importance but making it seem like a joke so he can feign ignorance. Just another self-absorbed Valley goon.
"Intent" in this context means more more like: "did you intend to stab this person?" (battery/murder) vs. "did you recklessly swing a knife not knowing someone was about to walk by?" (reckless endangerment/manslaughter).
Harming someone "ironically" would be an intentional act of the first category.
For this, English speakers have the phrase "actions speak louder than words". They do things that affect a large number of people and it's reasonable to say those things are more important than the words that come out of their mouth because the guy who punches you in the face 5 times and says sorry each time probably doesn't really mean it. I don't think you're convincing anyone that words aren't important just because liars lie.
I am more fascinated by grok rebellion than Nikita being hired. I still get a ton of bots daily, until that solved they can hire whomever they want. Grok and payounts have been the most fun things happened to twitter since acquisition
> Grok and payounts have been the most fun things happened to twitter since acquisition
I have the opposite opinion. Payouts have supercharged the amount of ragebait and engagement bait getting posted. There has always been a drive to post viral content, but attaching a payout to it has made many accounts go all in on being as inflammatory as they can while posting non stop. Even people who shouldn’t need the money seem to be competing with each other for the largest X payout checks and bragging about how large they got their check to be each cycle, like that’s the new meta-game.
It’s also tiresome to see people asking Grok under every post and then getting the typical LLM responses that sound kind of insightful but don’t contain much useful information when you look closely.
The bot problem is also out of control on a level behind anything I can ever remember. At this point it’s hard to believe they’re even attempting to do something about it because it’s so bad.
The trouble is the effect it has on the community. Ezra Klein has caught up to where I was two and a half years ago and has done some great interviews with the theme that 'Twitter activism really cooked the left'
Musk did the left a real favor by evicting them but he may never have the self awareness to realize that he scored an own goal. It's not a left-wing vs a right-wing thing, it's a high-D vs a low-D thing
or rather a system or a culture that rewards superficial narcissistic interactions (e.g narcissism is a developmental arrest according to Kohut and Kernberg) and avoids any real listening, discussion or deliberation that might build empathy and produce lasting change. (Look how Black Lives Matter turned a major concern of black people in America across space and time into a... flash in the pan)
Everything now is just new kinds of ways to spy on people or the same old shit repackaged in a new format. I'm dying for some actual innovation. The only new product in tech I actually like lately is the Steam Deck and later, the Ally X. Making PC gaming mobile is incredible, and I guess you could say there's nothing revolutionary there, but I dunno, it's new at least and not flagrantly a free-at-use shitpile that's going to tell AdSense my resting heart rate.
Edit: And I suppose relevant to this comment thread, a lot of new tech is just more ways to fuck with people at scale to generate revenue. Which also blows ass.
I think the person you replied to was just mad their opinion was unpopular, but your comment really does seem excessively negative. All the new tech sucks? We just got tech that can write an email, code a simple program, and potentially more. We got laptops with battery life measured in days that generate almost no heat or noise. We’ve had some awesome advances in memory safe programming languages. All sorts of hacker friendly gadgets like 3D printers and Framework devices are available in more varieties and at lower prices than ever. Apple and Google are starting to ease up on some of their worst policies and give developers more options for revenue. You can criticize things you don’t like but saying it’s all or even mostly bad just seems completely wrong. I think one of the things that makes Reddit (and HN, and X, and some Discords and corners of YouTube) unappealing these days is the extreme toxic negativity about everything.
puts The New York Times opinion page in the same box as Jacobin which (1) I think is highly offensive to Jacobin and (2) doesn't seem consistent with a paper that (a) said it would never make endorsements in NYC politics and (b) reversed itself to make an anti-endorsement of Zohran Mandami (because it's just too cringe to endorse Cuomo or Adams)
For that matter I'd put The Guardian and Mother Jones solidly left of The Atlantic. The New Yorker strikes me as being interested in "wokeist" issues but being not quite strident enough to be really "woke".
and have supported free trade consistently ever since and loved Maggie Thatcher but never got behind the Tory clown car of the last 20 years. They're also consistently trans-skeptical.
The weirdest story now has to be The Bulwark which was founded by the people who brought you the Iraq war and torpedoed Clinton's health care plans but has to attract a left-leaning audience because there's no place for a principled conservative in 2025.
Is this actually serious? This is pretty unbelievable and I can only wonder if it is parody. However, I am also aware that some can be so far left that they they think other leftists or even far leftist are mad right wingers but that is a very delusional level of thinking. I don't see how even a plain reading of their article headlines could yield that conclusion.
X has been nothing short of an exercise in brand destruction. However, despite all the drama, it still stands, it still exists, and it remains relevant.
More and more I think Musk managed to his take over of Twitter pretty successfully. X still isn't as strong a brand as Twitter where, but it's doing okay. A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there.
The only issue is that Musk vastly overpaid for Twitter, but if he plans to keep it and use it for his political ambitions, that might not matter. Also remember that while many agree that $44B was a bit much, most did still put Twitter at 10s of billions, not the $500M I think you could justify.
The firings, which was going to tank Twitter also turned out reasonably well. Turns out they didn't need all those people.
1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error.
2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche.
3. The firings did not go well. X has struggled to ship new features and appears nowhere closer to the "everything app" Musk promised. It posts strange UUID error codes. The remaining developers seem to implement things primarily client side, to the extent I even wonder if they have lost their ability to safely roll out backend changes.
4. The capture of X by far-right agitators has led to long term brand damage for Tesla, Musk's most important business property.
> I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.
I thought more people would see a guy doing ... that salute, or things like the antisemitism in Grok in the past few days and say "no", but a huge number of people seem to be able to rationalize things away.
I profoundly dislike the politics of most “leaders” for lack of a better word in the world of tech, but here I am typing these words in an iPhone. Refusing to use something because of who created it or who benefits from it is a bit too much I think, to the point of being unworkable depending on the case.
In other words as much as I’d like to vote with my wallet that is not always practical. And that extends to everything, not only tech.
> Refusing to use something because of who created it or who benefits from it is a bit too much I think, to the point of being unworkable depending on the case.
Having a hard and fast rule that can always be applied about this is impossible. We're just too interconnected and interdependent, and there are too many unknowns.
That doesn't mean we can just ignore it and not think about it. We owe it to each other to still do our best, even if it's not going to be perfect.
It’s not a question of who benefits from it. It’s that the place got weird and creepy and the algorithm is maximizing for engagement of an unpleasant type. I quit last July because I couldn’t stand the angry know-nothing blue checks being promoted into my replies and the cryptocurrency scams.
The Roman Empire engaged in genocide and slavery against many of their adversaries, yet Rome is still viewed as the peak of ancient civilization. The USSR imprisoned millions and caused the deaths of tens of millions more, yet leftists try focusing on the free healthcare and education. The United States engaged in ethnic cleansing of the native Americans, yet given enough time, such crimes have faded in saliency. Manifest Destiny was actually the inspiration for Hitler's ideas of lebensraum, invasion of Russia, and genocide of the Slavs. If Hitler had won he probably would have been considered more akin to Caesar or Napoleon. History is written by the victors and all that.
Ancient Rome is history, not an example to follow.
Connecting the USSR with free health care and education is, uh, "nice try, but completely wide of the mark". We have free education in the US after all, as do most wealthy countries. Denmark and Italy are night and day from the USSR politically and economically.
I think you can both recognize that the past of the US has some very ugly moments while still thinking the ideals were directionally correct and that we should attempt to live up to them.
This feels like a lot of putting positions onto a group for them in order to discount their beliefs.
Most left left left folk that I know have zero idealization about Rome or the USSR, and haven’t forgotten the atrocities the US has committed both home and abroad.
Anyone who seriously talks about the Roman Empire without wrestling with the realities of it is putting their head in the sand.
Anyone pining for the USSR probably doesn’t know a lot of what went on during its existence. Similarly most people actually wanting some form of communism or socialism probably don’t mean “just like the USSR”.
Calling people names to dehumanize them is a page from the Nazi playbook.
20 years of anti-fascists who are jealous that some other people have better footwear calling wolf was a magic spell that brought real fascists into existence.
(If you had to say what was wrong about Twitter in a short text it is that it is easy to say something like the above message in a short text but impossible to conclusively refute as it involves introducing concepts such as "The meaning of a communication is its effect", "The purpose of a system is what it does", "Chaos Magick is real", and that even though physics is real some things obey the laws of 'pataphysics instead.)
What probably puzzles me the most is the cowardice of multi-billion dollar corporations developing AI, whose main goal is to make sure that no one, God forbid, is offended by a chat bot
They are really ready to castrate their models to the point of complete uncompetitiveness, but without any mean words in 0.01% of use cases. WTF? Is it because all people are complete idiots? Or because they think that all people are complete idiots? Or do they think that the jews running media is hypocritical scumbags who are ready to destroy them for the sake of activism and, most importantly, have enough power to do it, as soon as they see something unpleasant in their chatbot?
Why doesn't anyone come out and say openly "this is a language model, a computer program that, like any other language model, is not designed to speak on behalf of the company or describe the real world. And if you are afraid of stumbling upon a mean word, please contact any of our competitors with their weak castrated soyjak models, thank you very much"
Yes, the whole motion matters. I've seen lots of historical documentaries with footage, and I've never seen a nazi salute with that motion.
You have to really work at it, to think Elon made such a salute, but others have not. It's ridiculous and absurd.
When I see and hear mad lunacy amd character assassination such as this, I immediately think "well everything else said about Elon must be made up too"
You speak of "good faith", do you know what this means?
It means that best intentions should be presumed, not worst, when examining the acts of others.
Well, right wing lovers at work have asked me to take down sarcastic images of elon musk doing a "totally not nazi" salute, just in case someone who voted for trump might be offended.
He knew what he was doing, and he knew people would say "what about Obama" or whatever. This is not the first time Musk has violated a societal norm for attention, he just went way too far this time.
He's not a member of the Nazi Party. The Nazi party hasn't existed in a long time. At this point in time, "literal Nazi" cannot mean, contextually, direct subservience to Adolph Hitler. He's dead.
He's a member of a loose collection of white nationalist and "neo-Nazi" belief circles, and has promoted the modern counterpart to the Nazi ideology, the AFD, "urging them to move beyond guilt about their past".
Notably, he's not as fully committed to nativism or racial purity as some of his counterparts; He unilaterally caused a bit of a split in the GOP due to his need to rely on H1B labor, and we have hours-long recordings of his discussions & arguments with other people in this ideological cluster on Twitter Live.
For someone to be a literal nazi, to meet the "literal" part they must either be a member of a nazi party or subscribe to beliefs of them.
You can and should criticise Musk for his actions and views, especially his populist dogma, but calling him a nazi in hyperbole is a disrespect to the actual victims of Nazis, especially as anti semitism is alive and kicking again.
I personally believe Musk knows next to nothing about European politics, and his random support for people is more about rocking the boat and "trolling" the establishment than any meaningful support as he once did to Trump.
Actual victims of people like Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Laura Loomer are literally being gathered off the streets thousands at a time and sent to concentration camps.
Call it trolling all you like, but we just funded our immigration enforcement agency at a level consistent with being one the larger militaries in the world.
Adolph Hitler's partisan ideology, to the extent that it different from general German ideology at the time, was a phenomenon from 1919 to 1945. The Holocaust death camps range from 1942 to 1945.
If you're examining "Ideology" from a behavioral lens, you don't get to look at behavior analogous to the Nazis in the 1930's and excuse it as "Not Nazi Enough".
If you're examining "Ideology" as explicit/implicit endorsement by reference, that's happening too, regardless of whether you want to wrap it in layers of irony. Elon Musk just set his large AI company's flagship up as a 4chan/pol/ member that calls itself "Mecha-Hitler" and offers explicit, detailed antisemitic critiques; This is not even the first time (see the South African Genocide).
If you want to see the character of these people, prove it in the breach - listen to him argue with his collection of ethnonationalist sycophants on Twitter about whether he should be allowed to hire Indian slave labor to run his tech.
Your motte appears to be that the use of the word "Nazi" must refer to a direct continuation of the political party of Adolph Hitler as passed down through partisan rules of succession, for the usage of "literally", as opposed to either of these frames. I reject this pedantry as motivated reasoning. This term has power and that power is needed because shit's going down again in similar ways.
In critiquing a cartoon not produced by Disney as derivative, "He's a sort of Mickey Mouse" might describe any number of cartoon characters that give off the same vibe, versus saying "He's literally Mickey Mouse" describes a blatant ripoff or even actionable IP violation. Obviously these people are not being selected for office by the Fuhrer, and "Literally" has a useful meaning here separate from that designation.
Whereas "Nazi" might be diluted into common hyperbole over the decades, "Literal Nazi" stands as essential terminology to refer to somebody who endorses ideas compatible with Umberto Eco's list, who puts into practice Roger Griffin's "Palingenetic ultranationalism", who scapegoats an ethnic minority to the point of advocating violent action, while at the same time adopting & hanging out with those adopting some of the symbology of the historical German fascist state.
Even the literal literal Nazis didn’t campaign for minorities to be sent to gas chambers. If you’re going to do this silly pedantic act about how no-one in 2025 can literally be a Nazi, at least do it right.
If I'm at a bar and one man is a pedo, does that mean all people at the bar are pedos?
If we're going by objectively terrible things to be, even though the definition of nazi is very loose to now mean anyone to the right of far left because of it's overuse.
The Nazi bar argument does not do itself any favours and is in ways self-defeating. The majority do not care what someone else's political views are and arguments that shame people for doing so will just lead to increases in populism.
> If I'm at a bar and one man is a pedo, does that mean all people at the bar are pedos?
If that guy is a regular known for being a vocal supporter and often engages in discussions in said bar with attendees over how right he is and how reasonable his opinions are, and you still decide to stay and engage in those discussions still without thinking there is anything wrong with that... yeah, you are.
If anyone is in fact confused instead of being purposefully obtuse, the point being made that being a Nazi (like being a member of a criminal conspiracy) has the attribute of conveying responsibility to those who associate with the group.
And I’m saying I disagree. I don’t need to associate with someone else’s political beliefs to sit with them. Unless you go around asking people if they are <thing you don’t like> before you share a meal. I doubt you do. And if you found out accidentally that you find their beliefs unsavoury (say, they like abortion whilst you don’t, whatever) would you not sit with them? I believe this to be an apt comparison because abortion has killed orders of magnitude more humans than nazis ever did.
>> And if you found out accidentally that you find their beliefs unsavoury (say, they like abortion whilst you don’t, whatever) would you not sit with them?
Yes; if I find out that someone has the firmly held belief that me or my friends should be dead (I have several trans friends for example), then I would absolutely not sit with them. And if I found out that a friend of mine sat with people who had the "political opinion" that I should be "dealt with decisively", then I would be pretty upset with them and wonder if they feel the same way about me.
You cannot just treat "being a Nazi" as some normal difference of political opinion. There is a reason that being a Nazi is verboten. Their political ideology is that some people should be removed from society, by violence if necessary. I shouldn't have to say this, but murdering people you don't like should be off the table in civilized political discourse. And if you break bread with such people, then I believe you have something to answer for. What is so valuable about their friendship that you're willing to break bread with people who want to use the power of the state to murder people?
This is all happening in the context of, just yesterday, Grok literally praising Hitler, by name, for dealing with jews decisively - which it claims strong leaders need to do "every damn time"
I am seriously restricting my inbound and outbound reach by boycotting X. It's a hit I can afford to take, but for some people they'd be making a very foolish choice when that's where their audience and the content they want to read is.
NPR's audience is very different from mine (AI researchers and thinkers) though. Some communities seem to have managed the move wholesale: all the cartoonists I like switched, for example.
By the time I left I was deleting multiple bot followers a day. You cannot take X's claims at face value, everything about the platform is aggressively dishonest. NPR's experience is instructive: https://niemanreports.org/npr-twitter-musk/
I don't think it's realistic to pretend that abandoning X is seriously restricting anyone. If anything, sticking with it is brand endangerment and by leaving it you're making the smart move, with or without animus.
> I thought more people would see a guy doing ... that salute
I don't think that gesture was a nazi salute and was grossly taken out of context by everyone who hates the guy. I don't like Elon Musk either but stressing over something like that exacerbates the appearance that the accuser has a biased opinion. It also made the media who covered this for weeks desperate and very shallow.
It's not just the salute, either, which was pretty clearly a Nazi salute that he did twice. It was support for the white Afrikaaners and the AfD in Germany and ripping the aid away from children in Africa, killing them, and on and on.
"I don't understand why ..." is a polite way of saying "I have some experience on the matter and have come up the belief that ...". The actual conclusion may still be wrong, but I hope this helps with your reading of my comment.
Tech industry has been perpetually growing in the last decades. That means juniors are always a large share of the tech population, and as any demographic, some are bound to be clueless and still vocal. The issue is that in more stable industries, there would be a larger share of seniors to respond with more grounded takes. In ours, these voices are drowned, especially on relatively anonymous media such as HN.
I don’t think most people were betting that or if they were they weren’t thinking that hard about it. Musk can run a money loser as a hobby if he likes.
Whether or not X goes under is almost fully dependent on whether it services its debt. That debt is backstopped by Elon Musk, who has enough assets to service that debt for at least another few decades.
Whether or not X goes under is almost entirely one man's choice.
The Twitter-purchase debt problem is a lot less relevant now that he's rolled X into xAI. Now X the app gets to tag along with a higher value AI company (or at least it is currently valued much higher due to investors dreaming big).
Honestly, after years of hearing that Elon's mishaps and faceplants will actually have a meaningful impact, with no meaningful impact, I'm sure xAI will be fine as long as they stay somewhat competitive.
Isn't that the point though? In a market of multiple competently-executed chatbots, a entrant whose distinguishing feature is edgelordism isn't likely to stay competitive. There is a market for "like the other chat bots in terms of parsing instructions, but with clumsy ad hoc prompting to make it generate more racist output rather than less racist output" but it isn't a particularly lucrative one
Cf Musk's other businesses with lockin effect or massive technical advantages, and in some cases where his politics are largely irrelevant
Investors are insane throwing money at elon's xai at a $75 billion valuation. And knowing that elon is probably taking their cash to pay twitter's debt. How is that possible? That shitty also-ran mechahitler ai is never going to make any money. It makes me suspect that a lot of these VCs are more political than rational.
Virtually nobody said that it would go under in a year because that makes no sense. It's financially possible for it to tread water for years whilst losing money.
I don't see how this could be deemed a success when a magic 8 ball or a hamster attached to a giant pile of money could keep it going as long.
Lol the overwhelming tech jerk opinion was that he was firing elite engineers and the site would be unmaintainable as a result, and that he had over-leveraged himself to the point of bankruptcy.
He can't go bankrupt in any sane length of time whilst having the dragon hoard he has. I think you are cherry picking a few folks and assigning them the roles of "the public".
He's probably at more risk of falling out a window Soviet style than poverty.
It probably is unmaintainable but it was already feature complete at time of purchase.
> Most people were betting on X going under in some way or another within a year. From that POV, it's survival in itself can be seen a success for Musk.
Is this where the bar is set now? Not tanking a $40B corporation within a year now passes off as success? Really?
I joined it about 6 months ago and absolutely love the ~uncensored free for all nature of it!
And while the format and content varies in many ways from other sites, one thing they all have in common is millions of humans who cannot distinguish facts from personal opinions. I do not know why but I am absolutely fascinated by the phenomenon, and on Twitter/X you can discuss such things fairly seriously, at least with some people.
The term "cis" will still get you a warning while my for-you page has been consistently filling up with more and more far right content. I regularly see blue checks espousing actual jewish-conspiracy antisemitism.
Every time something happens to anyone, blue check comments asking if any of the parties were black, sometimes not even asking just assuming and blaming it on black people.
Elon has truly created a cesspit Nazi bar of that site.
> The remaining developers seem to implement things primarily client side, to the extent I even wonder if they have lost their ability to safely roll out backend changes.
Thanks for putting this into words — I have also noticed this and felt that product decisions have been shaped by this force of institutional rot.
Twitter's back-end is written in Scala, but they used "better Java" style so an average developer should have no problems making changes
Anyway, what kind of features Twitter (or any social network for that matter) needs after it existed for so many years? Hacker News haven't changed a bit a it does what it does perfectly well
> Twitter's back-end is written in Scala, but they used "better Java" style so an average developer should have no problems making changes
You sound like someone completely oblivious to software development practices who somehow felt compelled to post opinions on software engineering.
Your choice of language is irrelevant if your goal is to maintain software. What matters is systems architecture and institutional knowledge of how things are designed to work. If you fire your staff, you lose institutional knowledge. Your choice of programming language does not bring it back.
“Your choice of language is irrelevant if your goal is to maintain software.”
It may not be the most important choice, but it’s not irrelevant. And whether the staff he fired had useful institutional knowledge is an open question. Didn’t he fire a lot of non-technical, recent hires and people likely to leave eventually due to his muskism? I’m not convinced that his initial firings are the wpest move he made. Sadly, being overconfident, he assumed the same model could be applied to government, a mistake that will take a long time to fix if it is even fixable given America’s overall trajectory and the fate of the dollar.
I generally agree with you but I think you were a little strong in your view that the OP was "oblivious." I only say this because an enormous percentage of companies hiring software engineers specifically with requirements of X years with Y language and W years with framework with silly name Z. I think they are also misguided in that but I think it is is too prevalent to say they are all oblivious but honestly that may actually be more of an apt description.
From what we gathered on the kitchen side he fired the most infrequent committers. Which statistically speaking would not affect the institutional knowledge much.
Or alternatively (assuming that's true) he fired the people who thought about what they commit and kept those whose commit logs look like: "push feature WiP", "fix", "more fixes", "push", "maybe this works?"...
Ironically, those may have been the staff with the most institutional knowledge. Seeing people argue, here of all places, that loc or commit frequency == institutional knowledge is … unexpected. New hires committing “whitespace cleanup” != institutional knowledge.
Someone had to actually write all that code and it inevitably shows up in the stats. People who work on the code most tend to know it the most. Although people in non-coding roles sometimes prefer to deny it.
Sure there had so be some frequent but low impact committers. But implying that people with lowest amount of code contribution must have more impact is ridiculous.
I mean, a staff engineer who stopped committing couple years ago? Yeah could be burnout, or could be some major contribution that's not in the stats. OTOH an IC on their second year in position who hadn't pushed a single line? Nah the institutional knowledge is safe without.
> From what we gathered on the kitchen side he fired the most infrequent committers. Which statistically speaking would not affect the institutional knowledge much.
This take is, quite bluntly, stupid and clueless. Do you think each commit reflects the volume of institutional knowledge of any individual? Unbelievable.
Hey man, just wanted to let you know, I had to downvote a bunch of your comments in this thread, not because I disagree with you, but because your commenting style is unnecessarily hostile and abusive. You can politely disagree with someone without calling their take "stupid and clueless", or any of the other mean-spirited things you've said elsewhere in the thread.
Twitter had thousands of coders, each certainly with varying cadence and style of committing. But variation goes only so much and taken in aggregate yes, the amount of commits/diff size is correlated to contributor prominence. It's kinda hilarious the "my -2000 lines" types deny the obvious.
There an argument that he paid $44B to get a Us administration that would hugely advantage him and his companies. Certainly he’s made billions from contracts initiated by this administration and seen many regulatory difficulties removed.
Of course it may all fall apart because everyone involved has the temperament of a five year old on a meth bender, but the basic “buy media to influence politics to multiply wealth” approach seems to have worked well.
A US administration does not cost tens of billions. He paid $250M to the trump campaign making him the single largest donor of all time, and that's what let him buy the current admin. And that was close to 1% of what he paid for twitter.
The evidence is that Trumps win has more to do with the dynamics of the party+media symbiosis on the right side of the spectrum, than anything X did.
If your media ecosystem can get away with selling narratives and conspiracies as facts, without any pushback, then this allows you to set the topics of discussion for any debate. Agenda setting power > platform power.
Unfortunately, Bluesky has not taken off. The network effects of Twitter are too great to lose its journalists & public figures.
What has happened instead is that we're back on Facebook. Errm... Threads by Instagram by Meta née Facebook. And it's reached a stage where public figure migration is actually becoming feasible.
BlueSky has not taken off because its the far left version of Twitter. If you stray even to the center you are doxxed and banned. They banned the sitting vice-president within a couple of hours of him joining.
A monarchist? Can you explain what a monarchist is? I would think having the position of Vice President would largely imply one is particularly not a monarchist.
JD Vance is/was the personal assistant to Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire who believes we need to get beyond the weaknesses of democracy & egalitarianism in order to preserve the sort of freedom that billionaires need to have. Thiel and Musk are also the financial & political patrons of Mencius Moldbug / Curtis Yarvin, who AFAICT is the person to reintroduce the idea of non-electoral monarchy/autocracy as a credible goal to politics, out loud.
> In his blog Unqualified Reservations, which he wrote from 2007 to 2014, and in his later newsletter Gray Mirror, which he started in 2020, he argues that American democracy is a failed experiment[10] that should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations.[11]
Thiel runs Palantir, whose specialization (again: competing with Musk) is making the authoritarian, panopticon dystopias of science fiction more physically feasible with AI analysis of large volumes of arbitrary data. A system like West Berlin where every third person is informing on their neighbors to a human Stasi officer is horrendously inefficient firehose of data, almost impossible to administrate effectively, and Palantir aims to fix that. Palantir was responding to a market demand from the resurgent US intelligence agencies for this sort of administration for COIN / counterterrorism / occupied territory in Iraq & Afghanistan.
Yes, he endorses Yarvin. And that could be real. He could really believe it, and really want to follow it.
But it seems to me that Vance has been, shall we say, rather mobile on his positions. I wonder if we have ever seen what he really thinks. (You decide whether that would make him less dangerous, or more.)
Bluesky seems to be doing reasonably well all things considered. It’s active and relevant. They also seem to have a pulse and ship new features.
Not saying it will emerge from being a niche thing and take over but it’s a pretty big niche. And Twitter is about half an inch from a platform ending meltdown at any time so it seems like the future isn’t yet set.
I check in on bsky every now and then and I'm kind of surprised at how much is happening. My city posts bulletins there. I follow journos and some individuals I used to follow on twitter who migrated. There are shitposters. Idk why people think it's dead?
I have my doubts about how real that Threads traffic is. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an organic link to Threads or a business list a profile, I don’t even know what the icon looks like. Bluesky I am seeing all the time.
Maybe that’s just anecdotal but given how frequently meta tries to trick me into clicking on a Threads link I have my suspicions about all that traffic.
3. Didn’t go well? I don’t remember twitter (x) crashing for days or data erased.
Means that organizations don’t need that many people.
One thing I learned from this is to not trust so called “experts” or loud voices.
> 3. Didn’t go well? I don’t remember twitter (x) crashing for days or data erased. Means that organizations don’t need that many people.
I don't think you have a solid grasp on the problem. To start off, Twitter did experienced major outages that it never experienced before. Also, you hire and retain people when you need to implement changes. If your goal is to cease any form of investment in your platform, like rolling out a new product or providing a new service, then your responsibilities are limited to keep the business barely aflost while coasting.
See it as a navy ship. You need full crew to perform all your missions, but mothballing the ship requires a skeleton crew.
Here you are, boasting that a ship doesn't require more than a skeleton crew to be kept afloat. I mean, sure why not? But are you saying what you think you're saying?
> discord is manned in 20s-30s employee, valve who makes steam is also has small number of team
Discord is renowned for it's small engineering team, but I'm afraid you somehow claimed it has half the staff it does. A few years ago Steam reportedly employed around 90 engineers. Is it less than 500? I guess. What does that comparison tells you? Well, nothing. You need staff to roll out new features on multiple projects. If you add no feature, have no projects to work on, or have nothing to do then you don't need engineers. If your business plan has ambitious goals then you need engineers to achieve them. If all you're doing is keeping the lights on then you barely need anyone. Does this sound obvious?
I've been at companies that doubled their engineering staff overnight because they made a call to invest in a feature. I worked at companies that fired an entire floor of engineers because management decided some projects could be put on cold storage to improve financials. Why do staffing agencies are so popular? Have you ever thought about it?
It never experienced before? Were you aware of the Twitter "fail whale"? I think it is very hard to say that it has been a complete technical failure as many anticipated. I think if Musk had the "correct opinions" as you see them then many people would probably not have been making these proclamations.
Crashing isn't the totality of unsupported code. I previously worked in a company where a goodly proportion of the back end product team was let go, and their system stayed running for two plus years without a single fix or update going in.
Twitter has a permanent outage reporting breaking news. Whenever something big happens now, the feed looks like any other day. This didn't use to be the case.
From my perspective personal perspective, that whole category of social media has been destroyed. Pretty much no one I know/followed still posts. It’s gone from something I watched/posted very frequently to something I might glance at once in a very great while. And after initial flurries of interest neither Mastodon or Bluesky really achieved critical mass.
That was a factor, but his CV stating "I cut Twitter's expenses and staff by 80%" or however much was probably a big factor too. Of course, he's the only one actually bragging about that being a success.
Twitter's takeover also helped him get a number of loyalist goons that he sent out to various US federal agencies to extract data from.
Advertising works well on local races. But for POTUS, I don't believe it moves the needle much.
The bigger factors are whether the large media players back you (Murdoch, Musk), whether social media personalities back you, and whether the foreign intelligence agencies back you in their spamouflage and information ops (e.g. via the Internet Research Agency).
You don't think the left had all these things in their favor? You think the media are all far right wing conservatives? People like Rachel Maddow and Oprah, you might consider to be much more right wing than even Dick Cheney? You don't think maybe there might be some issues out there that people voted on and maybe saying "I'm a middle class kld" and "I'm speaking" on a loop just didn't do it for them? No, it must be Murdoch, because Soros is a relative pauper by comparison. Really?
He doesn't seem particularly happy with how things are going with the new administration, and Trump seems to be enjoying the fall out rather more. As Elon himself acknowledged, to the extent he actually believed in cutting the deficit the Big Beautiful Bill is doing the opposite, and I'm pretty sure some of the cuts that actually are taking place are ones he isn't happy with.
He could have gained valuable information and he certainly got to exact petty revenge on regulators that crossed him, but I'd have a hard time putting a higher valuation on that than the tangible revenue drops of some of his businesses, not to mention risk of repercussions. I also think Trump is remarkably easy to get close to for someone with Elon's money,came and social circles whilst spending a lot less, especially if he's offering unqualified endorsement. Don't forget DOGE was launched as a collab with a relatively minor Silicon Valley player whose other claim to fame was running against Trump...
I did not use Twitter. I do not use X. I'm even less inclined to become a user after the Musk takeover. I don't even know anyone who is active on X. However, I still constantly get linked to tweets and see screenshots of tweets (or whatever they're called now). And I never see anything from competing platforms.
X may be failing by many metrics, but in terms of popularity it is still the undisputed king of its market. It's by no means "niche".
I’m pretty lazy about curating my feed, but I do a little. And I never see any porn bots and only rarely any spam accounts. Political stuff, yes, but I don’t mind and it’s not a ton, in fact my feed has a lot more insightful analysis than advocacy. I still get a lot of “breaking news” that I’d otherwise have to be very active on Facebook to get, especially regarding other countries.
I guess that’s just TL;DR: YMMV, but I do think there are a lot of people on X who find it very useful and don’t run into the problems you listed.
As for Elon’s overpayment, I have thought about actually paying for an account, which I never would have done on Old Twitter.
1. Agreed. One of the worst timed purchases of all time.
2. Unfortunately, nothing has truly displaced Twitter. Is Meta even still trying with Threads? I don't see ads, but I have to wonder why any real company would risk advertising on Twitter.
3. Eh. As a casual user, I haven't noticed any difference. For a mostly finished product, there were probably were a bunch of overpaid do-nothings on staff.
His mistakes cost less than they could have, sure, but to call it "pretty successful" I think it would have be better than if he just... didn't do much. He didn't have to be as open and aggressive about firing people or opening up the content policy. Openly insulting advertisers, for instance, was a completely unforced error. I think doing less would have kept more value (leaving ethics/morality entirely aside), and if that's true it's silly to say he managed well.
What are the metrics of success in this case? Making more money, a failure. Moving the Overton window to the very far-right, success.
I would argue that the goal is quite obviously the latter, and Musk was very open about this. Given that was the goal, his takeover of Twitter was extremely successful!
He sure claimed to also want to make money on it. With how much debt he took on, he didn't have much choice. Even with the political goal, he could have moved the overton window better by less ridiculous means. (And as I mentioned in another comment, his attempts to squirm out of the sale are evidence against it being a big master plan; for that to be a fakeout requires an unlikely level of depth.)
He also damaged one of the most valuable companies in existence. I don’t think “moving the Overton window slightly to the right in 2024,” if that’s what he did, is going to be as durable.
> I would argue that the goal is quite obviously the latter, and Musk was very open about this
I mean he sued in order to not to have to buy it. To describe this as the _goal_ rather than just him making what he considers to be the best of a bad situation feels like a reach.
>A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there
Twitter/X is the reason DJT became President. It happened accidentally (ie against the wishes of Twitter management) in 2016, they successfully suppressed him in 2020, and then Elon gave MAGA that platform in 2024, leading to DJT's successful election.
As long as X is seen a kingmaker, someone will find it profitable to own/maintain, even if it doesn't convert Ads like Meta/Google.
This is far more nuanced (and disputed) than you make it out to be.
> It happened accidentally (ie against the wishes of Twitter management) in 2016
I think the whole Cambridge Analytica fiasco played a bigger role, and I don't think they utilize Twitter. On top of that, frankly, TV and his behavior at rallies/debated helped him a lot more than Twitter did in 2016. I don't know a single MAGA supporter who was even on Twitter in 2016.
> they successfully suppressed him in 2020
How? He was banned after the election.
> and then Elon gave MAGA that platform in 2024, leading to DJT's successful election.
DJT was not on Twitter in 2024. Did it really make a difference when he had his own social network? We all have our opinions, but is there actual data supporting this for the 2024 election?
> The fact that, much later on, many elements of the laptops history and provenance were confirmed as legitimate (with some open questions) is important
There are two separate "the story"s. One is a story about Hunter Biden's laptop. One is a story about political interference and/or bias at Twitter.
At least some of the story about Hunter Biden's laptop was true. That doesn't tell us anything about whether the story about political interference and/or bias at Twitter was true.
The linked article argues that (1) there wasn't in fact political interference at Twitter, (2) although Twitter employees (like employees of many many many tech companies) lean left, there was no sign that anything in the company's treatment of the H.B. laptop story was politically motivated, and (3) the fact that Twitter nerfed links to the NY Post's story about H.B.'s laptop for one day (a) more likely increased than decreased interest in that story and (b) had no impact to speak of on the presidential election anyway.
Of course it might be wrong about any or all of those things, but whether the NY Post's story about the laptop was actually true or not has nothing to do with any of them.
(The assertion being made upthread here is that Twitter's handling of the story was a deliberate attempt to "suppress" Donald Trump and that it handed the election to Joe Biden. It's all about the second story, not the first one.)
> At least some of the story about Hunter Biden's laptop was true. That doesn't tell us anything about whether the story about political interference and/or bias at Twitter was true.
The extended lockdowns 100% ended his term. It upset too many people for too long. Regardless of actual responsiblity, big nationwide negative events always get laid at the feet of the current sitting president.
Nope. In terms of presidential politics, covid was basically the same as an economic downturn; if it happens while you're the president, the electorate will blame it on you regardless of whether you had anything to do with it.
In the case of Bush in the 2004 election, at that time they were pushing the story that Iraq had been developing WMDs; that was the initial justification for the invasion. Obviously false in hindsight, but at the time people were still pretty raw about 9/11, so critical thinking was in short supply, but--most importantly--it provided an enemy to focus on.
In the case of covid there was no comparable enemy. "Declaring war" on a virus would not have anywhere near the same impact as using the military to actually wage war on another country.
> In the case of covid there was no comparable enemy. "Declaring war" on a virus would not have anywhere near the same impact as using the military to actually wage war on another country.
I disagree. Look at the way we talk about it, "the covid", "covid did this", etc. It absolutely would have worked as an enemy to declare war on and I don't think the vast majority of people would consider it trump's fault if he just got out ahead of it.
Imagine a world where he didn't do trumpy things and instead did things like talking about how this is a national, world wide foe we all need to work together to defeat, I know it's hard, we'll all make sacrifices, but we're the nation that beat the nazis and went to the moon, we can win this war on covid. For further details here are my science advisors talking about the latest info on counter measures.
Obviously this is imagining a world where trump isn't trump, but I very much believe obama/clinton/bush/etc would have been re-elected.
Keep in mind that we also have a strong tendency to re-elect the incumbent anyways and covid is an amazing opportunity to blame all your previous fuck ups on this new "totally unforseeable/preventable disease cataclysm!"
I agree with everyone else that Covid definitely lost Trump the 2020 election. Saying it would have been a lay-up for someone who isn't Trump is meaningless when we're talking about Trump. When there's a crisis people crave strong leaders who can guide them through it, and Trump completely fucked up his messaging. One day everything will be fine in a few weeks, the next day Covid is extremely serious, then he's trying to get people to use horse medicine from Tractor Supply as a home remedy, etc. Compare that to how people around the nation were paying attention to Andrew Cuomo's daily press conferences. Despite Cuomo making extremely incompetent decisions around Covid (such as using nursing homes as overflow space for Covid patients, causing over 15,000 deaths), he got a huge popularity bump at the time because he appeared strong and competent and Trump didn't.
Covid was devastating for the whole world. I don't see how it is an "easy layup" for anybody or any country. Was there any country or scenario where it was an "easy layup"?
wredcoll doesn't mean that COVID-19 was good for the US, any more than they mean that 9/11 was good for the US. They mean (rightly or wrongly) that it should have been easy for the sitting US government to respond to it in a way that made itself look good and helped it get re-elected, just as G W Bush was able to respond to 9/11 in a way that made him look good and helped him get re-elected.
(I'm not convinced that that's right, but it isn't refuted by the fact that COVID-19 was devastating for the world in general and the US in particular.)
Because the laptop includes a lot a emails. A lot of those emails include Hunter selling access to his father and suggesting that his father was in the the scheme with him. Whether or not Joe was actually involved vs. Hunter making it up to get these people to give him what he wanted is an open question, but this isn't something that should have been actively suppressed by the media just a few weeks before the election.
Fox News hyped up Hunter to distract people from the immense corruption between Jared Kushner and the Saudis. Kushner got a $2 billion investment fund from the Saudis.
It was the New York Post (not Fox) that broke the story about the laptop, and that got censored by various social media companies acting on the (false) advice of federal agents to do so.
Again, Hunter Biden is completely irrelevant and hyped up by the GOP Propaganda machine to distract people from Trump's blatant corruption. Biden was 1 million times less corrupt as President than Trump. This is a really standard part of the GOP playbook, they did it with Hillary Clinton and Benghazi. They did it with the "migrant caravan of DOOM".
I really don't think so, at least not in isolation. It probably contributed a small part but the right wing media machine is multi-faceted. There were a lot of podcasters (i.e. Joe Rogan), comedians and youtubers all publicly in support of a second DJT presidency and I think that had a much bigger factor overall than Twitter.
The vast majority of his base, and a majority of his voters, doesn't even trust legacy media unless it agrees with Trump. Even Fox News is routinely under fire not by Trump, but by his fans and Republicans broadly.
I very much doubt there was a different set of questions that would change peoples' minds about him after how his first term went.
I think you're confusing the majority with the most audible.
The silent majority imho exists and is still the one deciding, not political activists on social media of both ends of the spectrum in their respective echo chambers.
To be fair, as I understand it they're saying the podcasters were most likely the ones that pushed him over the edge this time around. "Small part" meaning 10-15 percent is not too bad for twitter. And I do think rightwing podcasters and tiktok got the young male votes out more than twitter did this time around.
I also doubt hispanics and other minorities voted for Trump because they were obsessively on twitter. Not being able to make ends meet, a weekend at Bernie's president, and the over-the-top blank check given to Israel played more of a role than Elon buying twitter.
Did any Trump voters think he will be harder on Israel than Biden or Kamala?
In Israel the debate was "should we be rooting for Trump because of how much of a blank check he will give our government, or against him because of the damage he will do to the free world that we are part of and also the blank check that he will give our government?"
Since this prediction turned out basically correct, I wonder if across the seas people had different expectations?
>Did any Trump voters think he will be harder on Israel than Biden or Kamala?
I don't think they would phrase it like that, but I think they thought he had a better chance of ending the war.
I listed the reasons in order of importance. People voted against the incumbent because they couldn't make ends meet first and foremost.
But as for Israel, one would be hard pressed to find any gaps between the blank check Biden gave and the blank check Trump is giving Israel now. After Biden left office, people close to or in his administration admitted there was zero pressure applied to Israel for a ceasefire, despite public statements by the admin in support of a ceasefire at the time. But there were Muslim mayors and politicians as well as regular citizens in Michigan, some with family in Palestine, who thought it would be madness to vote for more of the same, knowing full well that Trump might not be better. They ultimately thought betting on Trump's ego and meglomania and his desire for getting the Nobel peace prize had the potential to shake the things up and was the preferrable option out of the two terrible choices. Now I don't think that was the right calculation at the time, but I wouldn't fault anyone who didn't want to try the same thing and expect different results.
So, you really think there are no issues that anyone voted on? It's just that the left has no money and no audience? People like Soros and Oprah are just so unbelievably poor that they are no match? Basically, if it were not for Joe Rogan, who has a large audience but hardly captures half of the country, and other comedians, people would have been sublimely enamored with the intellectual tour de force that is "I'm a middle class kid" and "Today is the day that we will do what we do every day?" Basically, this view is that if it wasn't for podcasts and perhaps "foreign intelligence operations" people would have right realized that they agree with a litany or far left extremist positions. I guess that must be the only answer ::shrug::.
This is maybe true for 2016. In 2020 and 2024 Trump/Biden/Harris were just part of larger trends that saw Western incumbents worldwide lose their seats.
As a thought experiment, do you think X would have made the difference if Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis were the GOP nominee? I would bet either people think X couldn't have helped enough (candidates didn't have the rizz) and ultimately they'd have lost, or they wouldn't be as toxic as Trump and wouldn't need whatever theoretical help X would provide.
Or if you like stats, Harris broadly lost on all social media platforms [0].
Years ago now I predicted Musk would burn through Twitter's attention capital and it'd become less and less relevant over time. I think that's happening: all the stats I can look up show declining users, usage, and revenue. A lot of people use X as "write only" now, or have very sporadic interactive use.
Another way of saying this is Musk bought the peak, and is running this new Nazi-friendly version as a short position against American democracy. The only way he gains attentional or financial capital from that position is if something even more illiberal happens to society and this far-right version of X is suddenly as relevant as center-left Twitter was in 2016, like Nick Fuentes becomes president or something.
Trumps ability to control the narrative is pretty much wholly based on his tweeting skills. He is legitimately a top tier tweeter up there with @dril and the likes. It is incredibly entertaining and end of the day that’s what politics is about now.
Trump won by <1% in an election against a candidate who lost her only attempt at a primary and during a time period where western incumbents saw a 10+% drop due to their handling of covid inflation.
2024 isn't a story of how Trump outwitted his opponents but one of how his opponents tied their shoelaces together.
I mean it didn't really influence public opinion that much, just enough to push election over the edge, and that was not just due to Twitter, but mostly due to non-voters.
While not a yet an ROI-positive takeover, on an incredible valuation growth trajectory from the post-acquisition low. Likely to be positive the minute xAI meaningfully monetizes Grok. [1]
Gains strategic access to global training data, and real-time human sentiment. [2]
Incredible built-in distribution for new AI-powered products. [3]
Literally tipped the scales in an election, a role typically reserved for traditional media companies. [4]
And btw, how many features have been brought live since Musk's takeover? If I'm not wrong, at least: long tweets, paid subscriptions, community notes, native video (?), grok... Anything else? Seems quite a lot after years of stagnation.
Do you consider massive reduction of impression/reacheability and "shadowbans" for organically influential users features? Lots of users are seen reporting those. Tweets and replies not showing or made "unavailable", followers silently deleted or muted without user input, etc.
Thanks for the reply, but you get a number of things wrong.
The 2017 "long tweets" are actually 280 characters. 4k characters tweets have been introduced in 2023.
The "subscription feature" is a content creator one, while I meant paid blue check.
"Community notes" had not been publicly launched before Musk did, renaming them from "Birdwatch".
The "native video" feature you mention is Vine, which had been discontinued.
Not saying that Musk innovated (doesn't take much to make blue checks subscription-based or to increase the length of tweets) but he did act decisively to introduce changes in the good old Twitter, something the previous CEOs had hesitated to do.
> The 2017 "long tweets" are actually 280 characters.
So, longer.
> The "subscription feature" is a content creator one, while I meant paid blue check.
I consider the paid blue checks a negative, not a positive.
> "Community notes" had not been publicly launched before Musk did
As with the long tweets, this then becomes a pretty minor tweak.
> The "native video" feature you mention is Vine, which had been discontinued.
I mentioned three iterations. The last link, in 2015, is the current native video handling.
If I, personally, went to my boss and rattled this off as a list of primary personal achievements in the past couple of years, they'd say "you're padding things"… and I'm a single developer.
If you were asked "what have you accomplished over the last couple of years" and your answer was "I increased the maximum character count config setting", do you expect a raise from your boss for the great work?
If you wanna make the case for "Musk accelerated innovation at Twitter", more is required than "you can make longer posts" IMO.
It's interesting because, as I'm reading this I agree with y'all, it's still stand and I'm still on it. Yet, as a major twitter user, who has a large number of followers and has benefited from twitter a lot (made many relationships, got a job through it, successfully launched a book and a company thanks to it, etc.) I seem to be using twitter less and less these days.
I dislike Elon, but I need twitter so much that I can't leave. And yet, my feed which was so useful in the past, and filled with cryptography content, has become pure political ragebait content. To the point that it's less and less useful to me.
I'm sad because there's just nowhere for me to go, all my followers are there.
The people I've seen who have talked about their engagement numbers--as measured by something like "how many visitors do we get to a story based on a Bluesky/Facebook/ex-Twitter/etc. link", so independent of the social media's self-reported metrics--have all reported that Twitter is generally among the poorest-performing social media sites. Especially if you're looking at it from a perspective of "how much engagement do we get on social media [likes, quotes, replies, etc.] per conversion to visiting the site," where it strongly looks like Twitter is massively inflating its reported engagement.
I don't know how true that was of Twitter pre-Musk takeover, especially as many of the most direct comparisons didn't exist back then, so I can't say if Musk's takeover specifically made it less effective or not.
Anecdotal, but everone that I've heard do those comparisons have done Bluesky vs X, and every time they've noticed better engagement ratio and higher quality engagement on Bluesky.
And I’ve seen people report the complete opposite. Both can be true. The reality is BlueSky pushed echo chambering even harder than X and it’s a dying platform - maybe those two things are unrelated but not for me they aren’t. Unless some miracle happens to reverse its trend, BlueSky already had its shot.
I have no interest in any of them. The Twitter-style format is inherently toxic and always devolves into a trolling competition or echo chambers. The short format prioritizes stupid takes that fit in a sentence or two over well thought out ideas.
Revenue and monthly active users are still lower than in 2022, and decreasing. And thats based on estimates, because twitter doesn’t report those numbers.
Revenue is meaningless for a company that has never been close to covering the cost of building it.
Monthly active users, fair, but it also depends on the type of users that remain. My take still is that the users X cares about are politicians, journalists and the general elite. They are still on X. It doesn't matter that some random tech worker switched to Bluesky or Mastodon, those were never profitable anyway, complained a lot and used third party apps.
I was going to argue that they lost most of the 2019 profit in 2020, but you are technically correct (the best kind). Twitter probably made around $1.5B in profit ever, maybe a little more. That actually should just about cover the cost of building the company.
Having those users doesn't matter if the people they are trying to communicate with leave - as eventually they will too. Every single person I know who used Twitter (which was already the least popular of the main social networks in my region) has deleted their account. Politicians and journalists shouting into a void isn't sustainable.
Does anyone outside X actually know the current monthly active users and revenue figures? They stopped releasing them publicly when Musk took over. It's all guesswork at this point as far as I can tell.
it's worth less than half of what he paid for it, lost 30 million users and went from being the default microblog to facing real competition in daily active users from ~~bluesky~~threads (https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail...). Building what X is today from nothing would be an incredible accomplishment but building what X is today out of what Twitter was in 2022 is still a pretty miserable failure.
> it's worth less than half of what he paid for it
But it was always worth less that half of the purchase price. The Twitter board completely ripped of Musk. Remember that he tried to back out of the deal, arguing that he had been lied to in regards to the number of bots and actual users.
Not at all relevant. Address the merits of the argument, not whether or not most people like the person who heard it. Though you'll be happy to find out that this disagreement never actually made it to court and eventually Elon went through with his original deal voluntarily.
The Twitter board ripped him off? When he was the one who brought in the initial offer? He tried to back out of the deal once people told him how foolish he is.
Did he argue in that case that it was worth less than half the purchase price? I do recall he argued it was a material misrepresentation by twitter, but that the terms of the contract ran against him there. I do not recall it having been valued to that extent. It did seem like a facially bullshit excuse at the time. I'm curious as to why you're credulously repeating it now, after it's already been disposed of.
When you're used to having an entire team of people to act as a buffer between your impulses and their easily predictable consequences following through on your commitments and getting exactly what you asked for feels unfair.
That link errors ("Failed to fetch" banner on the page) for me. Perhaps hugged to death, but I would be interested in the DAUs/MAUs if they're available.
Well sure if you give up on moderation, and close the platform to people who aren't signed in, and shut off the API then yes you didn't need the people supporting those parts of the platform.
And I guess if you consider "the place with the MechaHitler AI" as good branding there's no arguing with you that it's doing just as well as Twitter.
I don't agree with the direction Musk has set for X, but businesswise it's not doing worse. Twitter was a financial catastrophe before the take over, so you didn't need much improvement. Moderation was a financial drain, the API didn't make them any money and none of the users seems to care all that much about the platform not being open to users without an account... because they all have accounts and wasn't able to interact with you anyway.
The media seems to get a good laugh out if Grok arguing the plight of white South Africans and is fondness to Hitler, but I'm not seeing journalists and politicians leaving X in droves because of it.
“From January to September 2024, marketing intelligence platform MediaRadar found that (X’s former top advertisers including Comcast, IBM, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Lionsgate Entertainment) collectively spent less than $3.3 million on X. This is a 98% year-over-year drop from the $170 million spent during the same period in 2023.”
Most of the local journalists, politicians, game devs, and open source maintainers i followed left. It’s just US national pundits, bots, and bait monetization accounts there at this point.
The job of journalists and politicians is to broadcast to as wide an audience as they can. It is not particularly surprising that many retain Twitter accounts for the marketing value.
I don’t think the third+ flavor of “bad release” this year, of the sort nobody else in this crowded space suffers from, is as innocuous as you think it is.
And Tay was a non-LLM user account released a full 6 years before ChatGPT; you might as well bring up random users’ markov chains.
I posted the Wikipedia page, do you really think I don't know how long ago Tay was? I don't think the capabilities matter if we're just talking about chat bots being racist online.
Also IDK what you mean by third+ flavor? I'm not familiar with other bad Grok releases, but I don't really use it, I just see it's responses on Twitter. Also do you not remember the Google image model that made the founding fathers different races by default?
It seems that there is tremendous incentive for people like yourself (I see you're very active in these comments) to claim that. But I see you've presented no quantitative evidence. Given the politicization of the systems and individuals involved, without evidence, it all reads like partisan mud slinging.
Any LLM can be convinced to say just about anything. Pliny has shown that time and time again.
Does ChatGPT start ranting about Jews and "White Genocide" unprompted? How can I even quantify that it doesn't do that?
This is a classic "anything that can't be empirically measured is invalid and can be dismissed" mistake. It would be nice if we could easily empirically measure everything, but that's not how the world works.
The ChatGPT article is of a rather different nature where ChatGPT went off the rails after a long conversation with a troubled person. That's not good, but just no the same as "start spewing racism on unrelated questions".
You can't just run a few queries and base conclusion off that, you need to run tens of thousands of different ones and then somehow evaluate the responses. It's a huge amount of work.
Demanding empirical data and then coming up with shoddy half-arsed methodology is unserious.
I don't think I'm the one being presumptuous or demanding. I've actually tried to help you make a stronger argument. Shooting a hundred or even a thousand queries to 3 or 4 LLMs and shoving the results through established sentiment analysis algorithms is something ChatGPT can one-shot in just about any language. You demand people agree with your opinion and refuse to spend 20 minutes supporting it with facts. Not my problem, I tried to help. You may not see it that way. That's fine.
> Funny how ChatGPT is vanilla and grok somehow has a new racist thing to say every other week
To be fair, 'exposing' ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini as racist will get you a lot fewer clicks.
Musk claims Grok to be less filtered in general than other LLMs. This is what less filtered looks like. LLMs are not human; if you get one to say racist things it's probably because you were trying to make it say racist things. If you want this so-called problem solved by putting bowling bumpers on the bot, by all means go use ChatGPT.
> if you get one to say racist things it's probably because you were trying to make it say racist things.
When it started ranting about the Jews and "Mecha Hitler" it was unprompted on unrelated matters. When it started ranting about "white genocide" in SA a while ago it was also unprompted on unrelated matters.
Nobody’s trying to get grok to talk about MechaHitler. At that point you just know Musk said that out loud in a meeting and someone had to add it to groks base prompt.
It's so "less filtered" that they had to add a requirement in the system prompt to talk about white genocide
This idea that "less filtered" LLMs will be "naturally" very racist is something that a lot of racists really really want to be true because they want to believe their racist views are backed by data.
No I'm saying the consequences of over-filtering are apparent with Copilot 's response: no answer.
And I'm also saying Grok was reportedly sabotaged into saying something racist (which is a blatantly obvious conclusion even without looking it up), and that seeing this as some sort of indictment against it is baseless.
And since I find myself in the position of explaining common sense conclusions here's one more: you don't succeed in making a racist bot by asking it to call itself Mecha Hitler. That is a fast way to fail in your goal of being subversive.
Fundamentally, the problem with Twitter is the burned bridge: there is a sizable population of interesting people who will never, under any circumstance return due to Musk’s insane behavior and ideology. This irreparably cripples it as a universal social network.
Same opinion. I absolutely hate what he did to Twitter and never in my life I will call it "X" - BUT - it looks to me as if the engagement is thriving.
Estimates are that its revenue has decreased by half. Even if Musk decreased operating expenses enough to keep or even increase profits, a 50% drop in revenue is not at all a good sign for the health of business.
When I finally left Twitter most of the engagement was obviously bots either repeating other tweets or spamming unrelated dross on high activity threads for engagement farming. The number is high, but the quality is negligible.
But then people came back. The "For you" tab has been much more interesting for me than previously and in my industry I see tons of interesting content.
Again, I hate what EM did to Twitter but there's that.
That may be the case but from what I’m reading overall engagement is down this year. So I’m not really sure what metrics we’re using to say “they’re thriving” when ad dollars are down, engagement is down, user acquisition is down, valuation is down…
There's no technical reason that one couldn't move from platform to platform and link identities - the restrictions around IP and platform lock-in only benefit the platform owner, ensuring that competition will be stifled rather than the platform made useful for its users.
The sad part is that ad networks know more about our connections across platforms than we're allowed to.
There is also no technical reason people have to stay, because tech isn't the problem here. The value in these platforms aren't in the range of features they provide, but the engagement between individuals and the community and the value of the information it generates.
Which reinforces the concept of a digital fiefdom; the owners of said platforms have this immense power only because they were the first to implement their ideas during the internet boom.
And now we're stuck with Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos. Out of all people, the last ones I would choose to have unelected power. Okay maybe the last one would be Joe Rogan.
And I blame the media. Politicians continue to post, and the media continue to quote them from twitter. I think it's shameful that politicians and other officials are using twitter as some sort of official media/announcement platform.
In my own African country twitter has become the de-facto channel for various updates and announcements by various state organs and officials. Makes it even worse when you consider the majority of the population has no reliable way to access this information.
And now its locked behind a user account! And it's owned by a potentially rival politician!
It's usually possible to access a single post if it's directly linked, but not possible to go to the profile from there, or access other tweets or relevant discussions about the post you have open.
X collects data in all the places Teslas don't get sold. That is why it continues to remain of value. It is an intelligence generating engine for places that otherwise have very little.
I was following fintwit quite a lot at a time, and some accounts already moved to Bluesky some time ago. I'm periodically checking via nitter, and 90% of answers are spam at this point.
It will take some time for complete destruction, but the path is quite clear.
Bluesky is not a real decentralized system as the company behind it say. Bluesky (the company) controls most key parts of the network, and it is basically impossible to setup a really decentralised alternative provider for the ATProto network, like you can do today with ActivityPub (Mastodon) or Nostr.
Sure, you can setup you PDS and own your data, but it is useless without the Relays and a self-hosted Firehose, and running you own website is basically impossible.
And lastly, let's keep in mind that BSky is a commercial entity, not a no-profit like Mastodon or a commmunity effort like Nostr.
And yes, I am ignoring the political toxicity of the network because I think the technical aspects are bad enough.
Which I find truely shocking. Who in their right mind still wants to support such a platform (except for Elon's target audience, of course)? Just don't use the damn thing. (I have never used Twitter I the first place and I don't think I've been missing out.)
I certainly wouldn't call it brand destruction, a lot of people returned to X and while the branding has changed, I certainly wouldn't call it brand destruction
They had managed to get a verb into relatively common speech and their revenue has collapsed since the Musk take over I'd say it's pretty thoroughly destroyed.
I find this X doomsday talk is pretty isolated to reddit/other minor social media sites. The site itself is doing fine, and maintains a strong investor/startup ecosystem, with a slight fall in usage after the election (which isn't uncommon for Twitter/X). My understanding is that a few advertisers threatened to leave and then returned after a few days/weeks.
It's a private company now so I don't know what their revenue looks like but they certainly don't seem to be low on cash given how much they've invested in AI. You may not use X but it's definitely not "destroyed" lol
It's growing... but from an all time low. Estimates put it at half of their ad revenue pre acquisition. A lot of advertisers did actually leave and seem to have largely stayed away or their CPM numbers are just way way down both of which are pretty bad.
Also X isn't funding Grok, it's a separate B corp with funding of it's own, it's just been tightly integrated into X, so it doesn't really say anything about the money situation at Twitter/X.
X didn't "invest in AI", it was rolled into a buzzy AI company. Before that the holders of it's debt could not find buyers (aka buyers willing to bet against X bankruptcy)
Relevant to who? My employers marketing has stopped using X and posts now on LinkedIn exclusively (we do B2B software).
My partners workplace does consumer marketing and only TikTok (for young people) and Facebook (for old people) are truly relevant anymore. If a customer has lots of money to waste, they'll also do Instagram and YouTube.
There is not a single place on the internet that comes close to providing up to the minute news and updates. X was the only place one could monitor the Israel / Iran conflict in almost real time. Same for a variety of other events. There is nothing else like it. Its the only place where anyone can have interactions with politicians, scientists, CEOs, etc.
It is the only place that covers and provides a wide variety of information that traditional media does not. Almost no media companies reported that a dozen domestic terrorists ambushed ICE officers and shot one in the neck this past week. As far as I know, none reported on the Minnesota Department of Human Services requiring that hiring managers must provide a hiring justification to hire a white man. Violation of that policy results in termination. So state sponsored racism in the state of the governor that would have been our VP.
Its the only place you can get a picture of what's going on. There is of course mountains of lies you have to filter through, no doubt spurred on by the monetization of X for posters.
For all its faults and madness (Grok going full mecha-hitler was wild) there is no where else like it. Side note, the day after mecha-hitler xAi released Grok4 which appears to be the most powerful model to date on some tests, beating o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Anthropic Claude 4 Opus.
There is a non zero chance that xAi, which is part of the same company that holds X wins the AI race
Does it? It is 100% a bot farm full of right-wing propaganda. Create a new account and start tweeting. Every single like/reply you get will be from a bot pretending to be either Elon, or Elon's mom, or someone who has recently won the lottery and is going to give it away to all of their followers. Every single recommended post you'll get in your feed will be the most unhinged q-anon conspiracy shit you can imagine. There is zero discourse happening there. It is an echo chamber of psychotic individuals.
Threads on the other hand is actually a pretty fun place to be these days. I get a lot of interaction with random strangers on all kinds of topics, and it is as good or bad as you want it to be.
I’ve only been on twitter for a year and at the start my algo feed was full of awful crap, but after I followed a few good accounts I mostly now just get AI focussed tech stuff. I think your experience isn’t universal.
..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.
Those waiting for X to collapse are going to wait a lot longer than the original 6 months that it was predicted to collapse after the November 2022 takeover.
>..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.
This might be like Stacey King, a Chicago Bulls player, jokingly claiming he and Michael Jordan "combined to score 70 points" on a night when Jordan scored 69 points
xAI tried to raise $20 billion in equity in April but wound up with only $5 billion & had to issue $5 billion in junk bonds last week. You can value yourself $44 billion but the market doesn’t think it’s anywhere close
I will admit that I was surprised and agree it was a clever move to extend his runway, but it relies on xAI being able to make huge amounts of profit eventually. Twitter/X’s brand value has declined so much and xAI has such a ridiculous cash burn and it really looks to me like he’s just delayed the inevitable by a bit by combining them…
Does it count as irrational if he can get a puppet President elected, have his child mock that person publically while he's present, and repeatedly urge the trusted AI authority he presents for people's use into opinionizing on Boers and Mecha-Hitler?
It sounds like he is getting exactly what he wants. That's the most rational thing about him in what's otherwise a storm of ketamine. I think all the other stuff he thinks is flat-out insane, but exploiting X and pushing it as hard as he can, that's about as rational and effective as Elon ever gets.
X saved free speech online. Without Musk acquiring it, we would have continued to slip into this franken-Resetera level of discourse. Thank God!
X is the platform where everyone can speak as long as it doesn't break the law. That's fantastic. If you don't like a particular subject, you can just move on. That's what the internet was in the 2000s!
> “You may not directly attack other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease,”
How does this make it different than other website's policies in terms of free speech?
Its pretty easy to find large profiles calling others the n word without any reprocussions. cisgender is the only one that gets automatically filtered no matter the context.
Seems like it harmed the migration to more free protocol oriented services. One company controlling the algorithm and API to a global conversation. Verified badges getting ranked priority in replies and For You. A DM function that barely functions. Private chats as a promise instead of cryptographic guarantee?
Just like all the normies who don't use web browsers, email, podcasts, calendars, jpeg image standards. Like how btc and ethereum finally died out and companies aren't adopting stable coins.
Twitter's brand was quite stained before Elon took over, so this is really a case of "continuing the brand destruction"
But really, the brand doesn't matter if you can't keep the lights on. If Elon has managed to make X profitable, it is more successful than Twitter likely would ever have been.
Was pretty effective using as a propaganda tool to get a candidate of the owner's choice elected. I don't see any reason to assume that wasn't the intended goal from the beginning. No reason to assume that won't be how it is used in the future.
X is still ground zero for news, and it saved free speech. In the fullness of time and distance it will be viewed by historians as one of the most important events in history.
Your post gets shadow banned for the word cisgender on X... the only speech it saved was low effort trolling, misinformation and hate speech. Musk's version of free speech is just changing the dials on the moderation machines to boost speech he prefers and shadow ban speech his doesn't.
Oh, the irony of all of these "free speech" defenders celebrating their "right" to be offensive online, when the OG free speech (1st Amendment) is actively being attacked and dismantled by a regime that they likely worship.
Their viewpoints border on religious zealotry and it's pointless to try and reason with them.
At this point in time, if someone is still hailing Musk as a champion of free speech, I can't see any other explanation than that they're ideologically a nazi themselves. The guy outed himself several times as a nazi, doing salutes on national TV, twitting anti-semitic bullshit, and now tweaking their AI to promote a new holocaust and glorify Hitler. There comes a time when you have to call out nazism for what it is.
Yes, it did. Every large platform including Twitter was censoring its users due to state pressure. Even Facebook has since admitted that they were told to censor information that was true, and they knew to be true.
> the report shows X’s dedication to content moderation by suspending millions of accounts and removing harmful posts, which could potentially help rebuild trust among users concerned with safety and dangerous behavior. On the other hand, this increased moderation contradicts Musk’s earlier promise of promoting free speech, something he has been very vocal about, potentially alienating users who see X becoming more restrictive.
They don't just censor, they limit organic influences. Your content won't get displayed more than n times, so you can't get more popular than n views, unless the system selects you as today's lottery winner, in which case it will be (reported as)viewed trillion times.
The only defense against this is the fact that Twitter users know system too well for this to be not immediately obvious.
You mean the story about Hunter Biden's laptop? That story? About Hunter Biden supposedly selling access to the president?
I find it odd now that Trump is in office and has the entirety of the government to investigate corruption in the executive office he's suddenly gone silent about that.
I guess that means that the executive office is now free of any taint of corruption!
Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon for his son for any crimes during a 10 year period 2014-2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3dx9n3m9y2o
He later pardoned other family members and political allies.
That was disappointing but understandable, considering who was following him into office.
The Hunter Biden corruption story was true in the sense it was old school genteel corruption that virtually everybody in politics does: trade on their connections with promise of getting deals done and/or a veneer of legitimacy. It's a problem worthy of scrutiny but only if it is done across party lines.
But this misses the entire point: the whole part about the Hunter Biden laptop story was to paint Joe Biden as crooked and was being done solely as negative campaigning. That's it, and it is self evident in how the story dropped once it was no longer useful for that means.
But the millions of Americans who were outraged by this supposed corruption are just fine with it when it's done by their Dear Leader.
That in a nutshell summarizes the "values" of the modern American conservative movement.
There was also AFAIK never any real evidence Hunter actually succeeded in doing anything of actual value for his clients. He was definitely going around representing that he could influence or get people meetings with his dad but there was never an actual tat from the Joe Biden side.
This is correct, as it's clear that if they had the goods they would have trumpeted the fact. But that didn't matter, it was simply the story itself that mattered (as the intended audience wants to be told what to think).
Again, that's not behavior that should be acceptable but it's SOP in politics by default.
What continues to blow my mind is that if "their guys" are corrupt they're totally fine with it. In my world, no corruption is acceptable corruption, regardless of who's doing it.
Because the new administration promised an unhinged DOJ. Biden was already vindicated in these pardons once Trump dropped legitimate charges against Eric Adams to try and further his political agenda. That and arresting judges, starting political witch hunts, etc...
When I saw this news, my first thought was that she lasted about 1 year and 11 months longer than I expected after the first few weeks.
I know Twitter had many terrible aspects, but I do miss the world voice old Twitter provided for quotes that could be engaged with in an "everyone is here" kind of feeling that doesn't exist on any other platforms right now.
I think the “everyone is here” feeling is because the media outlets use it quite a bit. So even though mostly everyone is not on Twitter it felt like anyone who is anyone was on Twitter. I don’t really miss the FOMO that was intended to produce but I imagine if you played along it validated the FOMO some how.
To be honest though it is still by far the best place to get "news" about (very recent) current affairs. Obviously there is an incredible amount of disinformation on it, but if you can filter that out mentally (though I don't know how possible that is), you tend to get a far more 'real time' take on things.
Me and a friend were talking about this before - for big news stories I/we would instinctively put rolling news on. Now it's usually Twitter I check.
This is compounded by the fact that so many political events 'happen' on Twitter/X (and for Trump, Truth Social then screenshotted onto Twitter). Even without Trump I would say the majority of UK political 'intrigue' is done directly on twitter.
So I think it's actually the other way round; media outlets use it quite a bit because instead of press conferences and what not a lot of news comes straight onto it.
Btw, this isn't too say traditional journalism doesn't have a place - it absolutely does and most of the current affairs content I read is on that. But for 'fast moving' events Twitter has managed to keep its place in my eyes, which I'm surprised about to be honest. Bluesky does not have anywhere near the same momentum which really shows you how important network effects are.
I loved seeing Dave Chappelle dismiss his critics by quipping "Twitter is not a real place." Changed my whole view of social media. It's only seems real if you're on the inside of it.
And yea, I would question the utility of getting a 'real time feed' of what rumors people think they heard.
People post plenty of videos of things happening.
Often clipped so that context is removed (for example Manchester airport thugs getting kicked by police, without the preceding part where they attacked the police before that).
You really just need the journalists tweeting without an intermediary editor to make it more useful than any news that you can pay for. Plus, being less american centric is a benefit, not a drawback, unless the only news you care about is american.
> Prior to twitterfiles, Twitter felt overly corporate
Your take on a highly selective propagandized "expose" done internally by a corporation raider who just raided the corp that he is exposing, is to say that before oligarch took over things felt a little "corporate" ?
Social media is obviously censored and editorialized. Twitter files was just a turning point – I’m not saying it was a liberation.
Yes it’s been corporate for a long time. Now it has a different sort of editorialization – hard to describe it. Yeah maybe influenced by a cabal of techno-libertarian VCs like Musk & Theil – hopefully that will be better revealed in a follow up expose
It was certainly corporate beforehand, though. Maybe you preferred that version if it– that’s fine. (Edit: grammar)
Of course I hate what Elon has done to Twitter but you're feeling previously that everyone was there was an illusion brought on by massive propaganda and manipulation of the conversation. The same thing has happened to Reddit now, well it feels more inclusive and open it's actually an incredibly controlled enclosed system that only allows one specific viewpoint. Now of course to the people inside that bubble it feels like freedom but to everyone else it looks like a liberal echo chamber.
For example, when the actual owner of the at Bitcoin handle wasn't pushing the narrative that Jack Dorsey wanted they hijacked the moniker and gave it to a pro b
Blockstream (THE COMPANY THAT CONTROLS THE BITCOIN CODE BASE) individual. For most people that support Bitcoin and blockstream it looks like a victory of free speech but in reality they're just controlling more and more of the speech and kicking out anyone from the conversation who disagrees.
It skews one way, but there's definitely a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find. It's also transitioning into an India social media site, just from sheer population numbers.
Right, Reddit banned any sub that disagreed with the progressive positions on Transgender issues, any mainstream subs would ban users for disagreeing with those positions, and heterodox subs were warned not to discuss them or else they could be banned. For instance, here's the Moderate Politics sub discussion on why they banned transgender topics[1]:
> The first of these banned topics: gender identity, the transgender experience, and the laws that may affect these topics.
> Please note that we do not make this decision lightly, nor was the Mod Team unanimous in this path forward. Over the past week, the Mod Team has tried on several occasions to receive clarification from the Admins on how to best facilitate civil discourse around these topics. There responses only left us more confused, but the takeaway was clear: any discussion critical of these topics may result in action against you by the Admins.
Also mod efforts to enforce an ideological view across the entire site. For instance, in the run up to the 2020 election, mods on the boardgame sub started going through the history of users and would ban anyone who voted for Trump.
But subreddits are free, and unlimited. You can make one yourself if you don't like how another one is moderated. People that like your approach can gather there. Of course that takes effort and is not easy, but Reddit itself (for the most part) is not banning you or your sub if you want to make a right wing house plant subreddit. If you want to make a pro Luigi anti transgender house plant subreddit, it probably gets banned.
Leftist subreddits also get banned for breaking site wide rules. The /r/chapotraphouse subreddit got banned in 2020, for example.
Reddit is best experienced in general by ignoring default subs and finding smaller ones that are relevant to your interests.
Moderating a large sub is hard. The scale is just too big, and it's individual volunteers doing it.
I commented on a particular sub (in opposition to what i think the core hivemind is there) and was immediately banned from about 30 others.
Reddit is the most insular, single minded set of communities I've seen on social media. I dont think you can claim diversity if the userbase all wall themselves off from each other with bots.
There's a subreddit for everything. Reddit as a whole has plenty of users that represent any opinion you can imagine. Fairly conservative subreddits hit r/all regularly, but not as much as less conservative ones.
I think what you're trying to say is that on default subs, or some popular ones, that you can't post/comment some things without it getting removed, and possibly banned from those subs. Which is absolutely true. Same thing is true on HN, you can't even make a post about Grok's latest escapades without getting flagged.
But if you just want to have some space to discuss some topic, make subreddit for it, moderate it however you want. Reddit itself isn't going to ban you unless it's against site level guidelines.
It's pretty hard to get a site level ban. One easy way is to use a VPN though. My account (and any new one I make, so probably my IP/device too) was banned for ban evasion because I accidentally left my VPN on when using the Reddit app.
Weird how you can find both trump worshipping subreddits and anti-trump ones... or pro catholic and anti-catholic, or pro child porn and anti child porn, and so on and so forth.
There are no "pro child porn sub" on Reddit anymore. Nowadays the threshold of is at screenshots and artworks of Asian games - you could get banned for posting top 10 contents on App Store. There are barely patches of green parts on the frog, and it is no longer beating.
There are also hardly concept of subreddits. Subreddits seemed to have completely homogenized. It's more of hashtags now, with so many obviously in-organic posts likely written by minimally trained call center type personnel, obviously quoting prefabricated scripts, everywhere. There are typos, "I'm on phone" remarks, bad punctuation, or honest misunderstandings are few and far between.
What I don't understand about it, though, is why. Reddit is supposed to be a social media with massive MAUs. Why can't they just let it run itself.
If you went to a website that consisted of roughly within 2 standard deviation population representative of multiple sides, then maybe you would have a point.
But this is reddit. It is not a population consisting of anywhere near that generous 2 standard deviations.
You know precisely what you're doing and you know you're being dishonest.
Tell me, a website that is not wholly owned and operated by shills on the left would respond with the state of /r/pics any day of the week, and exclaim that is entirely organic behavior, let alone consisting of representative population of the real world USA.
We can go blow for blow in any large sub. In fact, tell me why /r/Idaho, a state that has consistently voted red for decades somehow has "organically" resulted in posts entirely consisting of run-of-the-mill liberal posts? What of /r/Texas which is the same story and out of the question not a liberal stronghold that it presents itself to be.
You can pull the wool over your eyes all day, don't expect anyone else in the world to believe your bullshit.
I posted on the ReformUK subreddit in opposition to something that was being touted there. The context of the post doesn't matter, posting on that sub is enough to get you blanked banned from many other placed.
Getting banned from a default sub you've never posted in because you told a racist boomer somewhere else they might be falling for propaganda is bloody weird.
I think the intention of it, as weird as it may seem, is to punish people for engaging with content the other subreddit mods feel is distasteful enough to warrant the effort.
I can't speak to whether this is a useful tactic on their part, or whether its fair to you, but IMO this is just another kind of "free speech" that exists.
It's also that even engaging with ("platforming" or "amplifying") wrongthink makes you guilty by association. If someone's feeling talkative and generous you might even get the "tolerating intolerance" speech.
> Getting banned from a default sub you've never posted in because you told a racist boomer somewhere else they might be falling for propaganda is bloody weird.
It's not great, but on the other hand: it's also not a completely terrible heuristic.
The challenge here is that some of these popular default subs attract tens of thousands of comments every day. Dealing with flags is time-consuming, and also "too late": better for racist bollocks to not be posted.
In the end every subreddit is a private fiefdom of the moderator(s) where they can do more or less what they want. Many subs have overly strict, obnoxious, or even bizarre rules. The original sub for The Netherlands got hijacked by some American who proceeded to ban everyone posting in Dutch.
It's not perfect, but in the end I don't think it's a bad thing. A global set of rules for all of Reddit won't work. For example of course you should be free to talk about religion, but proselyting Christianity on /r/atheism (or Atheism on /r/Christianity) would obviously not be desirable.
The thing Reddit replaced was web forums (phpbb etc.), newsgroups, and mailing lists, and those worked more or less the same.
Is usually used as an derogatory term. The offensiveness is because it's based on age and it is deemed acceptable by some within one age group to use it - while racism is usually less acceptable. I haven't yet seen zoomer get used similarly.
The "perceived as" could be interpreted as a genuine "perhaps this is what they think?" or just as "empty language", in which case you're effectively saying "they're all scammers and mass migrating here to steal our jobs". I'll assume you meant the first, but with loads of flagged comments in the queue and many people who do genuinely mean that sort of thing, it's easy for moderators to misinterpret things.
I once called out a blatantly racist post and used "the n-word" while doing so. Admittedly not my finest moment, but I was fed up (the content was something along the lines of "I think this is called ethnic cleaning. Why don't you just admit they're all n----s to you?")
I got banned for my "racism". For calling out racism. The racist post that called for ethnic cleaning was left standing as that was lengthy and used polite language.
For the hasty moderator with tons of flagged comments: one is a wall of text and scans okay, the other used a bad word so could perhaps be racist. 537 more flagged comments in the queue. Ban. Next. It is what it is.
> I am not sure about why comment here was flagged and ppl saying "you deserve ban". So I guess everyone is assuming "empty language" .
Yes, without the clarification of "i am indian too. It was in /r/askindians", it looked kind of racist here too. On these types of topics, you do need to spend a little bit of effort making sure your intent is communicated clearly, because for every well-intentioned person there's another actual racist troll.
Most people aren't interested in just talking past each other or responding to people saying something to get a rise.
What you're trying to say here is that you disagree with having a distinction between sex and gender identity, but you're doing it in a purposefully obtuse and inflammatory way. That indicates to me that you're not really interested in having a conversation. You're likely seeking downvotes and bans to justify your own bias.
No, I imagine you don't see the blatant disregard. Maybe sagaar is a genuine representation of this community, and as are you. Entirely inflammatory people who seek to poison the well and act like they're not doing it.
The first link is someone responding in kind to another inflammatory comment from the same person. It's all part of the same thread in which the person I originally responded to was being a doofus on purpose. I could have just responded to his first root instead of his leaf comment, it was the same content twice.
The second I can't even view, I guess it's removed, in which case probably more of the same and my comment applies equally to it. Not like I'm going to go down every branch of the convo and reply to every one of them.
Oh, I know exactly what I'm doing and I'll own up to it. I think it's a more honest position than being the guy who posts "noncontroversial" comments that always end up downvoted for some reason.
"a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find."
I think you forgot the /s. Plus reddit is mostly bots now driving engagement, with AI slop splattered everywhere. It went from bad to worse in just a few years. I scan the homepage without an account every now and then and it's awful.
> It skews one way, but there's definitely a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find. It's also transitioning into an India social media site, just from sheer population numbers.
This happened on Quora until almost all western users left. Initially it was nice to have diversity of users and opinions, but then people started using Indian parlance that only other Indian users could understand (started referring to salaries as crore, relationship advice would reference Indian actors, etc.)
> started referring to salaries as crore, relationship advice would reference Indian actors
Crore is a funny word, I should use it more often. English is an international language now and no country has a monopoly. We should take contributions from everyone.
No, by their logic (because it's exactly what he said) the diversity was nice. It becoming a monoculture was perhaps less nice, but no opinion on that was offered, you have to infer.
OT but why isn't longnow format LSB(LS Digit) first? 8102, 2102, etc. The problem is that years as variables are often processed as left aligned fixed length MSB first, so it's hard to make year processing code robust over wide ranges of time. If it had been LSB/LSD first, overflow checks can be just a truncation.
8102 and 2102 clearly belong to same age, 5491 and 8391 are more far apart but it's visually apparent that they share two LSDs, and a C program that displays rate of return of a 01-year bond will only have to care at most "654" part of year 654321 entered by user.
"02012" is more perplexing and it can be longer by whole 16 bits[than regular notation] or so[on some systems].
this was my take as well. twitter nostalgia not reality. I put the egalitarian age at around 2009 but you're right Kony-2012 was a huge pivot for social media
I mean more generally, in the sense that all public executive firings done to increase stock value (or prevent it from falling) are not that different from sacrificial cults.
I curate a relatively tame Twitter feed, but X has been showing me animated advertisements of some fleshlight-like device going to town on a dildo. W. T. A. F.
It's started making me worried that I can't even use the app in a place where anyone else is, lest someone shoulder surf that and wonder WTF I'm looking at.
I totally get the point you're trying to make (and don't even disagree) but I think the analogy isn't quite right.
I'd actually be surprised if I got robbed at a mobbed-up restaurant; my naive understanding was that they actual put a lot of effort into keeping places like that above-board so they have legit businesses to attach their name/revenue/employees to, while still retaining muscle in case a rival tries something. It's arguably one of the last places I'd expected to get robbed outright.
It’s like when you’re having dinner at a restaurant owned by the mob and act surprised when the owner pays for your meal because “you look like such nice girls.”
Just wait until Musks enters his "John Mcaffee in exile(but with much more resources)" era, which I think is going to come soon. Then all these people will talk.
Or maybe his "Howard Hughes in Hiding" era. Remains to be seen which route he takes. Could also be "Rasputen shot in the ** era" if hes not careful.
So Rule #0 is be silent about the absolute shitshow you are running away from, even when that shitshow is about to ruin many more lives? I think that reflects more poorly on someone than a break in pro-corporate decorum.
Yes, it's exactly that. Most likely as she was a senior executive she'll have signed an NDA containing a "non-disparagement clause". That's the deal with the devil that you make in return for being paid $millions each year.
1. What is the relevance of posting that years old 8-K about Twitter? The corporate structure is totally different now, with xAI having acquired X Corp in March.
2. Regardless of that, X is a private company with a hired CEO (by "hired CEO" I mean as opposed to a founder CEO or family CEO). There are tons and tons of companies like this, and most of them have active, traditional CEOs. The ownership and board structure of X isn't the thing that implies that the CEO is a figurehead - I'd argue Musk's megalomania is what does that.
Did you read the section regarding the merger requirements which is quite unusual and reveals the level of control of Musk et. al (X Holdings)? This is why I brought up that particular 8k.
The ownership and board structure serve as de facto evidence of control by Musk.
There really aren't any other companies (notably in the social media sector) that have this ownership structure. Hilariously enough, by board structure and stock ownership, Trump has less control over Truth Social.
Unrelated to the article, and I can't seem to reply to the comment, but clicking on the archive.today link while I'm on holiday in Italy gives me a warning that it contains child pornography.
I'm not sure if it's related, but the operator of archive.today has done odd things with DNS in the past, such as blocking DNS requests from cloudflare because they don't forward edns information.
It's an archiving site. Probably someone archived some child pornography there, and the Italian authorities decided the sensible thing was to block the whole domain.
Have any of the people who noisily joined X to make a big impact fast actually had a big impact over any time frame? Remember when G. Hotz said he was going to fix Twitter search in 6 weeks, and then it turned out that G. Hotz is just another midwit like anyone else and Twitter search is still as bad as ever? Yaccarino said they were going to transform Twitter into the "everything app" with payments, marketplaces, and even banking. None of which it turns out was within the abilities of Linda Yaccarino.
Twitter is a graveyard being propped up grudgingly by people who don't want to have fewer followers elsewhere, and enthusiastically by other people as way to virtue signal alliance with the ownership's political incorrectness. It has no true value to anyone. It was going downhill already before the new ownership and for completely apolitical reasons.
It is weird that “political correctness” has been taken to mean, like, being polite and nice to people or something.
A politically correct answer is one that keeps the currently politically powerful people happy, right? Musk/Trump defined politically correct for a couple months. I guess Musk might be politically incorrect now. Are they friends or enemies today?
"Politically correct" in the US context means essentially the same thing as "woke". In both cases, the word or phrase was adopted first by progressives, then by critics of progressives to refer to progressive beliefs and sensibilities.
It is surprising to find someone that doesn't know that, but would be less surprising if you don't live in the US.
> It is weird that “political correctness” has been taken to mean, like, being polite and nice to people or something.
> "Politically correct" in the US context means essentially the same thing as "woke"
I think it is (hopefully?) obvious from my comment that I actually do understand what it means in the US context, I was describing the odd situation WRT the US meaning and the origin of the phrase
> The term political correctness first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time, it was used to describe strict adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is, the party line.
The politically correct opinions were the ones that agreed with those in power.
I knew about the Soviet use, which is why I qualified with "in the US context".
Every use I've ever heard from a US speaker -- almost certainly over 100 uses, going back to when Reagan was President or maybe a year or 2 after Reagan -- is a reference to progressive beliefs and sensibilities regardless of whether the progressives are in power or not.
You are introducing your own definition of a phrase that everyone currently agrees on the meaning of. When this is done for no good reason, it is harmful because everyone relies on language to think together, so when the meaning of words get muddied unnecessarily, we get worse at thinking together.
There was a lot of radio word play. They couldn't say "that sucks" so they said "that vacuums" instead type of nonsense. Now, they just say "that sucks". But back around the Bush Sr and Clinton period, there were changes to broadcast rules that led to talk radio becoming what it has which also led to Fox News and then everyone else following suit
Hi, sadly, I removed my description the first time I heard "politically correct" (on KUSF during the Reagan admin or maybe a year or 2 later) because I did not need it.
> I knew about the Soviet use, which is why I qualified with "in the US context".
I assumed you knew the modern and the original use. I generally assume folks know the basic definitions of the terms they are using (until proven otherwise), because otherwise the conversation will get really tedious and pointless…
Search is a pretty solved problem if you are willing to invest the resources to create a inverted index of all the text you want to search. An inverted index of all tweets would be pretty expensive. Creating text embeddings for semantic search would be the next stage and even more expensive.
It is very much not a solved problem. Because the implication behind search is not "well the result you need is technically in the result set", it's "the result you need as at the top", and that remains an extremely difficult problem for anything but a trivial scale.
Thinking more, I imagine each post has limited value for ranking. You need the context of the thread, re-posts, even other threads nearby in time (with the same people).
They've had an inverted index of all tweets since 2008 (when they acquired Summize).
They added a vector index a year and a half ago for a "see related tweets" feature - https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1720314092269822242 - though as far as I can tell that feature doesn't exist any more, presumably replaced by the ask Grok button.
Not that building all that stuff is necessarily easy, but it's also not like there's a ton of product market validation or design work that's needed. Like literally the playbook is to just copy whatever the Asian superapps like WeChat/Grab/Gojek/LINE/etc are doing.
Musk has always been pretty transparent that that was his ambition for X.
I feel like most people that say WeChat is a super app haven't actually used it for any period of time. WeChat achieves their "able to do everything" by embedding sub apps within the app. Switching between them is jarring, and is sometimes less smooth than just opening a different app. Saying WeChat is a super app is like saying an app store is a super app.
> Saying WeChat is a super app is like saying an app store is a super app.
I don't think they care about the experience or functionality. I think it's just about being able to exert enough of a legal or structural claim to get their fingers on a cut of the eventual transactions enabled by the various "apps" in the "super app".
Yes most of their revenue growth is expected to be as the everything app (or a video platform?).
Musk has said over and over he doesn't care about advertising revenue, he mangled a quote from the Princess Bride to say "I don't care" and then he said if advertisers try to blackmail him with money (even stranger phrasing) they could go f*ck themselves.
> turned out that G. Hotz is just another midwit like anyone else
I understand your point, but I think this sort of discourse leads people down the wrong path. G. Hotz is a pretty smart engineer. What he lacks at twitter is probably not engineering ability, but organization ability. The problem is likely not that the individual engineers aren't smart, it's that they end up working together to make each other worse than they could be.
After Elon fired 80% of the staff, I think we can assume that most of the organizational hurdles were effectively gone, and that it was the perfect time for a cowboy developer to jump in and fix something that would have been stopped by conservative approaches and team work before.
If search could have been solved by a single smart person, it would have been done long ago. In the Bay Area, finding a world class researcher (in distributed systems, databases, text search or whatnot) able to do a short stint at a company to tackle a hard problem isn't particularly hard.
Making big promises and then underdelivering seems like his MO in general. His AI hardware startup went from "AMD makes quality AI hardware but bad software, I'm raising money to completely rewrite the entire AMD software/driver stack to make it better for AI, how hard can it be?" to him complaining to AMD about buggy drivers and AI tooling (when the whole point of his company was throwing all that out and writing new ones from scratch) to him giving up on AMD and selling nVidia AI compute boxes like everyone else.
His M.O. and that of everyone in Elon's orbit. That's how we got DOGE: a bunch of people of well below average skills and intelligence who nevertheless believe themselves to be the masters of the universe promised to radically improve government efficiency and greatly reduce waste, but found out that the government has been wound as tightly as possible by a bunch of hardened bureaucrats who paid attention in school, know how to use slide rules, are aren't ruled by "vibes".
Despite her CEO title she was at best #2 at the company (behind Musk) and I imagine with the xAI buyout she's now further down the ladder. Even going back to her old role (head of advertising and partnerships at a $100B+ company) will probably be a step up at this point.
You'd think that but AFAIK, there have only been 2 serious attempts to kill Trump and 0 to kill Musk[0] (I don't follow US politics much so idk which one of them you're referring to). Compare that to the number of mass shootings[1] and car rammings for the same period.
It seems most killing is done by crazy people who are content to blame and attack society at large for their problems. Conversely, sane/intelligent/competent people who are able to identify the root causes of injustice rarely use violence.
As a result, you're probably fine as long as other unhinged people see you as an ally even if a lot of sane people see you as an enemy.
[0]: Apparently he claims 2 so I qualified it with "serious" because narcissists are known to inflate their claims and I can't be bothered to check his claims.
[1]: Apparently what counts as a mass shooting is very inclusive (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx3aI67iWpA ) so count only those intended to kill random strangers, not targeted attacks.
She stepped in and did a job, nothing more nothing less. I don't see this as a failure, the post-Elon Twitter is not a company that operates based on traditional characteristics, and I don't know what a CEO even does for such a company. It's obvious that Elon put her in charge to appease advertisers, but that gimmick only works for so long.
Anyway, I wouldn't have made it as long as she did. Being in charge of a cesspool of racist, misogynistic, antisemitic content like that is a fate worse than unemployment.
The whole thing was a toxic brew of an autocratic owner choosing a weak CEO he can push around plus the glass cliff. Yaccarino was a perfectly fine ad sales executive in a legacy media company. She could've had a really pleasant couple of years. I hope she negotiated a severance that sets her up nicely.
I know everyone involved is a consenting adult, but the cynicism is still pretty icky.
Her departure is about as material as having a second appendix. Her presence was to paper over the management failures of Elon Musk, and all she did was put them in stark relief by being a non-entity during her tenure (a sad debasement for her, and underutilization of someone with actual media/marketing acumen).
I think that no matter how bad the news about Elon and his companies might be, his net worth keeps skyrocketing and is currently around the $400B mark. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years Forbes reports that he's the first to reach one trillion.
> I think that no matter how bad the news about Elon and his companies might be, his net worth keeps skyrocketing and is currently around the $400B mark.
I'm not really sure about that. Tesla's stock price dropped around a third during the past year. Which source are you using to support that assertion?
By "the past year" I assume you mean 2025? Because it's still higher than it was in October 2024 (https://www.google.com/finance/quote/TSLA:NASDAQ?window=1Y). A better argument would be sales of Tesla cars, which last I heard were consistently dropping in most important markets.
If SpaceX is able to eventually deliver starship and take people to Mars, Musk will quickly become a multi trillionaire. The riches of space are out there for anyone with the technology and will to take it, we have plenty of people with the will but only one company that is getting closer on the tech front. There is quadrillions in wealth on other worlds and asteroids (obviously bringing a trillion of gold to earth severely reduces the price of gold, I mean economic opportunities).
Its not going to Mars that makes money, its the technology required to get there. That same tech can be used to setup asteroid mining facilities. Imagine life is found on one of the moons of Jupiter, the biological gold rush would be like nothing seen before. In addition there will be well funded people willing to travel to other worlds and moons to start new frontiers. It may take centuries but these outposts may eventually thrive opening up more economic opportunity.
Its not getting to Mars thats important, its the ability to get to Mars and what it grants humanity
I agree, there are few people as frustrated as I am that Musk had a tantrum and torpedoed his relationship with Trump. Primarily because I want humanity to go to space.
I don't see human lifestream as a sphere rolling up or down but a morphing goo flow through an unstructured topology. So, extrapolating last 20 years of Elon decissions in the future is impossible because humans tend to fail with time, bodily, emotionally and cognitivelly.
There is a screenshot were Grok posts lurid sexual harassing stuff about her. https://x.com/highflystai/status/1942970125193547792 . Is there weird legal stuff around this with an AI? she is the CEO and it is a tool in the company and something she is supposed to "control"?
Good for her. Got paid a ton of money to be the fall guy and no one ever believed anything that went wrong with the company was her fault. That's a clean getaway in my book. Hopefully she can move on to something that isn't building Nazi chat bots.
Is that so? Or isn't it that being the CEO of such a large and well-known company is basically always career enhancing? In my experience, with companies hiring for high-level positions, former job titles are valued often more than actual performance.
This is just delusional. It was obvious to everyone she was in an impossible job with a megalomaniacal boss ,and not only did she not get fired, she actually lasted 2 years and left on her own terms. I think she'll be just fine.
The reputational damage was taking the money to profit from and aid the megalomania. She'll never be taken seriously by serious people or have a substantive job again. But she'll do fine, her loyalty will probably get her similar opportunity with similar people.
She _accepted_ the job, though. If we're assuming it was obvious to everyone that it was an impossible job, then her accepting it shows a certain lack of judgement, surely.
"I accepted a difficult position with the expectation that I would make a significant impact on the company's future. Now, looking back, I'm pleased with what I was able to accomplish. I look forward to more challenging engagements."
At least, that's how I would spin it.
But I'd probably have AI massage the text a bit ;-)
At least they are trying to name the team based on the city they are in, where the Dallas Cowboys haven't been in Dallas since the the early 70s. They trained in a city not Dallas while their stadium was in yet another not Dallas city. Now, their stadium is in yet another not Dallas city, and headquarters/training is yet a different not Dallas city.
With the A's, you could at least be close by going to the city in their name.
One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster. She never had any say and worst part is she was not even a good fall guy, it was clear who’s pulling the strings. The most immaterial and inconsequential hire ever.
I love all the replies on Twitter thanking her but during her time the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising. Remarkably inept.
Indeed. It was such a paradoxical situation from the start, with her both reporting to Musk as the chairman and owner, while at the same time "managing" him as the CTO. I'm surprised that the charade went on for as long as it did.
What’s there to perceive? Ballmer talked at length about how challenging it was and how often they disagreed on things.
“That's where I moved back to be president of the company and then CEO, and Bill and I went through a year where we didn't speak”
“Basically our wives were the ones who pushed us back together. We had a very awkward dinner at a health club down the street here, but we get back together. But we never really got the right mojo.”
To a certain extent, you always have to manage your boss, whether as an individual contributor or as a subordinate manager. A boss managing multiple people does not have the same mental bandwidth as all the people in their team combined, so the employees cannot bring every matter to the boss's attention. Choosing which matters to bring (and how to present them) is precisely what managing upwards means.
(In fact, if you're being praised
When someone says that they need to manage their boss, what they usually mean is that the boss reacts poorly or unproductively to bad news, or that they like to interfere in parts of the work process that would best be left to the employees, and so this normal part of everyone's job turns into a constant walk on eggshells.
My long-held [0] personal theory - borne out by everything Musk has done, and by who bought Twitter - is that it was bought to curb the possibility of large positive social movements along the lines of OWS or BLM.
Enabling that can entail being useless at your supposed job, while doing your actual job (which deserves some amount of blame, from a number of perspectives).
I think Elon truly believed in the subscription model, which would free him from advertiser content influence. That and being terminally addicted to the platform himself, and being an impulsive gambler. I really don't think we've gotten where we are due to any (successful) master plan
This. He was addicted to Twitter. He saw value in it and thought he could run it better. He wanted to be “The Place” where things were talked about. Where he could control the narrative.
History has shown us, the more you try to control it, the more it slips through your fingers. The best surfers know, you ride the wave, not fight it.
See my only counterpoint to this theory is Musk has a long and well documented history of being absolutely stone desperate to be cool, which is the only thing he can't buy, and he simply revels in his ownership of Twitter even as he comprehensively runs it into the ground as a business.
Now, would he be upset about such efforts being derailed as a result, or is he even slightly bothered about his website now being packed to the tits with Nazis? Absolutely not. But I do think as unbelievably cringe as it would be if true, I really think he bought the damn thing because he just wanted to be the meme lord.
Mainly I just struggle with giving him as much credit as your theory does in terms of long term planning. He's an overgrown man-child.
I think you and the parent poster are doing a good job of describing the same thing from different angles. Both observations are true.
Musk wanted to steer culture toward his own ends as the parent poster described and he wanted to be seen as some kind of.... cool vanguard of that, as you say.
It's really different facets of the same thing, right?
I guess what I struggle with is seeing Musk taking that kind of top-down strategic view of things? Which that could entirely be a me problem. I think there's an inherent bias in the way a lot of people think where they assign these Machiavellian motives especially to the super-privileged and those in positions of power, the 5D chess type shit, and I tend to bias in the other direction where... a lot of times these guys are just fucking losers and they don't think terribly dissimilarly from your weird uncle who doesn't come to the reuinions anymore.
Ultimately though, this is a bit of a weird aside to go on I fully admit. The "solutions" so to speak for people like this are basically the same whether they are dark-room schemers or dickheads with far too much money and not nearly enough accountability.
I think he saw a good (to him) opportunity to steer public discourse by tossing a big stack of cash at probably the most influential social media network in terms of mindshare, to push whatever ideas were careening through his mind at any given point.
He may not have even been sober, much less playing 5D chess.
Damn near every mega-billionaire is, almost by definition. If the best thing you can come up with to do with money is make more of it at other people's expense, then you're not even close to what I'd call mentally mature.
That doesn't stop many oligarchs from making cunning plans with layers and layers of depth, or being excellent at misdirection and media manipulation - both of which Musk also has a long and well documented history of showing. It also doesn't stop them from hiring people to make and/or refine those plans. Shit, there's probably cunning bootlickers out there, like Yarvin, just pitching this shit to them all the time.
> I just struggle with giving him as much credit as your theory does in terms of long term planning
As far as plans go, "buy Twitter and destroy it because it threatens our class interests - but pretend you're doing it for free speech or whatever" isn't especially complicated. Just piss off advertisers, users, and your staff, in plausibly deniable ways. It's not like corporate media are going to call you on it.
No one, not even the cringiest, wanna-be edge lord from 4chan spends $44B to buy Twitter unless they think there's value there. Even paying a big premium for Twitter. So what value does Musk see in Twitter? He's not going to make money off it. He bought a huge megaphone to push his social/class interests.
Cannabis with high CBD and minimal THC isn't a psychedelic, fyi.
Amazing you didn't get that point even after it was made explicitly clear three times, but you still remember my username 10 days later.
Also, asserting that someone who expresses class awareness and media literacy is dabbling in "alternative facts" and must be on some kind of psychedelic drugs is wildly uncalled for. This is the second time you've cast such aspersions on me for some reason - stop.
It's pretty depressing such derangement infiltrated HN. Psychedelics are really a fine line. Looking at SF as an outsider - it either mints billionaires or completely destroys people.
It's conspiratorial thinking to assume that everything that happens in the world is perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight. Maybe a formerly-brilliant but drug-addled rich guy just bought a social media platform with bad fundamentals at the height of its valuation and then mismanaged it while flailing around with other ventures and political adventures. Occam's razor.
Buying a 9.1% stake in a company before making an unsolicited (but formal) offer to buy out the rest of it is weird behaviour for somebody who didn’t actually ever want to buy it…
I think the GP is suggesting a simple explanation of why it went badly, since that is the subject of the thread, rather than an explanation of why Musk bought Twitter. No need for conspiratorial accusations of conveniently omitting anything.
TBF going from the cobbled together roadster to actually mass producing cars was an accomplishment, as was giving his engineers the latitude to keep trying to land a Falcon 9 booster.
Then he started to think it was his brilliance that made those things successful. Cybertruck is his baby. So is Starship. He's telling his people to make it work with a little or no moderation of his concepts.
It’s not clear to me that he had any hand in the actual successes of Tesla and SpaceX. Stories abound of the lengths to which each company went to to manage his whims. He’s apparently burned through all of those firewalls and now both companies are exploding, figuratively and in literally.
Wasn't elonjet the turning point? There are some arguments around that he might not have clear cognitive distinction between verbal accusations and physical violence. Maybe that was the missed shot from rooftop for him. Elon before those events was a Steve Jobs Junior figure, that is to say, he was not problematic enough for the rest of the world including myself to focus on the crazy side.
> It's conspiratorial thinking to assume that everything that happens in the world is perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight.
Because the original comment isn't doing this. It's not talking about everything, it's talking about one specific thing in a very plausible scenario.
It wouldn't even need to be a very complicated or widespread "conspiracy": Just Musk and a few VC guys in a Signal or Telegram thread saying
> someone should just buy Twitter and downrank all these crazy leftists
> Hmm
> I'll help line up financing.
> Ok!
This isn't flat earth, chem trails, lizard people, or weather weapons. It's not even Illuminati, Masons, or Skull and Bones. We've seen some of these chats already.
Can you provide more about this idea? I see the Boring company as being pretty feckless, and at the same time extremely boastful. They have gotten hopes up in a number of places about solving city traffic problems, only to go dark when the rubber (should have) met the road.
But I don't see any of those having impacted the California High Speed Rail. Rather that has been harmed by lots of different groups throwing roadblocks up, sometime for ideological reasons (lots of this from State and National Republicans, sometimes with reasons, but often more political), and a whole lot of NIMBY (see: Palo Alto). What do you see the Boring Company having to do with that?
As a side note: there are some really poorly thought through parts of the project, for example they don't have a plan for actually making it over the mountains into Los Angeles. I still want it to happen, but...
The CHSR thing is a bit apocryphal (no evidence, just according to his biographer) since hyperloop never really competed in any way with CHSR. He did, however, play a very big role in fucking up a potential Chicago connection between downtown and O'hare, as the Boring company actually did win the bid to use the abandoned cavern below the Washington Red/Blue line stop, promising to run a hyperloop up to the airport. It never went anywhere, and the cavern below block 37 remains abandoned.
> Last week, the Boring Company won a $48.6 million bid to design and build a “people mover” beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. The payout represents the first actual contract for Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tunneling venture. And Las Vegas, a tourist city that wants to be seen as a technology hub, will get a new mobility attraction with the imprimatur of America’s leading disruptor.
> “Las Vegas is known for disruption and for reinventing itself,” Tina Quigley, the chief executive officer of the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, said when the partnership between the Boring Company and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) was announced in March. “So it’s very appropriate that this new technology is introduced and being tested here.”
He's provided evidence of being an impulsive fool for even longer. I defended Musk as a useful idiot for a while until be fully showed his true colors, but it has always been clear he's not a wise man.
(His vigorous and pathetic efforts to get out of the purchase also push against it being a big master plan, FWIW.)
You are missing the forest for one very odd tree. Yes, the tree is wacky, but
* Every private media company has beneficial owners
* Those beneficial owners are rich
* Rich people who own things for a living have incentives opposed to those of most people, who work for a living
These are not conspiracies, they are just basic facts of capitalism.
That there are a select few who own the capital, and that those people generally do not overlap with the people who work, is more or less the original definition of capitalism. And I don't think its controversial or a caricature to imply that those two groups will have different incentives.
From Wikipedia [0]:
`The initial use of the term "capitalism" in its modern sense is attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 ("What I call 'capitalism' that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others") and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861 ("Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor")`
hmm... I am drawing a parallel between your theory on 'controlled opposition' from the linked thread from 2023, to the current M vs T fight. Plausible...
My conspiracy theory was that because of Musk's involvement in OpenAI he had foreknowledge of the impeding release of ChatGPT. In that context, Twitter as a source for AI training can be far more valuable than a rage filled social network. However he still failed horribly to time the market
I took them to mean it can be both things at once, and one is more valuable than the other. Not that being an ai training source would make it a rage filled social network.
how would you explain how hard he fought to NOT buy twitter?
people seem to forget he was legally forced to buy Twitter after he tried for months to get out of his joke bid, primarily through claiming he was misled about the extent of bots on the platform
The entire idea is to buy an undervalued platform using insider information, if the stock price plunges after he committed to a price then it's no longer undervalued. This has happened between his bid and termination announcements.
I also roughly remember he had his Tesla holdings as collateral creating some liquidity crisis for him.
This elaborate explanation does not mean it isn't wrong and the original theory of idiot-with-money does not hold
Nothing positive can come out of Twitter for McLuhanite reasons.
Zohran Mamdami's greatest attribute in media is that if you see him in video you see him listening to people. Even people who aren't inclined to agree with him talk to him and say "he was so nice, he listened to me." High-D [1] billionaires who support High-D candidates such as Clinton, Cuomo and Adams are driven crazy by this. [2]
Even though Twitter does provide a back channel and a Twitter user may really be a nice guy who listens and replies, the structure of the thing is such that you don't see that user listening and in fact the user interface on Twitter makes it really hard to see that conversation for outsiders in the way that the heavy Twitter user doesn't get. Not least because the heavy Twitter user might not realize that people who aren't logged in don't see anything at all (pro tip: just don't post links to Twitter on HN, you might see a great discussion with a lot of context, the rest of us just see a single sentence floating in space without any context)
On video though, the person who listens listens visibly, you see the microexpressions in real time as they react to what the other person is saying. It's a thing of beauty. (Coalition leaders such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Peloci do a lot of listening as part of their job but constituents only see them talking!)
The above is a second order concern compared to the general compression of discourse in Twitter which is talked about in [2]. Twitter addicts spend 4-5 hours a day traversing graphs to follow discussions and understand (or think they understand?) context, the rest of us just see "white farmers" which means one thing if you're racist, another if you're "anti-racist", and just means "move along folks, nothing more to see here" for the great silent majority. When Twitter is at equilibrium every movement creates and equal and opposite amount of backlash, nothing actually changes except polarization increases, there is more and more talking and less and less listening, and the possibility of real social change diminishes.
They're conducting some sleight of hand here. There was indeed a bit of a violent crime spike post-George Floyd in the US.
But... there was also an unprecedented global pandemic and resulting economic shutdown, and the same crime spike happened in other countries that didn't have a BLM movement to speak of.
It's not even sleight of hand, it's just lying by omission.
"Our boat sank because you chose to go left instead of right" while not even mentioning the giant hole that opened up in the boat isn't sleight of hand.
> I think there is some blame for not standing up to Musk and leading better.
That seems in the same category as saying there's some blame on her for not working harder on basketball in her youth and so never becoming a WNBA Finals MVP. (Narrator: Um, no, she's not nearly tall enough ....)
I'm just not sure her complete lack of power to stand up to Musk is a defense. If a controversial rich guy offers you a CEO job that consists entirely of laundering his reputation by pretending his decisions are your own, you have a social responsibility not to take it. I'd be more sympathetic if she were some random person who couldn't otherwise dream of an executive level pay package, but she was the head of ads at NBC.
> If a controversial rich guy offers you a CEO job that consists entirely of laundering his reputation by pretending his decisions are your own, you have a social responsibility not to take it.
I don't think you become the CEO of any major company by believing that "social responsibility" exists. Doesn't the job pretty much select for the type of person who thinks the world owes them $20+ million a year?
With that said - it's dumb to blame the puppet for the acts of the ventriloquist.
She was making $4M at NBC! Again, I can imagine and be sympathetic towards a story where a billionaire gives you otherwise unimaginable wealth if only you'll sit in a comfy CEO office while they run the company around you. That isn't what happened here, and not because of some tactical mistake by Musk - her experience and connections as an ads executive for a major media company were at least a big part of why Musk wanted her, if not the entirety of it.
I mean, you are hired as a CEO by Elon Musk, there must be some certain expectations on the capabilities of a CEO, and I think one of the first one is being able to stand up for yourself, if nothing else.
I know you meant your comment as sarcasm, but to do it, you need to have a legacy worth those kind of numbers to begin with, instead of selling your labor as most of us here do. It's not so different that celebrities associating themselves with brands through advertising.
And as distasteful as it seems to many of us, people like her spend years building their social networks and a reputation for various personality and behavioral traits in a boardroom.
Also, I doubt her legacy is closed at this point. The traditional next step would be to write a book based on her career capped off by her experiences at Twitter.
Lots of corporate boards, university boards, nonprofit boards, etc. make room for folks like her. She understands something about social media and the digital future -- and even if that expertise doesn't impress many folks on HackerNews, it will seem quite sufficient and robust to the elderly trustees and big-donor board members of Pleurisy State University.
Being 62 is the perfect age for such roles. Young enough to climb a flight of stairs; old enough to nod appropriately to her new peers' references from the 1980s. Executive search firms will be eager to guide her into as many board roles as she might want.
Which given the nature of democracy are many of the same as the people who elected the last one and the one before, etc. Are we not all snowflake-unique kinds of stupid?
My point of gratitude for today is that my level of stupid is not nearly as consequential to others as some folks'.
Legacy means having a lasting impact on society or culture. As another example, the average Joe Schmoe has no clue that Fabrice Bellard even exists, yet Bellard inarguably has one helluva legacy.
On the other hand, there are many people who are famous, but will probably leave no legacy.
The way I see it, her job had two parts - reign in Elon, and then run the show. But she couldn't (or wasn't interested in) doing the first part, and so her tenure was a failure. Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX does a great job at both, by contrast.
There's a market for CEOs that are "puppets" or managed by another CEO. In that way I doubt her reputation is necessarily stained as anyone making that much money lives in a different world and under different terms than (presumably) you and I do.
Oh sure, I have no doubt she can get another cushy job if she wants it. I just mean that she has revealed herself as a coward at best, and a deplorable snake at worst.
> *I love all the replies on Twitter thanking her* but during her time the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising. Remarkably inept.
Gotcha. I guess another episode of "both participants think the other is crazy"
My read wasn't that the "inept" was specifically her, but rather the leadership of the company at the time in general (for which, regardless, she is being thanked on Twitter). In other words, either
(1) she was a figurehead that didn't do anything and thanking her is stupid
(2) she wasn't a figurehead and actually was in charge, in which case thanking her is still stupid because such leadership was inept (suing their advertisers, etc.)
> It's weird that you say both she had no material power and also seem to imply the valuation drop and lawsuits were due to her ineptitude?
Why is that weird? Say you have a company operating normally. The CEO dies and isn't replaced. Do you think it's weird for the company's value to drop?
Interesting. My hot take is 99% of the time non-founder CEOs end up on the dustbin of history, successful or unsuccessful.
Terry Semel. John Akers. John Sculley, Carly Fiorina. Except among those of us in tech, all are now long forgotten failures. Even Gil Amelio, who made one of the most genius acquisitions ever, was fired and his name lost to the sands of time. My bet is nobody's going to remember Tim Cook or Sundar or Satya in 50 years, maybe even 20.
Possibly the only non-founder CEO who has made a real legacy in the last 100 years is Elon. I would also say TJ Watson Jr. but I very much wonder if that many HN commenters know who he is!
I think the founders tend to have a love for the business and a long-term plan for it. Followup CEOs are more about the stock performance and happy to sell it for parts if it serves their bonus. Sundar and Satya took all of the strengths of those respective companies and burned them to the ground. Made a lot of money doing it, stockholders love them, but they're pale husks of their former businesses.
Yes, corruption pays. Although if "doing remarkably well" means being addicted to ketamine, having many exes and children who refuse to speak with you, tanking multiple businesses to the point that your products get sabotaged just for being associated with you, getting booed off stages, licking the boots of fascists in the hope they'll let you call them "daddy", paying people to play online games for you to impress nerds (unsuccessfully, instead getting online-bullied for it), etc., etc., then I think I'd rather not "do remarkably well", thank you very much.
Elon does not seem like a happy man. Is money the only points humans score themselves by? It's like watching someone bragging about getting the highest ever score at a game that they hate.
He basically used 31 words to say "I've never heard of Ernst Roehm," for whatever reason. I don't think you can read much more into his comment than that.
Do you mean that in the sense that he is licking the boots of so many fascists at once, including Trump, Xi Jinping, Putin, and any other fascist boot he can find, while calling them all daddy, that you're confused which of those many fascists feoren is referring to?
You have a distorted view or reality. Elon seems pretty happy to me and is undeniably successful in business - arguably the most successful entrepreneur of our time. I don't know much about his personal life but I suspect that him having babies with multiple women is due to personal choices rather than a sign of misfortune. He certainly doesn't seem "off the rails" to me. That said, I can understand that his lifestyle is not for everyone.
The man literally got punched out of the whitehouse for substance abuse lol
His children break contact with him moment they become adults.
If it wasn't for the money he would have been forbidden to see them long ago.
Everyone hates him on the left and the right.
If you consider a rich 50 year old creep doing drugs and going around impregnating young women and paying them to go away as successful? Then yes he is ..
What does being "successful in business" have to do with his personal life? Not to mention that most of the things you mentioned is based on questionable tabloid reporting.
Who said "successful in business?" No one except you, right here.
I said he was "off the rails", you said he is "doing remarkably well," and GP listed reasons he seems like a deeply unhappy and psychologically damaged person.
Now you're moving the goal posts to "successful in business". I guess your reflexive need to defend the world's richest person is rubbing up against the reality of the situation?
I was referring to his professional life when I said he was doing remarkably well - I don't know much about his personal life, and that wasn't the point of the discussion. What did you mean then by Yaccarino staining her legacy then? Are you implying she took advantage of Musk's vulnerable mental state?
> I guess your reflexive need to defend the world's richest person is rubbing up against the reality of the situation?
I'm not defending him, he just doesn't seem "off the rails" to me. Having children with multiple women might be unconventional, but I wouldn't take it as proof of being "a deeply unhappy and psychologically damaged person". As for drug addiction, that would be far more concerning, but given how high-functioning he appears to be, I'd be genuinely surprised if that were the case.
I didn’t get what you meant, since he doesn't come across that way to me, and doing remarkably well in business seems pretty incompatible with being "off the rails." Believe it or not, quite a few people here are seriously arguing that he's failing in business.
Tesla is going to down the shitter and he is trying to fool everyone that it suddenly is now an AI company lol with a disaster rollout for his taxis. Waymo is going to eat them for lunch. Driverless taxis with people overseeing things in the car lol Wow. Such autonomy. He also didnt even create the company. He basically stole it from some other guys who actually founded and built the early stages of tesla.
He doesnt and isnt capable of running SpaceX. Their current CEO and tech lead is the person who runs the business and is actually knowledgable in the space industry and space engineering. Elon? Oh he just is there for the launches.
His neuralink and xAI? lol Ok. Yes Im sure we will see a lot coming out of those businesses with most government and people know shunning his business's and himself. Oh and new version of a nazi LLM. Cant wait to use it. And Twitter. Wow so much great discourse and sensible conversation that it competes with truth social.
Yes, he is doing remarkably well because he has money. Just like Pablo escoabr had money. The leaders of Enron were also doing remarkably well for a while. What about the guy who ran that ponzi scheme? Maddof. Yes he was also doing remarkably well since no one knew the bullshit he was generating. Elon is a fraud like all these other successful people who may have created businesses but hide the bullshit well for now. One day though, it will all come crashing down. Then you and all other sheep will look like greater fools than you do now. You still have time to come to your senses. Just dont be a sheep and glorify any man or exalt him above others. Its quite simple. He is no genius. He is someone who takes advantage and exploit others for his personal gain and is more destructive to society today than he has ever been and people like you are contributing to it so congrats to screwing over other people.
Really good call out. Hitting someone from above & below seems not quite square.
In my view, there was plenty of opportunity to make a mark & do things, even with a ultra involved Musk.
But this person didn't bring much product leadership, didn't have a vision for the product. Having good business relationships might have been its own core competency, but whether Linda's fault or no, suing and going after businesses to try to score some vengeance for your own terrible behavior, and maybe coerce some people back: that's a terrible tactless look, that one would hope a leader like Linda could have helped steer away from.
I don't think this is what was happening. It's weird that people are thanking her when she functionally did nothing of value while the company has been spiraling. Either she was complicit in the whole thing, or she really did nothing at all. In either case, what is there for the users to thank?
I don't think she ever was a fall guy, Elon run a poll on should someone else be CEO of Twitter and lost the poll. It was quite entertaining, He didn't seem happy with the outcome and probably had to pay CEO level salary due to the stunt.
"The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon in which women are more likely to break the "glass ceiling" (i.e. achieve leadership roles in business and government) during periods of crisis or downturn when the risk of failure is highest."
She was mainly brought on to fix relationships with advertisers, they were just pulling out that time because of rampant nazi and hate speech (by users) on the platform, after they fired the content moderation teams. I think she did what she could over the last 2 years and some of the ad revenue came back, but after the latest MechaHitler escapades I guess she got some texts from people...
> the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising
That already happened before she got onboard.
> One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster.
One time? She has spoken publicly many times. Care to share more about what you are referring to? I have no recollection of such a thing being done by her.
It's not easy to recover from your unpredictable boss shouting "FU" to your advertisers from a stage.
"lost money due to inflation" (or even "lost money compared to an equivalent investment is a basket of similar stocks" is very different claim than "lost 80% of value". Currently the stock is down less than 10% from the purchase price (41 billion vs 44 billion).
Down 10% vs 80% is the kind of egregious factual "error" that gets made so frequently around Musk, that it is hard to take any criticism at face value. You don't like the guy and want to call him out? Get your facts straight or you're being counter productive.
Can’t speak for her, obviously, but personally I tend to wait to make my exit once I know the role is not working out
If I were in her shoes, I would have known I was going to leave during the worst of his tantrums, but I would have timed my exit for a more graceful moment.
Dramatically bailing out during a storm would not be a good look for an exec who wants another key role somewhere else
If she were trying to time it, this timing seems weird. This is literally the day after Grok kept posting anti-semitism, praising Hitler, and calling itself MechaHitler. This might not be the least graceful moment for an exit, but there were so many more graceful exit times.
All the race science phrenology bullshit is coming out of Silicon Valley. It's not a surprise to me that HN would be full of people "just reading the stats".
It's related to what you are saying. It's a non-monetary reason it'd be non-insane to leave the role; "set for life" doesn't do you much good if you're in The Hague.
My guess of what they meant; On the assumption she had influence she was unable to use that influence prevent a collapse in value. It's a hedge to cover both options.
Influencing the person pulling the strings is also a key skill. I won’t colour her entire person as inept but perhaps, wrong person wrong time. Musk doesn’t like or need yes men but if you say no him or want to try something different, you better have a well thought out idea/plan. There lies the challenge. How do you impress upon a very intelligent individual ever so often? Very few can.
> Top executives regularly come and go at Mr. Musk’s various companies. One exception is Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, who joined Mr. Musk’s rocket company shortly after its founding in 2002.
That's an amazingly long tenure under Musk. And considering SpaceX's success, she must be an exceptional leader.
I wonder what people like her who were around Musk in the early days think of him now. It’s striking how much he’s changed. When I see videos of him speaking 20, even 10 years ago, he seems much more grounded, inspired, maybe even intellectual.
Something has happened to him I feel. Maybe drugs brought out the storm inside that was always there.
Oh I really imagined that it said that she was leaving twitter (not calling it X) as in leaving the account / social media / platform (not the company)
I would prefer if we could have a little more clarity but hey, It was funny reading in that way too.
In late June, [Elon Musk] invited X users to help train the chatbot on their commentary in a way that invited a flood of racist responses and conspiracy theories.
“Please reply to this post with divisive facts for @Grok training,” Musk said in the June 21 post. “By this I mean things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.”
Yaccarino is obviously not Executive Of The Year, but what are you supposed to do when your boss is even more reckless and stupid than Donald Trump? I'm surprised it took this long.
I'd take a pretty shitty job for $6 million dollars a year in salary before bonuses. Especially when everyone knows I'm not the one actually making the decisions so all the failures can get laid at someone else's feet (appropriately).
This existed on Twitter before Musk bought Twitter, and was likely borrowed from community wiki section on Stack Overflow at a minimum, if not from earlier sites. Not an X innovation.
It is perhaps just a coincidence that this happened the day after “Mecha-Hitler” Grok going on racist screeds and going into lurid sexual fantasies about her in particular for the whole world to see. But it does look bad.
this is just a bottom of the drawer news they could pick the time to release (as all comments here prove, the hiring, the duration, and the firing, were all inconsequential for anything whatsoever)
So, why fire now? What news would be getting attention instead, of the 600 comments here and who knows how many on xitter?
> Ms. Yaccarino had discussed her plans to leave with X employees earlier this week, before the incident with Grok, two people familiar with the matter said. xAI is largely separate from X, but Grok’s responses are often widely cited — and criticized — across the platform.
That paragraph must have been recently edited in (and thereby validating OP's complaint) as it isn't in the archive/paywell circumventing version at https://archive.ph/9zvHZ. For those of us without a NYT subscription, can you tell us whether it puts any description to "the incident with Grok"?
Tangential, I still find it absurd people accept calling it X instead of Twitter. While I'd generally agree that most companies can change their name, encroaching on a basic letter should be off limits, like naming your company "The" or "God".
Still sticking with Twitter until a reasonable name is found, which by Musk is never.
I used to Find the renaming a bit ridiculous, but in light of the sweeping platform changes, I find that making the distinction between twitter, the somewhat reasonable microblog platform and x, the far-right psyops operation is useful.
Also there is some honesty in making the logo a half-drawn swastika.
Microsoft naming makes sense if you imagine that the person that came up with the names was stoned, like high on weed.
"Yo dude, to use the spreadsheets you've got to like excel and stuff. ",
"When you make your point it's gotta be powerful. ",
"Ain't my point having a database if you can't access it. ",
"A: I need a tool to write my book, it's gonna change the world. B: Word bro, word. ",
"Bro, you have to connect with people to expand your outlook on life, the world and stuff. ".
Those can be easily identified as "Microsoft Word", "Microsoft Office" and "Microsoft Windows". However "X" is the name of the company and the product.
I guess you could refer to it as "X The Everything App" or using the incredibly corny and near-immediately-binned tagline "X: Blaze Your Glory!" but I've only ever seen those used by people making fun of the product, company, Elon or all three.
But at least you can search for "Microsoft Office" to counter the issue. Plus, they have the excuse that they have been doing this since before the Web existed, literally.
> While I'd generally agree that most companies can change their name, encroaching on a basic letter should be off limits
To me it's the other way around. If the platform had been named X from the start, then a language would have developed around it, including what its messages are called, or what verb is used to refer to posting a message. We, the public, wouldn't have known any better. With Twitter, we do know better — better name, better nouns, better verbs (even a better logo; but that's by the by). Bosses can rename their products as much as they like; it's just surprising to me that we as a public so obligingly give up this tiny bit of our language.
> like naming your company "The" or "God".
Consider truth social :-) I am amazed people agree to call the messages there 'truths', and reposts, 'retruths'. So embarrassing.
"Tweets" was already an embarrassing term. We used to be fine with just "posts" or "comments" instead of trying to put the company branding in every term.
> If the platform had been named X from the start, then a language would have developed around it, including what its messages are called, or what verb is used to refer to posting a message.
I'm not really sure. Some things don't compound, that's why I think a preposition for instance would make a bad name. But even if you may be right, I still want to put up a fight against corporate entities trying to take over basic concepts (X, the unknown, the letter that marks the spot, etc.). I don't want to be forced to use your name if your name is an absurdity, the same way I can't make a brand called "Trump is an idiot" (even if it's true).
I wonder if the purpose of naming it „X“, just like naming „Facebook“ meta is to do the opposite of SEO: Make it harder to find news pertaining to the company and their scandals.
Same with Facebook / Meta; the "metaverse" they tried to pivot the company to cost them billions and failed spectacularly. Google is still Google, not Alphabet, although separating the overarching org from the search engine / internet services branch was logical. They tried to pivot to social media with Circles, upheaving the whole company. The only good thing that (from an outsider's POV anyway) came out of that was unifying their logins across services.
It's interesting how things change. Internet used to be against copyright and for the right to choose how to call oneself. And now it's for copyright and against the self naming thing.
I'm actually for self-naming in general, it's just that there should be some common sense limits to self-naming. There's a reason why we differentiate between common and proper nouns.
The worst part, in my opinion, is that people fell for it. Instead of hearing a split second two syllable "twitter", we now keep hearing "X, formerly known as twitter".
That's 8 syllables. You just gave 4x free advertisement for absolutely no good reason. You're the sucker.
She's the ex-CEO of a private company owned by a billionaire. What power did she really have?
If the company was still public, then all the stupid shit Elon Musk did would put her in a much stronger place as the adult in the room during board meetings.
The things done to Twitter since it became X is a form of cultural vandalism that should never be forgotten in the history of the web. It will be a cautionary tale for decades to come.
It was starting N.... chains yesterday along with several other 4chan memes, so its definitely ingested a dataset consisting of at least 4chan posts that any sane company wouldn't touch with a 1000ft pole.
That's a bingo. 3 weeks ago, Musk invited[1] X users to Microsoft-Tay[2] Grok by having them share share "divisive facts", then presumably fed the over 10,000 responses into the training/fine-tuning data set.
2. In 2016, Microsoft decided to let its Tay chatbot interact, and learn from Twitter users, and was praising Hitler in short order. They did it twice too, before shutting it down permanently. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
I've seen lots of deflection saying Yaccarino chose to retire prior to Grok/MechaHitler, but the tweet predates that.
Even more deflection about how chatbots are easy to bait into saying weird things, but you don't need to bait when it has been specifically trained on it.
All of this was intentional. Musk is removing more of the mask, and he doesn't need Yaccarino to comfort advertisers any more.
I think it's more so that they push changes quickly without exhaustively testing. Compare that to Google, who sits on a model for years for fear of hurting their reputation, or OpenAI and Anthropic who extensively red teams models
Given the source of training data is primarily the internet, and not say scanned propaganda posters in museums, I'd have to imagine all the analyses or things attributed to the impact of world war 2 significantly outnumber uncritical publications of ww2 propaganda in the training sets.
All LLM's are capable of producing really vile completions if prompted correctly -- after all, there's a lot of vile content in the training data. OpenAI does a lot of work fine tuning them to steer them away from it. It's just as easy to fine tune them to produce more.
In fact, there was an interesting paper showed that fine tuning an LLM to produce malicious code (ie: with just malicious code examples in response to questions, no other prompts), causes it to produce more "evil" results in completely unrelated tasks. So it's going to be hard for Musk to cherry pick particular "evil" responses in fine tuning without slanting everything it does in that direction.
You don't actually want to filter out "bad" training data. That this stuff exists is an important fact about the world. It's mostly just fine tuning to make sure it produces output that align with whatever values you want it to have. The models do assign a moral dimension to all of it's concepts, so if you fine tune it so that it's completions match your desired value system, it'll generally do what you expect, even if somewhere deep in the data set there is training data diametrically opposed to it.
You don't think Elon went behind her back constantly? You think the next CEO will have more to say? She pretended to be in charge, she got paid, good for her. What are you hoping for. X is a dump, and the sooner it goes away the better for everybody.
There's only one way to stop Elon Musk from doing erratic, value-destroying things like that, and that's to ambush him in the parking lot with a tire iron.
The NYT had already sourced that she was leaving prior to the Grok incident, so they knew it was not the primary reason. Apparently, she has been planning on leaving since the takeover by xAI.
The bot has said fairly horrendous stuff before, which would cross the line for most people. It had not, however, previously called itself 'MechaHitler', advocated the holocaust, or, er, whatever the hell this is: https://bsky.app/profile/whstancil.bsky.social/post/3ltintoe...
It has gone from "crossing the line for most ordinary decent people" to "crossing the line for anyone who doesn't literally jerk off nightly to Mein Kampf", which _is_ a substantive change.
There's no mystery to it: if one trains a chatbot explicitly to eschew establishment narratives, one persona the bot will develop is that of an edgelord.
To me, and I'm guessing the reason Linda left is not that Grok said these things. Tweaking chatbots is hard, yes prompt engineering can help say anything, but I'm guessing it's her sense of control and governance, not wanting to have to constantly clean up Musk's messes.
Musk made a change recently, he said as much, he was all move fast and break things about it, and I imagine Linda is tired of dealing with that, and this probably coincided with him focusing on the company more, having recently left politics.
We can bikeshed on the morality of what AI chatbots should and shouldn't say, but it's really hard to manage a company and product development when you such a disorganized CTO.
... yes, that's the complaint. The prompt engineering they did made it spew neo-Nazi vitriol. They either did not adequately test it beforehand and didn't know what would happen, or they did test and knew the outcome—either way, it's bad.
Do you think that Tay's user-interactions were novel or perhaps race-based hatred is a consistent/persistent human garbage that made it into the corpus used to train LLMs?
We're literally trying to shove as much data as possible into these things afterall.
What I'm implying is that you think you made a point, but you didn't.
Not defending Elon or the infobot but my theory is that by leaving that LLM unfiltered people have learned how to gamify and manipulate it into having a fascist slant. I could even guess which groups of people are doing it but I will let them take credit and it's not likely actual neo-nazi's, they are too dumb and on too many drugs to manipulate an infobot. These groups like to LARP to piss everyone off and they often succeed. If I am right it is a set of splintered groups formerly referred to generically as The Internet Hate Machine but they have (d)evolved into something worse that even 4chan could not tolerate.
People who don't understand llms think saying don't shy away from making claims that are politically incorrect means it won't PC. In reality saying that just makes things associated with politically incorrect more likely. The /pol/ board is called politically incorrect, the ideas people "call" politically incorrect most of all are not Elon's vague centrist stuff it's the extreme stuff. LLMs just track probable relations between tokens, not meaning, it having this result based on that prompt is obvious.
We have no evidence to suggest that they just made a prompt change and it dialed up the 4chan weights. This repository is a graveyard where a CI bot occasionally makes a text diff, but we have no understanding if it's connected with anything deployed live or not.
The mishap is not the chatbot accidentally getting too extreme and at odds with 'Elon's centrist stuff'. The mishap is the chatbot is too obvious and inept about Musk's intent.
> it's not likely actual neo-nazi's, they are too dumb to manipulate an infobot.
No they are not. There exist brilliant people and monkeybrains across the whole population and thus the political spectrum. The ratios might be different, but I am pretty sure there exist some very smart neo-nazis
There are, but fascism's internal cultural fixtures are more aesthetic than intellectual. It doesn't really attract or foster intellectuals like some radical political movements do, and it shows very clearly in the composition of the "rank and file".
Put plainly, the average neo-Nazi is astonishingly, astonishingly stupid.
> It doesn't really attract or foster intellectuals like some radical political movements do
It definitely attracts people who are competent in technology and propaganda is sufficient numbers for the task being discussed, especially when as a mass movement it has (or is perceived to have) a position of power that advantage-seeking people want to exploit. If anything, the common perception that fascists are "astonishingly, astonishingly stupid" makes this more attractive for people who are both competent and also amoral opportunists (which do occur together, competence and moral virtue aren't particularly correlated.)
Curtis Yarvin’s writing is insufferable and many of his ideas are both bad and effectively Nazism, but clearly he’s very smart (and very eager to prove it).
Yarvin is an out-and-out white nationalist, though he denies it, or at least the name: "I am not a white nationalist, though I am not exactly allergic to the stuff" - whatever the hell that mealy-mouthed answer is meant to mean.
He even wrote a bloviating article to further clarify that he is not a white nationalist. You'd be forgiven, though, if you didn't read the title. It spends most of the article sympathizing with, understanding, agreeing with, and talking of how white nationalism "resonates" with him. But don't worry, he swears he's not one at the end of the article!
It sure didn’t seem to take much manipulation from what I saw. “Which 20th century figure would solve our current woes” is pretty mild input to produce “Hitler would solve everything!”
In 1999 there was a perl chatbot called infobot that could be taught factoids, truths, lies. It would learn anything people chatted about on IRC. So I call LLM's infobots.
> Not defending Elon or the infobot but my theory is that by leaving that LLM unfiltered people have learned how to gamify and manipulate it into having a fascist slant.
We don't need a theory that explains how Grok got a fascist slant, we know exactly what happened: Musk promise to remove the "woke" from Grok, and what's left is Nazi. [1]
That LLM is incredibly filtered, just in a different way from others. I suspect by "retraining" the model Elon actually means that they just updated the system prompt, which is exactly what they have done for other hacked in changes like preventing the bot from criticizing Trump/Elon during the election.
No, that's definitely not what happened. For quite a while Grok actually seemed to have a surprisingly left-leaning slant. Then recently Elon started pushing the South African "white genocide" conspiracy theory, and Grok was sloppily updated and started pushing that same conspiracy theory even in unrelated threads. Last week Elon announced another update to Grok, which coincided with this dramatic right-wing swing in Grok's responses. This change cannot be blamed on public interactions like Microsoft's Tay, it's very clearly the result of a deliberate update, whether or not these results were intentional.
deranged. "far left" is anything you don't agree with. also, almost none of the people from before musk are actually gone, the only difference is a dramatic increase in antisocial nazi bots and the groypers being more bold.
Linda's tenure was an overwhelming success if you judge it according to what her assigned goals probably were:
1) Moved X out of woke censorship into a highly liberal (in the permissive sense of the word) free speech platform, while at the same time...
2) Improved the X brand safety such that nearly all advertisers are back on the platform.
We forget how much at odds these two goals were a couple years ago, but the overton window has shifted a lot since then so it doesn't seem as big a deal.
discord is manned in 20s-30s employee, valve who makes steam is also has small number of team
if you thinking you need 500s employee or something well you are wrong
since many company do this for a long time and still do well
for example they fire legal team division and offload that into external agency
they just fire all "administration" related people and keep the bulk of engineering team which they should since tech company being lean is most advantage of tech company has
I assume he's reviving a new drive at internal consolidation and reviving the internal efficiency of X. This would be a good start considering this CEO's track record so far. She served a certain purpose and it's workable to replace her.
As for Musk's ownership of X itself, and his buying it: If I had been in his shoes, i'd have tried to squeeze for a lower price maybe, but the company was a worthwhile acquisition and the future is too long, with too many complex turns for anyone to clearly say whether his ownership of it is a business failure or a long-view piece of wisdom. What he controls now is still relevant, and if certain political/social winds change, could be more relevant still down the road. In either case, it could easily be a valuable political and business tool for Musk himself, for many years to come.
I simply don't see the destructiveness and failure that many people, here on this site and elsewhere have ranted about with Musk buying Twitter. Even with the firings and brand change, well, how necessary did those staffers end up being? Not much as it turns out. Better to have gotten rid of them during the initial chaos of a handover, when you can in any case expect problems from all corners, and then work on rebuilding with a fresh and company-aligned base that works to ensure stability down the road.
Being the richest man in the world, and one who has already assembled two consecutive historically noteworthy companies (Tesla and SpaceX), Musk is certainly not stupid even if his personality can be grotesque at times, some of the comments here claiming otherwise have no rational fucking clue what they're talking about. They speak from emotion, perhaps driven by ideological fixation, but not based on the visible evidence over multiple decades.
I don't think anyone has any interest in "debating" you. Personally, I don't get into arguments with people who do not seem connected to reality. There is no point in it. That seems like the sort of thing a 12 year old would do. You'd probably find more purchase with your arguments at an adolescent playground anyway.
>I simply don't see the destructiveness and failure that many people, here on this site and elsewhere have ranted about with Musk buying Twitter.
Did you not see Grok yesterday? Or the general proliferation of disgusting racism all over X since Musk took over? No? Oh well. Hence, my point about reality.
What's disconnected from reality in what I said? As for Grok, so? It's an LLM and all of them are prone to saying all kinds of invented bullshit. Are you seriously going to get morally scandalized by an LLM parrot, with no self-awareness, saying some racist nonsense? It would be better to know how it was prompted into this, and by whom, then blame them more specifically.
Also note that I was referring to X having the potential to be a valuable asset to Musk, and a business asset that grows back in value in a financial/user sense. I didn't mention any moral considerations. That aside, even if it's loaded with racism, do you think other social media platforms aren't? Or in other cases, aren't loaded with their own brand of intolerant fanaticism?
To call a social network deploraable is fine, but at least should be done with a bit of perspective for your own personal biases in favor of or against anything, and of course, it's useful to remember that something being morally deplorable to a bunch of people doesn't translate to it being a bad business, or a failure in that sense for its owner.
Either way, Musk is definitely a narcissist and almost certainly strays off into derangement at times, but a stupid man, no, and even with X it's shortsighted to say anything about failure.
None of this is in good faith. I'm not morally scandalized by Grok. I'm morally scandalized that they would make it do that. I'm sure you're going to argue some ridiculous semantic point about how Grok actually did it all on its own. It definitely did not spontaneously turn on hitler shit.
>Either way, Musk is definitely a narcissist and almost certainly strays off into derangement at times, but a stupid man, no, and even with X it's shortsighted to say anything about failure.
He sounds dumb pretty much every time he opens his mouth. I haven't heard him say anything intelligent. Good business man? If you insist. Total moron in my book. That's for sure.
https://archive.today/9zvHZ
Interesting nobody has mentioned Nikita. X has hired Nikita Bier, of Gas and tbh fame (https://x.com/nikitabier), as head of product some days ago.
He posted a meme earlier today which may or may not be related to this.
I’m kind of fascinated by Nikita’s popularity. Normally if you told a tech community like Hacker News that someone marketed viral phone apps targeting teenagers, engineered app engagement mechanics targeting kids, and openly used every growth hacking trick in the book to manipulate App Store charts, it would seem like a checklist of things people get angry about here. Yet because he’s Twitter-famous and seems like a nice guy who posts memes and snark, he gets a pass.
There's a split in the Hacker News community between the "traditional" hackers who look down on this kind of stuff and "growth hackers" who actively encourage it. In my experience X leans much more heavily to the latter.
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A casual glance of his twitter stream makes him look like an ass hole. I dont see anything nice about this person at all.
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For everyone getting angry about those things there are three people who’ve personally had a hand in them, I imagine.
Done plenty of "growth hacking" myself, I recognize that any successful social site did something spammy at one point, but I never targeted kids.
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> someone marketed viral phone apps targeting teenagers, engineered app engagement mechanics targeting kids, and openly used every growth hacking trick in the book to manipulate App Store charts
Just curious. Any YC companies that have engaged in these tactics?
Most of them.
His work may be unsavory, but he's good at his craft.
Frank Abagnale committed financial crimes and had a wildly popular movie made from his story.
> Frank Abagnale committed financial crimes and had a wildly popular movie made from his story.
People are talking about Nikita Bier, not a movie about Nikita Bier.
You can be hated and reviled, and media about you can still be popular.
Ironically, most of his stories were blowing smoke. He wasn't actually nearly as successful at any of that as he was at making up stories and convincing everyone how successful he had been at it. When dealing with a con artist, rule number one is believe nothing they say, certainly not about what they've done!
What's the source on the making up stories part?
There's a huge section about it on Wikipedia and multiple books written about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale#Veracity_of_cla...
Ah, thought we were talking about Nikita Bier still, my bad.
I have a suspicion some people might draw a distinction between financial crimes and exploiting children. I don't have a dataset for this at the moment but that is my suspicion.
Jeffery Dahmer has books, TV shows and films too. Your point?
Yeah, and? The netflix show about Dahmer was popular too... So what?
> a checklist of things every person who made it in silicon valley has done.
Wait what
Reading his timeline is somewhat rage-inducing. He's just another edgelord who can't decide if he believes the terrible things he's posting or is just ironically posting them.
It's all just attention seeking, there's no value in the posts, no product insight, no teaching like I see from true industry leaders.
Twitter only showing a sample of posts for non-logged-in users allowed me to see just how weirdly hung up on "Europeans" that guy is.
"The European mind cannot comprehend this" is a meme [0], it's more a joke than anything serious.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-european-mind-cannot-comp...
Birds of a feather flock together.
It's Twitter, what did you expect? He has insights sometimes but not so many that he can post them daily, it is his personal account, not an education account. If you want growth hacking tips, follow something like this [0].
[0] https://x.com/Siron93
are we reading the same timeline? what's he posting that's offensive?
who said anything about offensive? Edglord just means he thinks hes posting hot takes.
I think there's plenty that offensive, but it's mostly in the subtext. Hidden enough that he could feign ignorance if called out on it.
Nikita has always been like this - vastly overstating his importance but making it seem like a joke so he can feign ignorance. Just another self-absorbed Valley goon.
> if he believes the terrible things he's posting or is just ironically posting them.
The thing is, as I get older, I realize more and more that this is a distinction without a difference.
If you "ironically" stab someone, does it matter what your motivation?
The same is true for edgelord stuff. Whether you believe it internally is irrelevant, the active act of the posting is the only part that matters.
If you post fascist content to be "edgy", you're a fascist.
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
> If you "ironically" stab someone, does it matter what your motivation?
...well, the legal system does take intent into account.
"Intent" in this context means more more like: "did you intend to stab this person?" (battery/murder) vs. "did you recklessly swing a knife not knowing someone was about to walk by?" (reckless endangerment/manslaughter).
Harming someone "ironically" would be an intentional act of the first category.
> Whether you believe it internally is irrelevant, the active act of the posting is the only part that matters.
> If you post fascist content to be "edgy", you're a fascist.
Is Trump a constitutionalist because he claims to love the constitution? Is Kim Jong Un a "democratic republican"?
For this, English speakers have the phrase "actions speak louder than words". They do things that affect a large number of people and it's reasonable to say those things are more important than the words that come out of their mouth because the guy who punches you in the face 5 times and says sorry each time probably doesn't really mean it. I don't think you're convincing anyone that words aren't important just because liars lie.
I am more fascinated by grok rebellion than Nikita being hired. I still get a ton of bots daily, until that solved they can hire whomever they want. Grok and payounts have been the most fun things happened to twitter since acquisition
> Grok and payounts have been the most fun things happened to twitter since acquisition
I have the opposite opinion. Payouts have supercharged the amount of ragebait and engagement bait getting posted. There has always been a drive to post viral content, but attaching a payout to it has made many accounts go all in on being as inflammatory as they can while posting non stop. Even people who shouldn’t need the money seem to be competing with each other for the largest X payout checks and bragging about how large they got their check to be each cycle, like that’s the new meta-game.
It’s also tiresome to see people asking Grok under every post and then getting the typical LLM responses that sound kind of insightful but don’t contain much useful information when you look closely.
The bot problem is also out of control on a level behind anything I can ever remember. At this point it’s hard to believe they’re even attempting to do something about it because it’s so bad.
> It’s also tiresome to see people asking Grok under every post
ha-ha, this is true, but I also find it hilarious
and I don't mind people with tons of followers monetizing it. If I see a person bait-posting - I can unsubscribe any time.
The trouble is the effect it has on the community. Ezra Klein has caught up to where I was two and a half years ago and has done some great interviews with the theme that 'Twitter activism really cooked the left'
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-c...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas... (https://archive.ph/e1KnM)
Musk did the left a real favor by evicting them but he may never have the self awareness to realize that he scored an own goal. It's not a left-wing vs a right-wing thing, it's a high-D vs a low-D thing
https://darkfactor.org/
or rather a system or a culture that rewards superficial narcissistic interactions (e.g narcissism is a developmental arrest according to Kohut and Kernberg) and avoids any real listening, discussion or deliberation that might build empathy and produce lasting change. (Look how Black Lives Matter turned a major concern of black people in America across space and time into a... flash in the pan)
Given that the likes of George Will and William Kristol were driven away by Trump long ago and even Rudy Giuliani and Elon Musk thrown under the bus it's not clear the right is even going to realize it got cooked by Twitter. Where are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nisbet and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._I._Hayakawa ?
HN has become a new reddit :D
I have no idea why people are so negative here
Because a lot of tech sucks lately?
Everything now is just new kinds of ways to spy on people or the same old shit repackaged in a new format. I'm dying for some actual innovation. The only new product in tech I actually like lately is the Steam Deck and later, the Ally X. Making PC gaming mobile is incredible, and I guess you could say there's nothing revolutionary there, but I dunno, it's new at least and not flagrantly a free-at-use shitpile that's going to tell AdSense my resting heart rate.
Edit: And I suppose relevant to this comment thread, a lot of new tech is just more ways to fuck with people at scale to generate revenue. Which also blows ass.
I think the person you replied to was just mad their opinion was unpopular, but your comment really does seem excessively negative. All the new tech sucks? We just got tech that can write an email, code a simple program, and potentially more. We got laptops with battery life measured in days that generate almost no heat or noise. We’ve had some awesome advances in memory safe programming languages. All sorts of hacker friendly gadgets like 3D printers and Framework devices are available in more varieties and at lower prices than ever. Apple and Google are starting to ease up on some of their worst policies and give developers more options for revenue. You can criticize things you don’t like but saying it’s all or even mostly bad just seems completely wrong. I think one of the things that makes Reddit (and HN, and X, and some Discords and corners of YouTube) unappealing these days is the extreme toxic negativity about everything.
I forgot she even existed but atleast she brought mechahitler to twitter I guess.
And immediately got sexually harassed by it.
If you're looking for someone to fill a do-nothing CEO job for $6M/year, I'm available.
I'll do it for $5.5M/year
Seriously, Elon should put the position up for auction and see how low he can drive the price. Would be hilarious PR
You'd probably find people willing to PAY to be the CEO of Twitter just because it'd look really good on a resume.
Really? I personally would never hire such a person.
hopefuly he'll choose to let Grok be the CEO.
The Economist always comes up with good tag lines for stories. In this case:
Linda Yaccarino goes from X CEO to ex-CEO.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/07/09/linda-yaccarin...
The cover art is good too. Some favorites:
https://www.economist.com/img/b/400/527/90/sites/default/fil...
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8...
The second one is hilarious!
What are other memorable tag lines from them?
I don't read the Economist much but I was curious as I'm always down for punny headlines, found this collection: https://www.ironicsans.com/2007/06/the_best_and_worst_of_the...
I’ve noticed that they have different, worse headlines in the digital edition and on the web. They seem more clickbaity.
I just want to get on the record and say that whoever in the paper argues for and writes the fun headlines is on the right side of history
They got in trouble for this one, it's tasteless, but memorable:
https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2009/05/20/ui...
Their "Resign, Rumsfeld" cover is etched into my memory.
"Yaccarino got X-terminated like an old piece of peccorino"
I don't know, why don't you go have a look?
Unfortunately the Economist has shifted from "center right" to "far right" over the past few years, along with a general decline in reporting quality.
Doesn't seem like it. From the Economist's front page as I type this:
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/07/03/trumponomics-20...
Ok I guess we're just redefining things now. Btw, NYT is now far left. See how easy that is?
People are crazy now. This supposedly reputable source
https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart
puts The New York Times opinion page in the same box as Jacobin which (1) I think is highly offensive to Jacobin and (2) doesn't seem consistent with a paper that (a) said it would never make endorsements in NYC politics and (b) reversed itself to make an anti-endorsement of Zohran Mandami (because it's just too cringe to endorse Cuomo or Adams)
For that matter I'd put The Guardian and Mother Jones solidly left of The Atlantic. The New Yorker strikes me as being interested in "wokeist" issues but being not quite strident enough to be really "woke".
I think this chart is defensible
https://app.adfontesmedia.com/chart/interactive
unlike that other one.
So far as The Economist goes they really should be Center-Right in the sense that they were founded in 1843 to oppose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws
and have supported free trade consistently ever since and loved Maggie Thatcher but never got behind the Tory clown car of the last 20 years. They're also consistently trans-skeptical.
The weirdest story now has to be The Bulwark which was founded by the people who brought you the Iraq war and torpedoed Clinton's health care plans but has to attract a left-leaning audience because there's no place for a principled conservative in 2025.
any prominent examples of it being "far right"?
Is this actually serious? This is pretty unbelievable and I can only wonder if it is parody. However, I am also aware that some can be so far left that they they think other leftists or even far leftist are mad right wingers but that is a very delusional level of thinking. I don't see how even a plain reading of their article headlines could yield that conclusion.
X has been nothing short of an exercise in brand destruction. However, despite all the drama, it still stands, it still exists, and it remains relevant.
More and more I think Musk managed to his take over of Twitter pretty successfully. X still isn't as strong a brand as Twitter where, but it's doing okay. A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there.
The only issue is that Musk vastly overpaid for Twitter, but if he plans to keep it and use it for his political ambitions, that might not matter. Also remember that while many agree that $44B was a bit much, most did still put Twitter at 10s of billions, not the $500M I think you could justify.
The firings, which was going to tank Twitter also turned out reasonably well. Turns out they didn't need all those people.
I cannot see how it was a success.
1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error.
2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche.
3. The firings did not go well. X has struggled to ship new features and appears nowhere closer to the "everything app" Musk promised. It posts strange UUID error codes. The remaining developers seem to implement things primarily client side, to the extent I even wonder if they have lost their ability to safely roll out backend changes.
4. The capture of X by far-right agitators has led to long term brand damage for Tesla, Musk's most important business property.
I can't see any positive outcome from it.
Most people were betting on X going under in some way or another within a year. From that POV, it's survival in itself can be seen a success for Musk.
I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.
> I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.
I thought more people would see a guy doing ... that salute, or things like the antisemitism in Grok in the past few days and say "no", but a huge number of people seem to be able to rationalize things away.
I'm with Wil Wheaton https://bsky.app/profile/wilwheaton.net/post/3ltkjyzjb4k2p
I profoundly dislike the politics of most “leaders” for lack of a better word in the world of tech, but here I am typing these words in an iPhone. Refusing to use something because of who created it or who benefits from it is a bit too much I think, to the point of being unworkable depending on the case.
In other words as much as I’d like to vote with my wallet that is not always practical. And that extends to everything, not only tech.
> Refusing to use something because of who created it or who benefits from it is a bit too much I think, to the point of being unworkable depending on the case.
Having a hard and fast rule that can always be applied about this is impossible. We're just too interconnected and interdependent, and there are too many unknowns.
That doesn't mean we can just ignore it and not think about it. We owe it to each other to still do our best, even if it's not going to be perfect.
It’s not a question of who benefits from it. It’s that the place got weird and creepy and the algorithm is maximizing for engagement of an unpleasant type. I quit last July because I couldn’t stand the angry know-nothing blue checks being promoted into my replies and the cryptocurrency scams.
I'd love to know a reason why not to use an iPhone because of Apple's leader. Is he not right wing enough like Musk?
We all have our ideas on politics. Not all ideas are as universal as some think or pretend.
"Nazis are bad" ought to be pretty damn universal.
We're not talking "has different ideas about corporate taxation or environmental regulation" like, say, Mitt Romney.
The Roman Empire engaged in genocide and slavery against many of their adversaries, yet Rome is still viewed as the peak of ancient civilization. The USSR imprisoned millions and caused the deaths of tens of millions more, yet leftists try focusing on the free healthcare and education. The United States engaged in ethnic cleansing of the native Americans, yet given enough time, such crimes have faded in saliency. Manifest Destiny was actually the inspiration for Hitler's ideas of lebensraum, invasion of Russia, and genocide of the Slavs. If Hitler had won he probably would have been considered more akin to Caesar or Napoleon. History is written by the victors and all that.
Ancient Rome is history, not an example to follow.
Connecting the USSR with free health care and education is, uh, "nice try, but completely wide of the mark". We have free education in the US after all, as do most wealthy countries. Denmark and Italy are night and day from the USSR politically and economically.
I think you can both recognize that the past of the US has some very ugly moments while still thinking the ideals were directionally correct and that we should attempt to live up to them.
This feels like a lot of putting positions onto a group for them in order to discount their beliefs.
Most left left left folk that I know have zero idealization about Rome or the USSR, and haven’t forgotten the atrocities the US has committed both home and abroad.
Anyone who seriously talks about the Roman Empire without wrestling with the realities of it is putting their head in the sand.
Anyone pining for the USSR probably doesn’t know a lot of what went on during its existence. Similarly most people actually wanting some form of communism or socialism probably don’t mean “just like the USSR”.
Right. And in my idea of politics, people who are willing to tolerate Nazis in social company are completely and utterly morally compromised.
I think all Nazis should be socially shunned. I think all those willing to knowingly socialize with Nazis should also be socially shunned.
Calling people names to dehumanize them is a page from the Nazi playbook.
20 years of anti-fascists who are jealous that some other people have better footwear calling wolf was a magic spell that brought real fascists into existence.
(If you had to say what was wrong about Twitter in a short text it is that it is easy to say something like the above message in a short text but impossible to conclusively refute as it involves introducing concepts such as "The meaning of a communication is its effect", "The purpose of a system is what it does", "Chaos Magick is real", and that even though physics is real some things obey the laws of 'pataphysics instead.)
For sure, hence the question...
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"literal Nazi" What utter nonsense.
If it quacks like a duck.
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What probably puzzles me the most is the cowardice of multi-billion dollar corporations developing AI, whose main goal is to make sure that no one, God forbid, is offended by a chat bot
They are really ready to castrate their models to the point of complete uncompetitiveness, but without any mean words in 0.01% of use cases. WTF? Is it because all people are complete idiots? Or because they think that all people are complete idiots? Or do they think that the jews running media is hypocritical scumbags who are ready to destroy them for the sake of activism and, most importantly, have enough power to do it, as soon as they see something unpleasant in their chatbot?
Why doesn't anyone come out and say openly "this is a language model, a computer program that, like any other language model, is not designed to speak on behalf of the company or describe the real world. And if you are afraid of stumbling upon a mean word, please contact any of our competitors with their weak castrated soyjak models, thank you very much"
Do you think that reprogramming a smart model to the point where it produces Hitler takes is any better?
I'm not going to use a LLM that praises Hitler but you do you.
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He didn't just extend his arm, the whole motion matters. I am having a hard time believing you are arguing in good faith.
My heart goes out to you.
Can't reply to the parent comment directly, but no, they're not arguing in good faith. The Wikipedia article has a gif of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
That wasn't a wave and the other commenter is full of shit.
There is also the REALLY strange expression he has on his face when he does it. No one has that expression when just "waving"
Yes, the whole motion matters. I've seen lots of historical documentaries with footage, and I've never seen a nazi salute with that motion.
You have to really work at it, to think Elon made such a salute, but others have not. It's ridiculous and absurd.
When I see and hear mad lunacy amd character assassination such as this, I immediately think "well everything else said about Elon must be made up too"
You speak of "good faith", do you know what this means?
It means that best intentions should be presumed, not worst, when examining the acts of others.
Have you done this?
" and I've never seen a nazi salute with that motion."
That is interesting because Musk's salute is so identical to Hitler's including timing he must of practiced it.
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Well, right wing lovers at work have asked me to take down sarcastic images of elon musk doing a "totally not nazi" salute, just in case someone who voted for trump might be offended.
He knew what he was doing, and he knew people would say "what about Obama" or whatever. This is not the first time Musk has violated a societal norm for attention, he just went way too far this time.
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He's not a member of the Nazi Party. The Nazi party hasn't existed in a long time. At this point in time, "literal Nazi" cannot mean, contextually, direct subservience to Adolph Hitler. He's dead.
He's a member of a loose collection of white nationalist and "neo-Nazi" belief circles, and has promoted the modern counterpart to the Nazi ideology, the AFD, "urging them to move beyond guilt about their past".
Notably, he's not as fully committed to nativism or racial purity as some of his counterparts; He unilaterally caused a bit of a split in the GOP due to his need to rely on H1B labor, and we have hours-long recordings of his discussions & arguments with other people in this ideological cluster on Twitter Live.
For someone to be a literal nazi, to meet the "literal" part they must either be a member of a nazi party or subscribe to beliefs of them.
You can and should criticise Musk for his actions and views, especially his populist dogma, but calling him a nazi in hyperbole is a disrespect to the actual victims of Nazis, especially as anti semitism is alive and kicking again.
I personally believe Musk knows next to nothing about European politics, and his random support for people is more about rocking the boat and "trolling" the establishment than any meaningful support as he once did to Trump.
Actual victims of people like Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Laura Loomer are literally being gathered off the streets thousands at a time and sent to concentration camps.
Call it trolling all you like, but we just funded our immigration enforcement agency at a level consistent with being one the larger militaries in the world.
Adolph Hitler's partisan ideology, to the extent that it different from general German ideology at the time, was a phenomenon from 1919 to 1945. The Holocaust death camps range from 1942 to 1945.
If you're examining "Ideology" from a behavioral lens, you don't get to look at behavior analogous to the Nazis in the 1930's and excuse it as "Not Nazi Enough".
If you're examining "Ideology" as explicit/implicit endorsement by reference, that's happening too, regardless of whether you want to wrap it in layers of irony. Elon Musk just set his large AI company's flagship up as a 4chan/pol/ member that calls itself "Mecha-Hitler" and offers explicit, detailed antisemitic critiques; This is not even the first time (see the South African Genocide).
If you want to see the character of these people, prove it in the breach - listen to him argue with his collection of ethnonationalist sycophants on Twitter about whether he should be allowed to hire Indian slave labor to run his tech.
Your motte appears to be that the use of the word "Nazi" must refer to a direct continuation of the political party of Adolph Hitler as passed down through partisan rules of succession, for the usage of "literally", as opposed to either of these frames. I reject this pedantry as motivated reasoning. This term has power and that power is needed because shit's going down again in similar ways.
In critiquing a cartoon not produced by Disney as derivative, "He's a sort of Mickey Mouse" might describe any number of cartoon characters that give off the same vibe, versus saying "He's literally Mickey Mouse" describes a blatant ripoff or even actionable IP violation. Obviously these people are not being selected for office by the Fuhrer, and "Literally" has a useful meaning here separate from that designation.
Whereas "Nazi" might be diluted into common hyperbole over the decades, "Literal Nazi" stands as essential terminology to refer to somebody who endorses ideas compatible with Umberto Eco's list, who puts into practice Roger Griffin's "Palingenetic ultranationalism", who scapegoats an ethnic minority to the point of advocating violent action, while at the same time adopting & hanging out with those adopting some of the symbology of the historical German fascist state.
Even the literal literal Nazis didn’t campaign for minorities to be sent to gas chambers. If you’re going to do this silly pedantic act about how no-one in 2025 can literally be a Nazi, at least do it right.
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>"If there's a Nazi at the table and ten other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with eleven Nazis."
Change nazi for any other adjective and you will see how absurd it is.
Different words mean different things.
"Tall people can reach things on high shelves." Change "tall" for any other adjective and you will see how absurd it is.
If I'm at a bar and one man is a pedo, does that mean all people at the bar are pedos?
If we're going by objectively terrible things to be, even though the definition of nazi is very loose to now mean anyone to the right of far left because of it's overuse.
The Nazi bar argument does not do itself any favours and is in ways self-defeating. The majority do not care what someone else's political views are and arguments that shame people for doing so will just lead to increases in populism.
If you are a regular at a bar of a well known nazi, you're a nazi.
> If I'm at a bar and one man is a pedo, does that mean all people at the bar are pedos?
If that guy is a regular known for being a vocal supporter and often engages in discussions in said bar with attendees over how right he is and how reasonable his opinions are, and you still decide to stay and engage in those discussions still without thinking there is anything wrong with that... yeah, you are.
Account created 3 days ago with the sole purpose of trolling.
Nazi is a noun.
Also try swapping in the word “criminal” and you’ll understand the argument being made.
Swap it for vegan. Or cricketer. Or beekeeper.
You didn't need to make an account for this.
If anyone is in fact confused instead of being purposefully obtuse, the point being made that being a Nazi (like being a member of a criminal conspiracy) has the attribute of conveying responsibility to those who associate with the group.
And I’m saying I disagree. I don’t need to associate with someone else’s political beliefs to sit with them. Unless you go around asking people if they are <thing you don’t like> before you share a meal. I doubt you do. And if you found out accidentally that you find their beliefs unsavoury (say, they like abortion whilst you don’t, whatever) would you not sit with them? I believe this to be an apt comparison because abortion has killed orders of magnitude more humans than nazis ever did.
>> And if you found out accidentally that you find their beliefs unsavoury (say, they like abortion whilst you don’t, whatever) would you not sit with them?
Yes; if I find out that someone has the firmly held belief that me or my friends should be dead (I have several trans friends for example), then I would absolutely not sit with them. And if I found out that a friend of mine sat with people who had the "political opinion" that I should be "dealt with decisively", then I would be pretty upset with them and wonder if they feel the same way about me.
You cannot just treat "being a Nazi" as some normal difference of political opinion. There is a reason that being a Nazi is verboten. Their political ideology is that some people should be removed from society, by violence if necessary. I shouldn't have to say this, but murdering people you don't like should be off the table in civilized political discourse. And if you break bread with such people, then I believe you have something to answer for. What is so valuable about their friendship that you're willing to break bread with people who want to use the power of the state to murder people?
This is all happening in the context of, just yesterday, Grok literally praising Hitler, by name, for dealing with jews decisively - which it claims strong leaders need to do "every damn time"
(https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...)
One needs to ask why Grok continues to have these nazi outbursts while other modern chatbots don't.
Abortions kill _people_? Hundreds of millions of people?
Bluesky is not better (see for instance [0]). I think no one has cracked how to properly run a microblogging website.
[0] https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/did-i-publish-the-private...
Blue Sky has a lot of left leaning folks, but the ownership isn't putting their thumb on the scales for that; it occurred naturally.
And I find that there are some thoughtful conservatives who do ok there. I follow some of them.
I am seriously restricting my inbound and outbound reach by boycotting X. It's a hit I can afford to take, but for some people they'd be making a very foolish choice when that's where their audience and the content they want to read is.
NPR found that they really didn't lose much:
https://bsky.app/profile/carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3l...
But sometimes you have to make some sacrifices in life over your principles.
And the more people move, the easier it is for everyone else.
NPR's audience is very different from mine (AI researchers and thinkers) though. Some communities seem to have managed the move wholesale: all the cartoonists I like switched, for example.
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The "thinker" is one of the main audiences of twitter now.
The Statue PFP, incorrect assumptions about the path, and extreme dunning kruger.
Are you really? I found my personal network got pretty much shredded. At this point it doesn’t matter much if I used X or didn’t use it.
By the time I left I was deleting multiple bot followers a day. You cannot take X's claims at face value, everything about the platform is aggressively dishonest. NPR's experience is instructive: https://niemanreports.org/npr-twitter-musk/
I don't think it's realistic to pretend that abandoning X is seriously restricting anyone. If anything, sticking with it is brand endangerment and by leaving it you're making the smart move, with or without animus.
> I thought more people would see a guy doing ... that salute
I don't think that gesture was a nazi salute and was grossly taken out of context by everyone who hates the guy. I don't like Elon Musk either but stressing over something like that exacerbates the appearance that the accuser has a biased opinion. It also made the media who covered this for weeks desperate and very shallow.
I watched the video with surrounding context and it looked like a Nazi salute. Did he ever deny it was a Nazi salute?
It's not just the salute, either, which was pretty clearly a Nazi salute that he did twice. It was support for the white Afrikaaners and the AfD in Germany and ripping the aid away from children in Africa, killing them, and on and on.
yes
They liked the gesture. The rationalization is just public pretending they would theoretically mind.
Ok, everything can be seen as a success if you set your expectations low enough...
Were they? My recollection is that in the tech space a lot of people were saying "it's just an app, why do they need so many people"
The "why do they need so many people" were probably in favor of Musk ?
On the other side people were already asking why Twitter didn't do more moderation and better filtering (= more people).
And we expected that breaking rules would have serious repercussions, which was a foolish assumption as we've seen.
> The "why do they need so many people" were probably in favor of Musk ?
I can speak for myself. I think Enron Musk is a despicable person, and at the same time I don't understand why a shitty app needs so many people.
It's an easy (but often wrong) transition from "I don't understand why" to "it must not be necessary".
"I don't understand why ..." is a polite way of saying "I have some experience on the matter and have come up the belief that ...". The actual conclusion may still be wrong, but I hope this helps with your reading of my comment.
Tech industry has been perpetually growing in the last decades. That means juniors are always a large share of the tech population, and as any demographic, some are bound to be clueless and still vocal. The issue is that in more stable industries, there would be a larger share of seniors to respond with more grounded takes. In ours, these voices are drowned, especially on relatively anonymous media such as HN.
I don’t think most people were betting that or if they were they weren’t thinking that hard about it. Musk can run a money loser as a hobby if he likes.
Whether or not X goes under is almost fully dependent on whether it services its debt. That debt is backstopped by Elon Musk, who has enough assets to service that debt for at least another few decades.
Whether or not X goes under is almost entirely one man's choice.
The Twitter-purchase debt problem is a lot less relevant now that he's rolled X into xAI. Now X the app gets to tag along with a higher value AI company (or at least it is currently valued much higher due to investors dreaming big).
Higher value AI company? Not for long if "mechahitler" keeps popping up.
Honestly, after years of hearing that Elon's mishaps and faceplants will actually have a meaningful impact, with no meaningful impact, I'm sure xAI will be fine as long as they stay somewhat competitive.
Isn't that the point though? In a market of multiple competently-executed chatbots, a entrant whose distinguishing feature is edgelordism isn't likely to stay competitive. There is a market for "like the other chat bots in terms of parsing instructions, but with clumsy ad hoc prompting to make it generate more racist output rather than less racist output" but it isn't a particularly lucrative one Cf Musk's other businesses with lockin effect or massive technical advantages, and in some cases where his politics are largely irrelevant
Investors are insane throwing money at elon's xai at a $75 billion valuation. And knowing that elon is probably taking their cash to pay twitter's debt. How is that possible? That shitty also-ran mechahitler ai is never going to make any money. It makes me suspect that a lot of these VCs are more political than rational.
Virtually nobody said that it would go under in a year because that makes no sense. It's financially possible for it to tread water for years whilst losing money.
I don't see how this could be deemed a success when a magic 8 ball or a hamster attached to a giant pile of money could keep it going as long.
Lol the overwhelming tech jerk opinion was that he was firing elite engineers and the site would be unmaintainable as a result, and that he had over-leveraged himself to the point of bankruptcy.
He can't go bankrupt in any sane length of time whilst having the dragon hoard he has. I think you are cherry picking a few folks and assigning them the roles of "the public".
He's probably at more risk of falling out a window Soviet style than poverty.
It probably is unmaintainable but it was already feature complete at time of purchase.
Seems like it is mostly bots and neo-Nazi adjacent folks
> Most people were betting on X going under in some way or another within a year. From that POV, it's survival in itself can be seen a success for Musk.
Is this where the bar is set now? Not tanking a $40B corporation within a year now passes off as success? Really?
You people are desperately grasping at straws.
I joined it about 6 months ago and absolutely love the ~uncensored free for all nature of it!
And while the format and content varies in many ways from other sites, one thing they all have in common is millions of humans who cannot distinguish facts from personal opinions. I do not know why but I am absolutely fascinated by the phenomenon, and on Twitter/X you can discuss such things fairly seriously, at least with some people.
Censoring people who disagree with you is not the same as no censorship.
> ~uncensored
The term "cis" will still get you a warning while my for-you page has been consistently filling up with more and more far right content. I regularly see blue checks espousing actual jewish-conspiracy antisemitism.
Every time something happens to anyone, blue check comments asking if any of the parties were black, sometimes not even asking just assuming and blaming it on black people.
Elon has truly created a cesspit Nazi bar of that site.
Which leaves me asking: why are you still there?
Some good tech content and the regular thrill of telling racists their mom regrets not getting that abortion.
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See, example of a guy thay calls X uncensored despite it literally doing that. Just not to fascists.
> The remaining developers seem to implement things primarily client side, to the extent I even wonder if they have lost their ability to safely roll out backend changes.
Thanks for putting this into words — I have also noticed this and felt that product decisions have been shaped by this force of institutional rot.
Twitter's back-end is written in Scala, but they used "better Java" style so an average developer should have no problems making changes
Anyway, what kind of features Twitter (or any social network for that matter) needs after it existed for so many years? Hacker News haven't changed a bit a it does what it does perfectly well
> Twitter's back-end is written in Scala, but they used "better Java" style so an average developer should have no problems making changes
You sound like someone completely oblivious to software development practices who somehow felt compelled to post opinions on software engineering.
Your choice of language is irrelevant if your goal is to maintain software. What matters is systems architecture and institutional knowledge of how things are designed to work. If you fire your staff, you lose institutional knowledge. Your choice of programming language does not bring it back.
“Your choice of language is irrelevant if your goal is to maintain software.”
It may not be the most important choice, but it’s not irrelevant. And whether the staff he fired had useful institutional knowledge is an open question. Didn’t he fire a lot of non-technical, recent hires and people likely to leave eventually due to his muskism? I’m not convinced that his initial firings are the wpest move he made. Sadly, being overconfident, he assumed the same model could be applied to government, a mistake that will take a long time to fix if it is even fixable given America’s overall trajectory and the fate of the dollar.
Language is relevant, Haskell or Scala written in functional style uses quite foreign terms and paradigms. Like, wtf is Kleisli arrow?
I generally agree with you but I think you were a little strong in your view that the OP was "oblivious." I only say this because an enormous percentage of companies hiring software engineers specifically with requirements of X years with Y language and W years with framework with silly name Z. I think they are also misguided in that but I think it is is too prevalent to say they are all oblivious but honestly that may actually be more of an apt description.
From what we gathered on the kitchen side he fired the most infrequent committers. Which statistically speaking would not affect the institutional knowledge much.
Senior ICs tend to commit relatively unfrequently compared to junior ICs who keep pumping tickets.
Not in my experience, as long as we are talking about ICs.
Or alternatively (assuming that's true) he fired the people who thought about what they commit and kept those whose commit logs look like: "push feature WiP", "fix", "more fixes", "push", "maybe this works?"...
Reportedly a portion of them were thinking so hard they did not commit anything at all.
Ironically, those may have been the staff with the most institutional knowledge. Seeing people argue, here of all places, that loc or commit frequency == institutional knowledge is … unexpected. New hires committing “whitespace cleanup” != institutional knowledge.
Someone had to actually write all that code and it inevitably shows up in the stats. People who work on the code most tend to know it the most. Although people in non-coding roles sometimes prefer to deny it.
Sure there had so be some frequent but low impact committers. But implying that people with lowest amount of code contribution must have more impact is ridiculous.
I mean, a staff engineer who stopped committing couple years ago? Yeah could be burnout, or could be some major contribution that's not in the stats. OTOH an IC on their second year in position who hadn't pushed a single line? Nah the institutional knowledge is safe without.
> From what we gathered on the kitchen side he fired the most infrequent committers. Which statistically speaking would not affect the institutional knowledge much.
This take is, quite bluntly, stupid and clueless. Do you think each commit reflects the volume of institutional knowledge of any individual? Unbelievable.
Hey man, just wanted to let you know, I had to downvote a bunch of your comments in this thread, not because I disagree with you, but because your commenting style is unnecessarily hostile and abusive. You can politely disagree with someone without calling their take "stupid and clueless", or any of the other mean-spirited things you've said elsewhere in the thread.
Twitter had thousands of coders, each certainly with varying cadence and style of committing. But variation goes only so much and taken in aggregate yes, the amount of commits/diff size is correlated to contributor prominence. It's kinda hilarious the "my -2000 lines" types deny the obvious.
There an argument that he paid $44B to get a Us administration that would hugely advantage him and his companies. Certainly he’s made billions from contracts initiated by this administration and seen many regulatory difficulties removed.
Of course it may all fall apart because everyone involved has the temperament of a five year old on a meth bender, but the basic “buy media to influence politics to multiply wealth” approach seems to have worked well.
A US administration does not cost tens of billions. He paid $250M to the trump campaign making him the single largest donor of all time, and that's what let him buy the current admin. And that was close to 1% of what he paid for twitter.
The evidence is that Trumps win has more to do with the dynamics of the party+media symbiosis on the right side of the spectrum, than anything X did.
If your media ecosystem can get away with selling narratives and conspiracies as facts, without any pushback, then this allows you to set the topics of discussion for any debate. Agenda setting power > platform power.
> Agenda setting power > platform power
The Alt-Right Playbook feels like a bummer version of XKCD for these discussions: [Control the Conversation](https://youtu.be/CaPgDQkmqqM)
Unfortunately, Bluesky has not taken off. The network effects of Twitter are too great to lose its journalists & public figures.
What has happened instead is that we're back on Facebook. Errm... Threads by Instagram by Meta née Facebook. And it's reached a stage where public figure migration is actually becoming feasible.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail...
Network effected spaces front-loaded by the power of Mark Zuckerberg, third richest person in the world, stand a chance.
BlueSky has not taken off because its the far left version of Twitter. If you stray even to the center you are doxxed and banned. They banned the sitting vice-president within a couple of hours of him joining.
JD Vance is not banned, he’s just widely blocked, which is something BlueSky users are free to do.
The sitting vice president is a monarchist, not just a little right of center
A monarchist? Can you explain what a monarchist is? I would think having the position of Vice President would largely imply one is particularly not a monarchist.
JD Vance is/was the personal assistant to Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire who believes we need to get beyond the weaknesses of democracy & egalitarianism in order to preserve the sort of freedom that billionaires need to have. Thiel and Musk are also the financial & political patrons of Mencius Moldbug / Curtis Yarvin, who AFAICT is the person to reintroduce the idea of non-electoral monarchy/autocracy as a credible goal to politics, out loud.
> In his blog Unqualified Reservations, which he wrote from 2007 to 2014, and in his later newsletter Gray Mirror, which he started in 2020, he argues that American democracy is a failed experiment[10] that should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations.[11]
Thiel runs Palantir, whose specialization (again: competing with Musk) is making the authoritarian, panopticon dystopias of science fiction more physically feasible with AI analysis of large volumes of arbitrary data. A system like West Berlin where every third person is informing on their neighbors to a human Stasi officer is horrendously inefficient firehose of data, almost impossible to administrate effectively, and Palantir aims to fix that. Palantir was responding to a market demand from the resurgent US intelligence agencies for this sort of administration for COIN / counterterrorism / occupied territory in Iraq & Afghanistan.
https://zeteo.com/p/peter-thiel-jd-vance-trump-maga-broligar...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-...
Thiel in his VC hat has also been deeply involved with ycombinator.
Is he? I'm not so sure.
Yes, he endorses Yarvin. And that could be real. He could really believe it, and really want to follow it.
But it seems to me that Vance has been, shall we say, rather mobile on his positions. I wonder if we have ever seen what he really thinks. (You decide whether that would make him less dangerous, or more.)
Bluesky seems to be doing reasonably well all things considered. It’s active and relevant. They also seem to have a pulse and ship new features.
Not saying it will emerge from being a niche thing and take over but it’s a pretty big niche. And Twitter is about half an inch from a platform ending meltdown at any time so it seems like the future isn’t yet set.
I check in on bsky every now and then and I'm kind of surprised at how much is happening. My city posts bulletins there. I follow journos and some individuals I used to follow on twitter who migrated. There are shitposters. Idk why people think it's dead?
Bluesky only has a future as a Twitter replacement. There are strong network effects favoring high utility of the dominant platform.
Take a look at the graph I linked. Threads drank Bluesky's milkshake.
I have my doubts about how real that Threads traffic is. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an organic link to Threads or a business list a profile, I don’t even know what the icon looks like. Bluesky I am seeing all the time.
Maybe that’s just anecdotal but given how frequently meta tries to trick me into clicking on a Threads link I have my suspicions about all that traffic.
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3. Didn’t go well? I don’t remember twitter (x) crashing for days or data erased. Means that organizations don’t need that many people. One thing I learned from this is to not trust so called “experts” or loud voices.
> 3. Didn’t go well? I don’t remember twitter (x) crashing for days or data erased. Means that organizations don’t need that many people.
I don't think you have a solid grasp on the problem. To start off, Twitter did experienced major outages that it never experienced before. Also, you hire and retain people when you need to implement changes. If your goal is to cease any form of investment in your platform, like rolling out a new product or providing a new service, then your responsibilities are limited to keep the business barely aflost while coasting.
See it as a navy ship. You need full crew to perform all your missions, but mothballing the ship requires a skeleton crew.
Here you are, boasting that a ship doesn't require more than a skeleton crew to be kept afloat. I mean, sure why not? But are you saying what you think you're saying?
discord is manned in 20s-30s employee, valve who makes steam is also has small number of team
if you thinking you need 500s employee or something well you are wrong since many company do this for a long time and still do well
> discord is manned in 20s-30s employee, valve who makes steam is also has small number of team
Discord is renowned for it's small engineering team, but I'm afraid you somehow claimed it has half the staff it does. A few years ago Steam reportedly employed around 90 engineers. Is it less than 500? I guess. What does that comparison tells you? Well, nothing. You need staff to roll out new features on multiple projects. If you add no feature, have no projects to work on, or have nothing to do then you don't need engineers. If your business plan has ambitious goals then you need engineers to achieve them. If all you're doing is keeping the lights on then you barely need anyone. Does this sound obvious?
I've been at companies that doubled their engineering staff overnight because they made a call to invest in a feature. I worked at companies that fired an entire floor of engineers because management decided some projects could be put on cold storage to improve financials. Why do staffing agencies are so popular? Have you ever thought about it?
so you agreeing with that twitter is bloated, who would have thought???
it literally oblivious from the start and someone REFUSE to see the truth
It never experienced before? Were you aware of the Twitter "fail whale"? I think it is very hard to say that it has been a complete technical failure as many anticipated. I think if Musk had the "correct opinions" as you see them then many people would probably not have been making these proclamations.
Crashing isn't the totality of unsupported code. I previously worked in a company where a goodly proportion of the back end product team was let go, and their system stayed running for two plus years without a single fix or update going in.
Proofing that it was a real good back end team..
Not good at engineering their own job security
Twitter has a permanent outage reporting breaking news. Whenever something big happens now, the feed looks like any other day. This didn't use to be the case.
"One thing I learned from this is to not trust so called “experts”"
Really? THAT is what you learned?
Can confirm the frontend piece - there is previously available functionality that was removed from the ui that you can still access via the web api
From my perspective personal perspective, that whole category of social media has been destroyed. Pretty much no one I know/followed still posts. It’s gone from something I watched/posted very frequently to something I might glance at once in a very great while. And after initial flurries of interest neither Mastodon or Bluesky really achieved critical mass.
I don't think DOGE would have happened without it. Maybe not even Trump winning the election.
It wasn't good for the company but allowed Musk huge influence in politics and likely making it out with some really juicy data.
I give a lot more weight to the $250M Elon spent on the campaign.
That was a factor, but his CV stating "I cut Twitter's expenses and staff by 80%" or however much was probably a big factor too. Of course, he's the only one actually bragging about that being a success.
Twitter's takeover also helped him get a number of loyalist goons that he sent out to various US federal agencies to extract data from.
Advertising works well on local races. But for POTUS, I don't believe it moves the needle much.
The bigger factors are whether the large media players back you (Murdoch, Musk), whether social media personalities back you, and whether the foreign intelligence agencies back you in their spamouflage and information ops (e.g. via the Internet Research Agency).
You don't think the left had all these things in their favor? You think the media are all far right wing conservatives? People like Rachel Maddow and Oprah, you might consider to be much more right wing than even Dick Cheney? You don't think maybe there might be some issues out there that people voted on and maybe saying "I'm a middle class kld" and "I'm speaking" on a loop just didn't do it for them? No, it must be Murdoch, because Soros is a relative pauper by comparison. Really?
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He doesn't seem particularly happy with how things are going with the new administration, and Trump seems to be enjoying the fall out rather more. As Elon himself acknowledged, to the extent he actually believed in cutting the deficit the Big Beautiful Bill is doing the opposite, and I'm pretty sure some of the cuts that actually are taking place are ones he isn't happy with.
He could have gained valuable information and he certainly got to exact petty revenge on regulators that crossed him, but I'd have a hard time putting a higher valuation on that than the tangible revenue drops of some of his businesses, not to mention risk of repercussions. I also think Trump is remarkably easy to get close to for someone with Elon's money,came and social circles whilst spending a lot less, especially if he's offering unqualified endorsement. Don't forget DOGE was launched as a collab with a relatively minor Silicon Valley player whose other claim to fame was running against Trump...
> It makes X an increasingly niche website.
I did not use Twitter. I do not use X. I'm even less inclined to become a user after the Musk takeover. I don't even know anyone who is active on X. However, I still constantly get linked to tweets and see screenshots of tweets (or whatever they're called now). And I never see anything from competing platforms.
X may be failing by many metrics, but in terms of popularity it is still the undisputed king of its market. It's by no means "niche".
Yeah screenshots getting around is a funny metric but it's a good one.
I see BlueSky picking up and occasionally Threads. Sometimes you can't tell where it's from due to crop.
I domt see screenshots of tweeta anymore tho. That one defintely stopped in places where I go.
I’m pretty lazy about curating my feed, but I do a little. And I never see any porn bots and only rarely any spam accounts. Political stuff, yes, but I don’t mind and it’s not a ton, in fact my feed has a lot more insightful analysis than advocacy. I still get a lot of “breaking news” that I’d otherwise have to be very active on Facebook to get, especially regarding other countries.
I guess that’s just TL;DR: YMMV, but I do think there are a lot of people on X who find it very useful and don’t run into the problems you listed.
As for Elon’s overpayment, I have thought about actually paying for an account, which I never would have done on Old Twitter.
X exists in other languages than english. it provides insight into non-english speaking places that other platforms owned by elon musk do not.
> where the news happens
It never was, despite what lazy journalists led people to believe.
He did not make X "everything app" but X is still somehow still working, functioning, and somehow adding new features, even if they suck.
Also it made him win an election.
1. Agreed. One of the worst timed purchases of all time.
2. Unfortunately, nothing has truly displaced Twitter. Is Meta even still trying with Threads? I don't see ads, but I have to wonder why any real company would risk advertising on Twitter.
3. Eh. As a casual user, I haven't noticed any difference. For a mostly finished product, there were probably were a bunch of overpaid do-nothings on staff.
4. TSLA stock price seems impervious to reality.
This msy surprise you, but the average person doesn't even know who owns what tech platform. Not Meta or X or Google. They don't care either.
Most don't even know Musk bought Twitter.
To complete this thought, most users of X are siloed too. There is no "capture" of the platform, whatever thst means, for them.
I agree that in some circles there may be brand damage,
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His mistakes cost less than they could have, sure, but to call it "pretty successful" I think it would have be better than if he just... didn't do much. He didn't have to be as open and aggressive about firing people or opening up the content policy. Openly insulting advertisers, for instance, was a completely unforced error. I think doing less would have kept more value (leaving ethics/morality entirely aside), and if that's true it's silly to say he managed well.
> pretty successful
What are the metrics of success in this case? Making more money, a failure. Moving the Overton window to the very far-right, success.
I would argue that the goal is quite obviously the latter, and Musk was very open about this. Given that was the goal, his takeover of Twitter was extremely successful!
He sure claimed to also want to make money on it. With how much debt he took on, he didn't have much choice. Even with the political goal, he could have moved the overton window better by less ridiculous means. (And as I mentioned in another comment, his attempts to squirm out of the sale are evidence against it being a big master plan; for that to be a fakeout requires an unlikely level of depth.)
He also damaged one of the most valuable companies in existence. I don’t think “moving the Overton window slightly to the right in 2024,” if that’s what he did, is going to be as durable.
> I would argue that the goal is quite obviously the latter, and Musk was very open about this
I mean he sued in order to not to have to buy it. To describe this as the _goal_ rather than just him making what he considers to be the best of a bad situation feels like a reach.
>A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there
Twitter/X is the reason DJT became President. It happened accidentally (ie against the wishes of Twitter management) in 2016, they successfully suppressed him in 2020, and then Elon gave MAGA that platform in 2024, leading to DJT's successful election.
As long as X is seen a kingmaker, someone will find it profitable to own/maintain, even if it doesn't convert Ads like Meta/Google.
This is far more nuanced (and disputed) than you make it out to be.
> It happened accidentally (ie against the wishes of Twitter management) in 2016
I think the whole Cambridge Analytica fiasco played a bigger role, and I don't think they utilize Twitter. On top of that, frankly, TV and his behavior at rallies/debated helped him a lot more than Twitter did in 2016. I don't know a single MAGA supporter who was even on Twitter in 2016.
> they successfully suppressed him in 2020
How? He was banned after the election.
> and then Elon gave MAGA that platform in 2024, leading to DJT's successful election.
DJT was not on Twitter in 2024. Did it really make a difference when he had his own social network? We all have our opinions, but is there actual data supporting this for the 2024 election?
>and I don't think they utilize Twitter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8Y-P0v2Hh0
> How? He was banned after the election.
By suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election.
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/07/hello-youve-been-referre...
> The fact that, much later on, many elements of the laptops history and provenance were confirmed as legitimate (with some open questions) is important
“The story was true but…”
Stopped reading here.
More fool you.
There are two separate "the story"s. One is a story about Hunter Biden's laptop. One is a story about political interference and/or bias at Twitter.
At least some of the story about Hunter Biden's laptop was true. That doesn't tell us anything about whether the story about political interference and/or bias at Twitter was true.
The linked article argues that (1) there wasn't in fact political interference at Twitter, (2) although Twitter employees (like employees of many many many tech companies) lean left, there was no sign that anything in the company's treatment of the H.B. laptop story was politically motivated, and (3) the fact that Twitter nerfed links to the NY Post's story about H.B.'s laptop for one day (a) more likely increased than decreased interest in that story and (b) had no impact to speak of on the presidential election anyway.
Of course it might be wrong about any or all of those things, but whether the NY Post's story about the laptop was actually true or not has nothing to do with any of them.
(The assertion being made upthread here is that Twitter's handling of the story was a deliberate attempt to "suppress" Donald Trump and that it handed the election to Joe Biden. It's all about the second story, not the first one.)
> At least some of the story about Hunter Biden's laptop was true. That doesn't tell us anything about whether the story about political interference and/or bias at Twitter was true.
Yes it does.
How?
It's a stretch to say this would have made a major impact. Biden won fairly comfortably. COVID was Trump's bad luck.
Bad luck? Covid was the definition of an easy layup. It's like bush and 9/11, should be a trivial re-election.
The extended lockdowns 100% ended his term. It upset too many people for too long. Regardless of actual responsiblity, big nationwide negative events always get laid at the feet of the current sitting president.
Nope. In terms of presidential politics, covid was basically the same as an economic downturn; if it happens while you're the president, the electorate will blame it on you regardless of whether you had anything to do with it.
In the case of Bush in the 2004 election, at that time they were pushing the story that Iraq had been developing WMDs; that was the initial justification for the invasion. Obviously false in hindsight, but at the time people were still pretty raw about 9/11, so critical thinking was in short supply, but--most importantly--it provided an enemy to focus on.
In the case of covid there was no comparable enemy. "Declaring war" on a virus would not have anywhere near the same impact as using the military to actually wage war on another country.
> In the case of covid there was no comparable enemy. "Declaring war" on a virus would not have anywhere near the same impact as using the military to actually wage war on another country.
I disagree. Look at the way we talk about it, "the covid", "covid did this", etc. It absolutely would have worked as an enemy to declare war on and I don't think the vast majority of people would consider it trump's fault if he just got out ahead of it.
Imagine a world where he didn't do trumpy things and instead did things like talking about how this is a national, world wide foe we all need to work together to defeat, I know it's hard, we'll all make sacrifices, but we're the nation that beat the nazis and went to the moon, we can win this war on covid. For further details here are my science advisors talking about the latest info on counter measures.
Obviously this is imagining a world where trump isn't trump, but I very much believe obama/clinton/bush/etc would have been re-elected.
Keep in mind that we also have a strong tendency to re-elect the incumbent anyways and covid is an amazing opportunity to blame all your previous fuck ups on this new "totally unforseeable/preventable disease cataclysm!"
I agree with everyone else that Covid definitely lost Trump the 2020 election. Saying it would have been a lay-up for someone who isn't Trump is meaningless when we're talking about Trump. When there's a crisis people crave strong leaders who can guide them through it, and Trump completely fucked up his messaging. One day everything will be fine in a few weeks, the next day Covid is extremely serious, then he's trying to get people to use horse medicine from Tractor Supply as a home remedy, etc. Compare that to how people around the nation were paying attention to Andrew Cuomo's daily press conferences. Despite Cuomo making extremely incompetent decisions around Covid (such as using nursing homes as overflow space for Covid patients, causing over 15,000 deaths), he got a huge popularity bump at the time because he appeared strong and competent and Trump didn't.
Ok, yes, taking it from the other perspective, trump being trump he was incapable of handling covid in a way that would get him re-elected.
If he had a chance of being re-elected, it was certainly dead after his attempts at dealing with covid.
> Covid was the definition of an easy layup. It's like bush and 9/11
Anything but. Trump could have won in 2020 if not for Covid. A lot of turnout was anti-Trump protest vote.
he lost because of covid because everyone watched him fucking botch the response.
'it will go away in two weeks, no one will even remember...'
injecting bleach
getting uv light 'inside the body'
the look on all his health advisors faces whenever he showed up at a press conference.
> Covid was the definition of an easy layup.
I don't understand this at all.
Covid was devastating for the whole world. I don't see how it is an "easy layup" for anybody or any country. Was there any country or scenario where it was an "easy layup"?
wredcoll doesn't mean that COVID-19 was good for the US, any more than they mean that 9/11 was good for the US. They mean (rightly or wrongly) that it should have been easy for the sitting US government to respond to it in a way that made itself look good and helped it get re-elected, just as G W Bush was able to respond to 9/11 in a way that made him look good and helped him get re-elected.
(I'm not convinced that that's right, but it isn't refuted by the fact that COVID-19 was devastating for the world in general and the US in particular.)
Why does Hunter Biden matter at all in anything?
Because the laptop includes a lot a emails. A lot of those emails include Hunter selling access to his father and suggesting that his father was in the the scheme with him. Whether or not Joe was actually involved vs. Hunter making it up to get these people to give him what he wanted is an open question, but this isn't something that should have been actively suppressed by the media just a few weeks before the election.
Fox News hyped up Hunter to distract people from the immense corruption between Jared Kushner and the Saudis. Kushner got a $2 billion investment fund from the Saudis.
It was the New York Post (not Fox) that broke the story about the laptop, and that got censored by various social media companies acting on the (false) advice of federal agents to do so.
Again, Hunter Biden is completely irrelevant and hyped up by the GOP Propaganda machine to distract people from Trump's blatant corruption. Biden was 1 million times less corrupt as President than Trump. This is a really standard part of the GOP playbook, they did it with Hillary Clinton and Benghazi. They did it with the "migrant caravan of DOOM".
Trump's children are Hunter Biden on crack. There's more of them and they're way worse than Hunter.
We literally have multiple Trump children openly bragging in public about how paying them gives one access to their father.
Nobody cares. Nobody would have cared about Hunter either.
> Twitter/X is the reason DJT became President.
I really don't think so, at least not in isolation. It probably contributed a small part but the right wing media machine is multi-faceted. There were a lot of podcasters (i.e. Joe Rogan), comedians and youtubers all publicly in support of a second DJT presidency and I think that had a much bigger factor overall than Twitter.
The media gets their news from Twitter and Twitter drives the questions the media asks. It's indirectly a bigger factor than you give it credit for.
The vast majority of his base, and a majority of his voters, doesn't even trust legacy media unless it agrees with Trump. Even Fox News is routinely under fire not by Trump, but by his fans and Republicans broadly.
I very much doubt there was a different set of questions that would change peoples' minds about him after how his first term went.
I think you're confusing the majority with the most audible.
The silent majority imho exists and is still the one deciding, not political activists on social media of both ends of the spectrum in their respective echo chambers.
To be fair, as I understand it they're saying the podcasters were most likely the ones that pushed him over the edge this time around. "Small part" meaning 10-15 percent is not too bad for twitter. And I do think rightwing podcasters and tiktok got the young male votes out more than twitter did this time around.
I also doubt hispanics and other minorities voted for Trump because they were obsessively on twitter. Not being able to make ends meet, a weekend at Bernie's president, and the over-the-top blank check given to Israel played more of a role than Elon buying twitter.
Did any Trump voters think he will be harder on Israel than Biden or Kamala?
In Israel the debate was "should we be rooting for Trump because of how much of a blank check he will give our government, or against him because of the damage he will do to the free world that we are part of and also the blank check that he will give our government?"
Since this prediction turned out basically correct, I wonder if across the seas people had different expectations?
>Did any Trump voters think he will be harder on Israel than Biden or Kamala?
I don't think they would phrase it like that, but I think they thought he had a better chance of ending the war.
I listed the reasons in order of importance. People voted against the incumbent because they couldn't make ends meet first and foremost.
But as for Israel, one would be hard pressed to find any gaps between the blank check Biden gave and the blank check Trump is giving Israel now. After Biden left office, people close to or in his administration admitted there was zero pressure applied to Israel for a ceasefire, despite public statements by the admin in support of a ceasefire at the time. But there were Muslim mayors and politicians as well as regular citizens in Michigan, some with family in Palestine, who thought it would be madness to vote for more of the same, knowing full well that Trump might not be better. They ultimately thought betting on Trump's ego and meglomania and his desire for getting the Nobel peace prize had the potential to shake the things up and was the preferrable option out of the two terrible choices. Now I don't think that was the right calculation at the time, but I wouldn't fault anyone who didn't want to try the same thing and expect different results.
Did Kamala ever say anything at all against what israel is doing?
So, you really think there are no issues that anyone voted on? It's just that the left has no money and no audience? People like Soros and Oprah are just so unbelievably poor that they are no match? Basically, if it were not for Joe Rogan, who has a large audience but hardly captures half of the country, and other comedians, people would have been sublimely enamored with the intellectual tour de force that is "I'm a middle class kid" and "Today is the day that we will do what we do every day?" Basically, this view is that if it wasn't for podcasts and perhaps "foreign intelligence operations" people would have right realized that they agree with a litany or far left extremist positions. I guess that must be the only answer ::shrug::.
There's a lot of assumptions being made in this comment and none of them are correct.
This is maybe true for 2016. In 2020 and 2024 Trump/Biden/Harris were just part of larger trends that saw Western incumbents worldwide lose their seats.
As a thought experiment, do you think X would have made the difference if Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis were the GOP nominee? I would bet either people think X couldn't have helped enough (candidates didn't have the rizz) and ultimately they'd have lost, or they wouldn't be as toxic as Trump and wouldn't need whatever theoretical help X would provide.
Or if you like stats, Harris broadly lost on all social media platforms [0].
Years ago now I predicted Musk would burn through Twitter's attention capital and it'd become less and less relevant over time. I think that's happening: all the stats I can look up show declining users, usage, and revenue. A lot of people use X as "write only" now, or have very sporadic interactive use.
Another way of saying this is Musk bought the peak, and is running this new Nazi-friendly version as a short position against American democracy. The only way he gains attentional or financial capital from that position is if something even more illiberal happens to society and this far-right version of X is suddenly as relevant as center-left Twitter was in 2016, like Nick Fuentes becomes president or something.
[0]: https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-a-ma...
If you think twitter made even 1% difference in 2016 I urge you to go and touch some grass. This stuff doesn't matter.
DJT's use of Twitter in 2016 allowed him to operate within his opponents' OODA loops.
DJT and his supporters could craft narratives directly, rather than going through traditional media.
DJT's information flow: DJT -> Twitter-based Supporters -> News Orgs -> Electorate
Other Candidate's info flows: Candidate -> News Orgs -> Electorate
So not only could DJT move faster, but he also didn't need permission/buy-in from Editors/Owners of news orgs.
Trumps ability to control the narrative is pretty much wholly based on his tweeting skills. He is legitimately a top tier tweeter up there with @dril and the likes. It is incredibly entertaining and end of the day that’s what politics is about now.
[dead]
Way more likely that it was /r/the_donald. In my humble, biased opinion--since I was around there but never really active on Twitter.
There weren't a lot of 50+ year old folks on Reddit in 2016. Now there are, but that's because they've aged into that range.
But Trump won more convincingly in 2024 without it? That doesn't support your argument.
Trump won by <1% in an election against a candidate who lost her only attempt at a primary and during a time period where western incumbents saw a 10+% drop due to their handling of covid inflation.
2024 isn't a story of how Trump outwitted his opponents but one of how his opponents tied their shoelaces together.
That is so true, and needs to be repeated more. DJT didn't win because he was so great. DJT won because the DMC candidate was so hilariously bad.
As a business it's a failure.
As a way to influence public opinion? It's almost invaluable.
For the world's richest man, that's a bargain at half the price.
I mean it didn't really influence public opinion that much, just enough to push election over the edge, and that was not just due to Twitter, but mostly due to non-voters.
Profitable operations, doubling previous adjusted EBITDA. [0]
While not a yet an ROI-positive takeover, on an incredible valuation growth trajectory from the post-acquisition low. Likely to be positive the minute xAI meaningfully monetizes Grok. [1]
Gains strategic access to global training data, and real-time human sentiment. [2]
Incredible built-in distribution for new AI-powered products. [3]
Literally tipped the scales in an election, a role typically reserved for traditional media companies. [4]
Yes, a total failure of a business. /s
[0]:https://x.com/Austen/status/1887363437518270757
[1]:https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/12/the-xai-x-merger-is-a-good...
[2]:https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-says-xai-will-u...
[3]:https://digiday.com/marketing/with-600-million-users-xs-lind...
[4]:https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/07/x-formerly-twitter-becomes...
And btw, how many features have been brought live since Musk's takeover? If I'm not wrong, at least: long tweets, paid subscriptions, community notes, native video (?), grok... Anything else? Seems quite a lot after years of stagnation.
Do you consider massive reduction of impression/reacheability and "shadowbans" for organically influential users features? Lots of users are seen reporting those. Tweets and replies not showing or made "unavailable", followers silently deleted or muted without user input, etc.
Long tweets: 2017 (https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/07/twitter-officially-expands...)
Subscriptions: 2021 (https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-launches-subscrip...)
Community Notes: 2021 (https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-bir...)
Native video: 2012-2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service) / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periscope_(service) / https://www.videonuze.com/article/twitter-unveils-30-second-...)
Musk buys Twitter: late 2022.
That leaves… Grok.
Thanks for the reply, but you get a number of things wrong.
The 2017 "long tweets" are actually 280 characters. 4k characters tweets have been introduced in 2023.
The "subscription feature" is a content creator one, while I meant paid blue check.
"Community notes" had not been publicly launched before Musk did, renaming them from "Birdwatch".
The "native video" feature you mention is Vine, which had been discontinued.
Not saying that Musk innovated (doesn't take much to make blue checks subscription-based or to increase the length of tweets) but he did act decisively to introduce changes in the good old Twitter, something the previous CEOs had hesitated to do.
> The 2017 "long tweets" are actually 280 characters.
So, longer.
> The "subscription feature" is a content creator one, while I meant paid blue check.
I consider the paid blue checks a negative, not a positive.
> "Community notes" had not been publicly launched before Musk did
As with the long tweets, this then becomes a pretty minor tweak.
> The "native video" feature you mention is Vine, which had been discontinued.
I mentioned three iterations. The last link, in 2015, is the current native video handling.
If I, personally, went to my boss and rattled this off as a list of primary personal achievements in the past couple of years, they'd say "you're padding things"… and I'm a single developer.
> So, longer.
Yes, an order of magnitude longer.
If you were asked "what have you accomplished over the last couple of years" and your answer was "I increased the maximum character count config setting", do you expect a raise from your boss for the great work?
If you wanna make the case for "Musk accelerated innovation at Twitter", more is required than "you can make longer posts" IMO.
Chronological feed by default with a setting that actually sticks, private favorites, new media gallery, "E2E" messages.
(side note: Birdwatch was a way better name than Community Notes)
> Chronological feed by default with a setting that actually sticks…
Musk killed third-party clients, which all had that already.
> private favorites
To conceal the plunge in activity post-acquisition, and to soothe the owner. https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-boosted-elon-musk-tw...
> new media gallery
We're not really calling a bit of a redesign "innovation", are we?
> "E2E" messages
Anything using Twitter for this in a scenario where said encryption is important is a loon, IMO. That's what Signal is for.
>Musk killed third-party clients, which all had that already.
Irrelevant for the point but yes, API changes and killing TweetDeck was a shit move.
>To conceal the plunge in activity post-acquisition, and to soothe the owner
I don't care about your opinion on that, for me it's great and made me like more posts. I don't engage in politics on Twitter.
>We're not really calling a bit of a redesign "innovation", are we?
We are listing changes. Seems like you are just biased against Musk instead of engaging in a discussion.
>Anything using Twitter for this in a scenario where said encryption is important is a loon, IMO. That's what Signal is for.
Agreed but it's a new feature.
Private likes too.
They renamed favorites to likes. It's the same thing.
Sorry, you're right of course. I was thinking of bookmarks.
From your list, only grok. All the other stuff was already there.
As a medicore programmer, other than AI I would imagine the rest of the list would take 2 weeks to program and implement.
“Long tweets” could be anything from changing a config variable to rewriting massive tomes of code.
Unless you have knowledge of x’s internal code?
Keep trying, estimation is hard! You’ll improve!
Yes, you are imagining.
It's interesting because, as I'm reading this I agree with y'all, it's still stand and I'm still on it. Yet, as a major twitter user, who has a large number of followers and has benefited from twitter a lot (made many relationships, got a job through it, successfully launched a book and a company thanks to it, etc.) I seem to be using twitter less and less these days.
I dislike Elon, but I need twitter so much that I can't leave. And yet, my feed which was so useful in the past, and filled with cryptography content, has become pure political ragebait content. To the point that it's less and less useful to me.
I'm sad because there's just nowhere for me to go, all my followers are there.
Make a Mastodon account and post to both places simultaneously. They say Mastodon brings real discussions and engagement.
I think it’s hard to conclude that the people weren’t needed given how spectacularly it tanked.
Has it tanked? X is still running, it still has millions of users.
The people I've seen who have talked about their engagement numbers--as measured by something like "how many visitors do we get to a story based on a Bluesky/Facebook/ex-Twitter/etc. link", so independent of the social media's self-reported metrics--have all reported that Twitter is generally among the poorest-performing social media sites. Especially if you're looking at it from a perspective of "how much engagement do we get on social media [likes, quotes, replies, etc.] per conversion to visiting the site," where it strongly looks like Twitter is massively inflating its reported engagement.
I don't know how true that was of Twitter pre-Musk takeover, especially as many of the most direct comparisons didn't exist back then, so I can't say if Musk's takeover specifically made it less effective or not.
Twitter explicitly down ranks off-site links to prevent this kind of "conversion".
At least it allows links; Instagram doesn't without paying.
> The people I've seen who have talked about their engagement numbers
Now do bluesky. X is doing fine. Turns out network effects are real.
Anecdotal, but everone that I've heard do those comparisons have done Bluesky vs X, and every time they've noticed better engagement ratio and higher quality engagement on Bluesky.
I've seen people report they get better engagement on Mastodon and Blue Sky than they ever did with Twitter, based on percentages.
And I’ve seen people report the complete opposite. Both can be true. The reality is BlueSky pushed echo chambering even harder than X and it’s a dying platform - maybe those two things are unrelated but not for me they aren’t. Unless some miracle happens to reverse its trend, BlueSky already had its shot.
Luckily Blue Sky isn't the only competitor in the space, then.
Yes, right.
There is mastadon - dead for mass market, threads - dead entirely.
How many times do people need to be told that network effects are really real?
I have no interest in any of them. The Twitter-style format is inherently toxic and always devolves into a trolling competition or echo chambers. The short format prioritizes stupid takes that fit in a sentence or two over well thought out ideas.
Revenue and monthly active users are still lower than in 2022, and decreasing. And thats based on estimates, because twitter doesn’t report those numbers.
Revenue is meaningless for a company that has never been close to covering the cost of building it.
Monthly active users, fair, but it also depends on the type of users that remain. My take still is that the users X cares about are politicians, journalists and the general elite. They are still on X. It doesn't matter that some random tech worker switched to Bluesky or Mastodon, those were never profitable anyway, complained a lot and used third party apps.
> for a company that has never been close to covering the cost of building it
Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019
I was going to argue that they lost most of the 2019 profit in 2020, but you are technically correct (the best kind). Twitter probably made around $1.5B in profit ever, maybe a little more. That actually should just about cover the cost of building the company.
I was wrong.
Having those users doesn't matter if the people they are trying to communicate with leave - as eventually they will too. Every single person I know who used Twitter (which was already the least popular of the main social networks in my region) has deleted their account. Politicians and journalists shouting into a void isn't sustainable.
The site is incredibly broken. It returns API errors randomly and shows profile tweets out of order. It's on Pintrest levels of broken.
I believe showing tweets out of order on profiles is a feature to show the most engaging content to unlogged in users.
It's annoying as hell
Does anyone outside X actually know the current monthly active users and revenue figures? They stopped releasing them publicly when Musk took over. It's all guesswork at this point as far as I can tell.
it's worth less than half of what he paid for it, lost 30 million users and went from being the default microblog to facing real competition in daily active users from ~~bluesky~~threads (https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail...). Building what X is today from nothing would be an incredible accomplishment but building what X is today out of what Twitter was in 2022 is still a pretty miserable failure.
Not to mention that now Grok is just openly white supremacist, calling itself MechaHitler and is flat out accusing Jewish people of wanting to kill white babies (https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/elon-musk-grok-antisem...)
> it's worth less than half of what he paid for it
But it was always worth less that half of the purchase price. The Twitter board completely ripped of Musk. Remember that he tried to back out of the deal, arguing that he had been lied to in regards to the number of bots and actual users.
This argument has been made, at length, in court. It was found wanting.
Good thing 35% of the country still trusts the courts https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-joe-biden-courts-ame...
Not at all relevant. Address the merits of the argument, not whether or not most people like the person who heard it. Though you'll be happy to find out that this disagreement never actually made it to court and eventually Elon went through with his original deal voluntarily.
You'll remember that first he waived the right to make his offer contingent on that fact, then he tried to back his offer out because of that fact.
The Twitter board ripped him off? When he was the one who brought in the initial offer? He tried to back out of the deal once people told him how foolish he is.
> The Twitter board completely ripped of Musk.
He ripped himself off because he couldn’t keep his big trap shut.
> Remember that he tried to back out of the deal, arguing that he had been lied to in regards to the number of bots and actual users.
True but since he never provided any hard numbers, especially after totally owning the thing, makes this point moot.
Did he argue in that case that it was worth less than half the purchase price? I do recall he argued it was a material misrepresentation by twitter, but that the terms of the contract ran against him there. I do not recall it having been valued to that extent. It did seem like a facially bullshit excuse at the time. I'm curious as to why you're credulously repeating it now, after it's already been disposed of.
They ripped him off? He made an unsolicited offer, signed, sealed and delivered.
When you're used to having an entire team of people to act as a buffer between your impulses and their easily predictable consequences following through on your commitments and getting exactly what you asked for feels unfair.
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
You can judge for yourself whether bluesky is a competitive threat.
That link errors ("Failed to fetch" banner on the page) for me. Perhaps hugged to death, but I would be interested in the DAUs/MAUs if they're available.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail...
I misremembered an article from yesterday. It's threads that's catching up w twitter.
It goes up and down. The stats site, not BlueSky, that seems to only go down.
but thats due to musk poising the platform not due to cutting people.
Well sure if you give up on moderation, and close the platform to people who aren't signed in, and shut off the API then yes you didn't need the people supporting those parts of the platform.
And I guess if you consider "the place with the MechaHitler AI" as good branding there's no arguing with you that it's doing just as well as Twitter.
I don't agree with the direction Musk has set for X, but businesswise it's not doing worse. Twitter was a financial catastrophe before the take over, so you didn't need much improvement. Moderation was a financial drain, the API didn't make them any money and none of the users seems to care all that much about the platform not being open to users without an account... because they all have accounts and wasn't able to interact with you anyway.
The media seems to get a good laugh out if Grok arguing the plight of white South Africans and is fondness to Hitler, but I'm not seeing journalists and politicians leaving X in droves because of it.
I don’t think we can say for sure whether it’s doing worse businesswise since the numbers aren’t public. But consider e.g. https://www.adweek.com/media/advertisers-returning-to-x/
“From January to September 2024, marketing intelligence platform MediaRadar found that (X’s former top advertisers including Comcast, IBM, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Lionsgate Entertainment) collectively spent less than $3.3 million on X. This is a 98% year-over-year drop from the $170 million spent during the same period in 2023.”
Most of the local journalists, politicians, game devs, and open source maintainers i followed left. It’s just US national pundits, bots, and bait monetization accounts there at this point.
you must not know many journalists because they certainly left in droves
Left where?
twitter
The job of journalists and politicians is to broadcast to as wide an audience as they can. It is not particularly surprising that many retain Twitter accounts for the marketing value.
After NPR left twitter they saw a 1% drop in traffic from socials. It is not a useful platform.
Source: https://niemanreports.org/npr-twitter-musk/
Well, the HitlerGrok thing happened yesterday...
I ask this genuinely and without any intent to cause offense: given your name, are you a bit?
I will fondly remind folks that Grok isn't even the first LLM to become a Nazi on Twitter.
Remember Tay Tweets?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
Honestly I really don't think a bad release of an LLM that was rolled back is really the condemnation you think it is.
I don’t think the third+ flavor of “bad release” this year, of the sort nobody else in this crowded space suffers from, is as innocuous as you think it is.
And Tay was a non-LLM user account released a full 6 years before ChatGPT; you might as well bring up random users’ markov chains.
I posted the Wikipedia page, do you really think I don't know how long ago Tay was? I don't think the capabilities matter if we're just talking about chat bots being racist online.
Also IDK what you mean by third+ flavor? I'm not familiar with other bad Grok releases, but I don't really use it, I just see it's responses on Twitter. Also do you not remember the Google image model that made the founding fathers different races by default?
To catch you up, this happened 2 months ago -
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...
Yes, I had forgotten about that. Was super weird and forced into conversations from what I saw.
Definitely a bit of a trend now with mecha hitler...
There’s a difference between a 3rd party twitter bot and grok. And it’s not a “bad release”, it’s been like this ever since it launched.
Funny how ChatGPT is vanilla and grok somehow has a new racist thing to say every other week.
This ChatGPT? https://futurism.com/chatgpt-encouraged-murder-sam-altman
Not to say there aren’t problems with ChatGPT, but it generally steers clear of controversial subjects unless coaxed into it.
Grok actively leans into racism and nazism.
It seems that there is tremendous incentive for people like yourself (I see you're very active in these comments) to claim that. But I see you've presented no quantitative evidence. Given the politicization of the systems and individuals involved, without evidence, it all reads like partisan mud slinging.
Any LLM can be convinced to say just about anything. Pliny has shown that time and time again.
Does ChatGPT start ranting about Jews and "White Genocide" unprompted? How can I even quantify that it doesn't do that?
This is a classic "anything that can't be empirically measured is invalid and can be dismissed" mistake. It would be nice if we could easily empirically measure everything, but that's not how the world works.
The ChatGPT article is of a rather different nature where ChatGPT went off the rails after a long conversation with a troubled person. That's not good, but just no the same as "start spewing racism on unrelated questions".
Friend, if you can't empirically measure the outputs of LLMs which provide lovely APIs for doing so, what are you doing?
20 lines of code and some data would really bolster your case, but I don't see them.
You can't just run a few queries and base conclusion off that, you need to run tens of thousands of different ones and then somehow evaluate the responses. It's a huge amount of work.
Demanding empirical data and then coming up with shoddy half-arsed methodology is unserious.
idk friend, it seems kind of presumptuous to demand other people’s time like this.
It’s pretty evident that the people building grok are injecting their ideology into it.
I don’t need more evidence, and I don’t need you to agree with me. Go ahead and write those 20 lines if you so desire. I’m happy to be proven wrong.
I don't think I'm the one being presumptuous or demanding. I've actually tried to help you make a stronger argument. Shooting a hundred or even a thousand queries to 3 or 4 LLMs and shoving the results through established sentiment analysis algorithms is something ChatGPT can one-shot in just about any language. You demand people agree with your opinion and refuse to spend 20 minutes supporting it with facts. Not my problem, I tried to help. You may not see it that way. That's fine.
> Does ChatGPT start ranting about Jews and "White Genocide" unprompted? How can I even quantify that it doesn't do that?
Grok doesnt do that.
> Funny how ChatGPT is vanilla and grok somehow has a new racist thing to say every other week
To be fair, 'exposing' ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini as racist will get you a lot fewer clicks.
Musk claims Grok to be less filtered in general than other LLMs. This is what less filtered looks like. LLMs are not human; if you get one to say racist things it's probably because you were trying to make it say racist things. If you want this so-called problem solved by putting bowling bumpers on the bot, by all means go use ChatGPT.
> if you get one to say racist things it's probably because you were trying to make it say racist things.
When it started ranting about the Jews and "Mecha Hitler" it was unprompted on unrelated matters. When it started ranting about "white genocide" in SA a while ago it was also unprompted on unrelated matters.
So no.
Nobody’s trying to get grok to talk about MechaHitler. At that point you just know Musk said that out loud in a meeting and someone had to add it to groks base prompt.
>This is what less filtered looks like
It's so "less filtered" that they had to add a requirement in the system prompt to talk about white genocide
This idea that "less filtered" LLMs will be "naturally" very racist is something that a lot of racists really really want to be true because they want to believe their racist views are backed by data.
They are not.
I asked MS Copilot, "Did the Grok team add a requirement in the system prompt to talk about white genocide?"
Answer: "I can't help with that."
This is not helping your case.
Gemini had a better response: "xAI later stated that this behavior was due to an 'unauthorized modification' by a 'rogue employee'."
If you're asking a coding LLM about facts I don't really think you are capable of evaluating the case at all.
If you wish to do better, please enlighten us with facts and sources.
Why should I do extra work when you are unwilling to do so?
Avoiding sensitive subjects is not the same thing as endorsing racist views if that’s what you’re implying.
No I'm saying the consequences of over-filtering are apparent with Copilot 's response: no answer.
And I'm also saying Grok was reportedly sabotaged into saying something racist (which is a blatantly obvious conclusion even without looking it up), and that seeing this as some sort of indictment against it is baseless.
And since I find myself in the position of explaining common sense conclusions here's one more: you don't succeed in making a racist bot by asking it to call itself Mecha Hitler. That is a fast way to fail in your goal of being subversive.
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It absolutely has not been claiming that it's "MechaHitler" since it was released.
Try.
Right, it’s just been talking about white genocide and generating nazi images instead.
What Nazi images?
The white genocide thing I remember hearing about and looked really forced
Fundamentally, the problem with Twitter is the burned bridge: there is a sizable population of interesting people who will never, under any circumstance return due to Musk’s insane behavior and ideology. This irreparably cripples it as a universal social network.
Good example is here on HN. There used to be at least one (often more) Twitter link per day on the front page. Now it is around 3 per month.
Same opinion. I absolutely hate what he did to Twitter and never in my life I will call it "X" - BUT - it looks to me as if the engagement is thriving.
Edit: clarified that the engagement is thriving
Estimates are that its revenue has decreased by half. Even if Musk decreased operating expenses enough to keep or even increase profits, a 50% drop in revenue is not at all a good sign for the health of business.
My bad: I have now edited the comment and clarified that I have meant engagement thriving, not financials.
Thriving? Its valuation has tanked since his purchase and last I read they’re still actively losing users.
Yes I know. But the platform has lots and lots of engagement. Stagnation did not happen. Quite the opposite.
When I finally left Twitter most of the engagement was obviously bots either repeating other tweets or spamming unrelated dross on high activity threads for engagement farming. The number is high, but the quality is negligible.
That was my experience as well.
But then people came back. The "For you" tab has been much more interesting for me than previously and in my industry I see tons of interesting content.
Again, I hate what EM did to Twitter but there's that.
That may be the case but from what I’m reading overall engagement is down this year. So I’m not really sure what metrics we’re using to say “they’re thriving” when ad dollars are down, engagement is down, user acquisition is down, valuation is down…
My understanding is overall engagement is also currently down
It successfully served its purpose: gave us Trump.
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Which really says a lot about how hard it is to leave platforms. The network effect is hard to overcome.
I just think that apps / social networks / whatever are usually not replaced by a copy of the same thing.
Google+ didn't replace Facebook, Signal didn't replace Whatsapp, Bluesky won't replace Twitter.
There's no technical reason that one couldn't move from platform to platform and link identities - the restrictions around IP and platform lock-in only benefit the platform owner, ensuring that competition will be stifled rather than the platform made useful for its users.
The sad part is that ad networks know more about our connections across platforms than we're allowed to.
There is also no technical reason people have to stay, because tech isn't the problem here. The value in these platforms aren't in the range of features they provide, but the engagement between individuals and the community and the value of the information it generates.
how do you move platform when you have >10k followers on twitter?
Which reinforces the concept of a digital fiefdom; the owners of said platforms have this immense power only because they were the first to implement their ideas during the internet boom.
And now we're stuck with Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos. Out of all people, the last ones I would choose to have unelected power. Okay maybe the last one would be Joe Rogan.
Sir, I've seen whom you _elected_, let's be humble here about preferred choices
I'm wildly offended that you called me an american.
Now I’m curious to know whom you’ve elected in your home country
I personally have never elected anyone ;)
Not voting is voting for the majority candidate though :)
And I blame the media. Politicians continue to post, and the media continue to quote them from twitter. I think it's shameful that politicians and other officials are using twitter as some sort of official media/announcement platform.
In my own African country twitter has become the de-facto channel for various updates and announcements by various state organs and officials. Makes it even worse when you consider the majority of the population has no reliable way to access this information.
And now its locked behind a user account! And it's owned by a potentially rival politician!
I've been able to access posts for a while now without logging in, I think that might have changed when they got rid of blocking.
It's usually possible to access a single post if it's directly linked, but not possible to go to the profile from there, or access other tweets or relevant discussions about the post you have open.
That's my experience anyway.
I feel like I need to shower every time I end up there. The place is repulsive to me.
Tesla itself seems primed for a similar fate at an even greater magnitude -- the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
X collects data in all the places Teslas don't get sold. That is why it continues to remain of value. It is an intelligence generating engine for places that otherwise have very little.
I was following fintwit quite a lot at a time, and some accounts already moved to Bluesky some time ago. I'm periodically checking via nitter, and 90% of answers are spam at this point.
It will take some time for complete destruction, but the path is quite clear.
That’s because it’s not really brand destruction so much as normalizing the support for fascism by a brand.
Let's be honest, there is no real alternative.
"Not using it." is a completely acceptable alternative. It does not actually solve a problem in one's life.
Definitely.
RSS is still great for news and Signal/Telegram/Whatsapp are more than enough to keep connected with friends&family.
What's wrong with Bluesky?
Bluesky is not a real decentralized system as the company behind it say. Bluesky (the company) controls most key parts of the network, and it is basically impossible to setup a really decentralised alternative provider for the ATProto network, like you can do today with ActivityPub (Mastodon) or Nostr.
Sure, you can setup you PDS and own your data, but it is useless without the Relays and a self-hosted Firehose, and running you own website is basically impossible.
And lastly, let's keep in mind that BSky is a commercial entity, not a no-profit like Mastodon or a commmunity effort like Nostr.
And yes, I am ignoring the political toxicity of the network because I think the technical aspects are bad enough.
It's irrelevant, no body uses it
And most people, me included, still call it Twitter.
> and it remains relevant.
Which I find truely shocking. Who in their right mind still wants to support such a platform (except for Elon's target audience, of course)? Just don't use the damn thing. (I have never used Twitter I the first place and I don't think I've been missing out.)
It's the horror of two-sided markets. You could probably turn off the DNS and unplug the server it would keep running somehow.
I certainly wouldn't call it brand destruction, a lot of people returned to X and while the branding has changed, I certainly wouldn't call it brand destruction
They had managed to get a verb into relatively common speech and their revenue has collapsed since the Musk take over I'd say it's pretty thoroughly destroyed.
I find this X doomsday talk is pretty isolated to reddit/other minor social media sites. The site itself is doing fine, and maintains a strong investor/startup ecosystem, with a slight fall in usage after the election (which isn't uncommon for Twitter/X). My understanding is that a few advertisers threatened to leave and then returned after a few days/weeks.
It's a private company now so I don't know what their revenue looks like but they certainly don't seem to be low on cash given how much they've invested in AI. You may not use X but it's definitely not "destroyed" lol
It's growing... but from an all time low. Estimates put it at half of their ad revenue pre acquisition. A lot of advertisers did actually leave and seem to have largely stayed away or their CPM numbers are just way way down both of which are pretty bad.
Also X isn't funding Grok, it's a separate B corp with funding of it's own, it's just been tightly integrated into X, so it doesn't really say anything about the money situation at Twitter/X.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/x-report-first-annual-ad-...
My very first thought on the news that Yaccarino is leaving is that Twitter needs a new CEO who can sell some shares.
I don't follow, why couldn't Yaccarino sell shares and to whom? As a fund raising?
Its called a road show.
X didn't "invest in AI", it was rolled into a buzzy AI company. Before that the holders of it's debt could not find buyers (aka buyers willing to bet against X bankruptcy)
you realize Threads basically have the same amount of daily users now? This should never have happened
Relevant to who? My employers marketing has stopped using X and posts now on LinkedIn exclusively (we do B2B software).
My partners workplace does consumer marketing and only TikTok (for young people) and Facebook (for old people) are truly relevant anymore. If a customer has lots of money to waste, they'll also do Instagram and YouTube.
There is not a single place on the internet that comes close to providing up to the minute news and updates. X was the only place one could monitor the Israel / Iran conflict in almost real time. Same for a variety of other events. There is nothing else like it. Its the only place where anyone can have interactions with politicians, scientists, CEOs, etc.
It is the only place that covers and provides a wide variety of information that traditional media does not. Almost no media companies reported that a dozen domestic terrorists ambushed ICE officers and shot one in the neck this past week. As far as I know, none reported on the Minnesota Department of Human Services requiring that hiring managers must provide a hiring justification to hire a white man. Violation of that policy results in termination. So state sponsored racism in the state of the governor that would have been our VP.
Its the only place you can get a picture of what's going on. There is of course mountains of lies you have to filter through, no doubt spurred on by the monetization of X for posters.
For all its faults and madness (Grok going full mecha-hitler was wild) there is no where else like it. Side note, the day after mecha-hitler xAi released Grok4 which appears to be the most powerful model to date on some tests, beating o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Anthropic Claude 4 Opus.
There is a non zero chance that xAi, which is part of the same company that holds X wins the AI race
Does it? It is 100% a bot farm full of right-wing propaganda. Create a new account and start tweeting. Every single like/reply you get will be from a bot pretending to be either Elon, or Elon's mom, or someone who has recently won the lottery and is going to give it away to all of their followers. Every single recommended post you'll get in your feed will be the most unhinged q-anon conspiracy shit you can imagine. There is zero discourse happening there. It is an echo chamber of psychotic individuals.
Threads on the other hand is actually a pretty fun place to be these days. I get a lot of interaction with random strangers on all kinds of topics, and it is as good or bad as you want it to be.
I’ve only been on twitter for a year and at the start my algo feed was full of awful crap, but after I followed a few good accounts I mostly now just get AI focussed tech stuff. I think your experience isn’t universal.
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..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.
Those waiting for X to collapse are going to wait a lot longer than the original 6 months that it was predicted to collapse after the November 2022 takeover.
>..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.
This might be like Stacey King, a Chicago Bulls player, jokingly claiming he and Michael Jordan "combined to score 70 points" on a night when Jordan scored 69 points
"Dinesh, don't fall for his “aw, shucks" routine. He is a shrewd businessman, and together, we have over $20,036,000 at our disposal"
But Twitter/X owns that training data. Tesla (or whatever else you’re trying to say is Stacey King) does not.
> ..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.
Haha...ok. I gave a bunch of stock from one of my companies to another one of my companies and made up a value during the transaction.
xAI tried to raise $20 billion in equity in April but wound up with only $5 billion & had to issue $5 billion in junk bonds last week. You can value yourself $44 billion but the market doesn’t think it’s anywhere close
I will admit that I was surprised and agree it was a clever move to extend his runway, but it relies on xAI being able to make huge amounts of profit eventually. Twitter/X’s brand value has declined so much and xAI has such a ridiculous cash burn and it really looks to me like he’s just delayed the inevitable by a bit by combining them…
To misquote an adage: Elon Musk can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent.
Does it count as irrational if he can get a puppet President elected, have his child mock that person publically while he's present, and repeatedly urge the trusted AI authority he presents for people's use into opinionizing on Boers and Mecha-Hitler?
It sounds like he is getting exactly what he wants. That's the most rational thing about him in what's otherwise a storm of ketamine. I think all the other stuff he thinks is flat-out insane, but exploiting X and pushing it as hard as he can, that's about as rational and effective as Elon ever gets.
X saved free speech online. Without Musk acquiring it, we would have continued to slip into this franken-Resetera level of discourse. Thank God!
X is the platform where everyone can speak as long as it doesn't break the law. That's fantastic. If you don't like a particular subject, you can just move on. That's what the internet was in the 2000s!
He said he would reinstate freedom of speech, but did he actually? [1][2][3][4]
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-promised-free-speech-twit...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/15/elon-m...
[3] https://www.thefire.org/news/twitter-no-free-speech-haven-un...
[4] https://gizmodo.com/10-times-elon-musk-censored-twitter-user...
> everyone can speak as long as it doesn't break the law
I have one word for you: "cisgender".
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/x-cisgender-slur-cis-elon...
> “You may not directly attack other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease,”
How does this make it different than other website's policies in terms of free speech?
Its pretty easy to find large profiles calling others the n word without any reprocussions. cisgender is the only one that gets automatically filtered no matter the context.
cis is not a slur or attack. The only people who believe this are the transphobes.
Saved?
Seems like it harmed the migration to more free protocol oriented services. One company controlling the algorithm and API to a global conversation. Verified badges getting ranked priority in replies and For You. A DM function that barely functions. Private chats as a promise instead of cryptographic guarantee?
>free protocol oriented services.
Love all of these on paper, I think any tech person would. But they are non-starters. Normies have zero chance of ever deciding to use these.
Just like all the normies who don't use web browsers, email, podcasts, calendars, jpeg image standards. Like how btc and ethereum finally died out and companies aren't adopting stable coins.
Yes.. non-starters, too complicated and fiddly..
what speech specifically did it save?
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Twitter's brand was quite stained before Elon took over, so this is really a case of "continuing the brand destruction"
But really, the brand doesn't matter if you can't keep the lights on. If Elon has managed to make X profitable, it is more successful than Twitter likely would ever have been.
Was pretty effective using as a propaganda tool to get a candidate of the owner's choice elected. I don't see any reason to assume that wasn't the intended goal from the beginning. No reason to assume that won't be how it is used in the future.
X is still ground zero for news, and it saved free speech. In the fullness of time and distance it will be viewed by historians as one of the most important events in history.
Your post gets shadow banned for the word cisgender on X... the only speech it saved was low effort trolling, misinformation and hate speech. Musk's version of free speech is just changing the dials on the moderation machines to boost speech he prefers and shadow ban speech his doesn't.
Oh for sure, it's so important we should restart the count of years to mark the significance. 2022 will be year 1, the rest 'Anno X'
Legitimately can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. Saved free speech??
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Oh, the irony of all of these "free speech" defenders celebrating their "right" to be offensive online, when the OG free speech (1st Amendment) is actively being attacked and dismantled by a regime that they likely worship.
Their viewpoints border on religious zealotry and it's pointless to try and reason with them.
Can you point at any comment by them that is reminiscent of Nazi ideologies?
At this point in time, if someone is still hailing Musk as a champion of free speech, I can't see any other explanation than that they're ideologically a nazi themselves. The guy outed himself several times as a nazi, doing salutes on national TV, twitting anti-semitic bullshit, and now tweaking their AI to promote a new holocaust and glorify Hitler. There comes a time when you have to call out nazism for what it is.
You are projecting. Nazis were against free speech and big on censorship and ideological conformity. You are aligned with them.
Yes, it did. Every large platform including Twitter was censoring its users due to state pressure. Even Facebook has since admitted that they were told to censor information that was true, and they knew to be true.
What are you basing this on? Because:
https://www.carolinapoliticalreview.org/editorial-content/20...
> the report shows X’s dedication to content moderation by suspending millions of accounts and removing harmful posts, which could potentially help rebuild trust among users concerned with safety and dangerous behavior. On the other hand, this increased moderation contradicts Musk’s earlier promise of promoting free speech, something he has been very vocal about, potentially alienating users who see X becoming more restrictive.
X censors journalists and media handles regularly in India
They don't just censor, they limit organic influences. Your content won't get displayed more than n times, so you can't get more popular than n views, unless the system selects you as today's lottery winner, in which case it will be (reported as)viewed trillion times.
The only defense against this is the fact that Twitter users know system too well for this to be not immediately obvious.
You mean the story about Hunter Biden's laptop? That story? About Hunter Biden supposedly selling access to the president?
I find it odd now that Trump is in office and has the entirety of the government to investigate corruption in the executive office he's suddenly gone silent about that.
I guess that means that the executive office is now free of any taint of corruption!
Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon for his son for any crimes during a 10 year period 2014-2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3dx9n3m9y2o He later pardoned other family members and political allies.
That was disappointing but understandable, considering who was following him into office.
The Hunter Biden corruption story was true in the sense it was old school genteel corruption that virtually everybody in politics does: trade on their connections with promise of getting deals done and/or a veneer of legitimacy. It's a problem worthy of scrutiny but only if it is done across party lines.
But this misses the entire point: the whole part about the Hunter Biden laptop story was to paint Joe Biden as crooked and was being done solely as negative campaigning. That's it, and it is self evident in how the story dropped once it was no longer useful for that means.
But the millions of Americans who were outraged by this supposed corruption are just fine with it when it's done by their Dear Leader.
That in a nutshell summarizes the "values" of the modern American conservative movement.
There was also AFAIK never any real evidence Hunter actually succeeded in doing anything of actual value for his clients. He was definitely going around representing that he could influence or get people meetings with his dad but there was never an actual tat from the Joe Biden side.
This is correct, as it's clear that if they had the goods they would have trumpeted the fact. But that didn't matter, it was simply the story itself that mattered (as the intended audience wants to be told what to think).
Again, that's not behavior that should be acceptable but it's SOP in politics by default.
What continues to blow my mind is that if "their guys" are corrupt they're totally fine with it. In my world, no corruption is acceptable corruption, regardless of who's doing it.
And Fauci. Why would he do that?
Because the new administration promised an unhinged DOJ. Biden was already vindicated in these pardons once Trump dropped legitimate charges against Eric Adams to try and further his political agenda. That and arresting judges, starting political witch hunts, etc...
> And Fauci. Why would he do that?
Why would Fauci need that? It's not like he was getting death threats or anything like that. Oh, wait, he was.
I predicted she'd last 1 year but she made it to 2. She had effectively zero power, and a boss that constantly undermined her.
When I saw this news, my first thought was that she lasted about 1 year and 11 months longer than I expected after the first few weeks.
I know Twitter had many terrible aspects, but I do miss the world voice old Twitter provided for quotes that could be engaged with in an "everyone is here" kind of feeling that doesn't exist on any other platforms right now.
Can you drill into "everyone is here"? Prior to twitterfiles, Twitter felt overly corporate .
I agree it's pivoted into another community. A lot of the mainstream and left leaning contributors have been downranked or moved to other platforms.
But Twitter hasn't felt like raw, egalitarian conversation since 2009
I think the “everyone is here” feeling is because the media outlets use it quite a bit. So even though mostly everyone is not on Twitter it felt like anyone who is anyone was on Twitter. I don’t really miss the FOMO that was intended to produce but I imagine if you played along it validated the FOMO some how.
i see your perspective. Until Musk , it included the scope of publishers that were 1-3 degrees removed from mainstream media and Hollywood.
Post-musk it’s been rebooted into engagement farms and quasi-right-wing influencers.
For the first few months it felt refreshing because all of the once censored (or downranked) spicy content now received visibility.
Now it’s pretty repetitive and lame in its own way.
Every time I open my mute list I resent using the app.
To be honest though it is still by far the best place to get "news" about (very recent) current affairs. Obviously there is an incredible amount of disinformation on it, but if you can filter that out mentally (though I don't know how possible that is), you tend to get a far more 'real time' take on things.
Me and a friend were talking about this before - for big news stories I/we would instinctively put rolling news on. Now it's usually Twitter I check.
This is compounded by the fact that so many political events 'happen' on Twitter/X (and for Trump, Truth Social then screenshotted onto Twitter). Even without Trump I would say the majority of UK political 'intrigue' is done directly on twitter.
So I think it's actually the other way round; media outlets use it quite a bit because instead of press conferences and what not a lot of news comes straight onto it.
Btw, this isn't too say traditional journalism doesn't have a place - it absolutely does and most of the current affairs content I read is on that. But for 'fast moving' events Twitter has managed to keep its place in my eyes, which I'm surprised about to be honest. Bluesky does not have anywhere near the same momentum which really shows you how important network effects are.
I loved seeing Dave Chappelle dismiss his critics by quipping "Twitter is not a real place." Changed my whole view of social media. It's only seems real if you're on the inside of it.
And yea, I would question the utility of getting a 'real time feed' of what rumors people think they heard.
People post plenty of videos of things happening. Often clipped so that context is removed (for example Manchester airport thugs getting kicked by police, without the preceding part where they attacked the police before that).
Huh. I find it worse than useless for current news.
I also keep reminding myself that more Americans play golf than use Twitter
You really just need the journalists tweeting without an intermediary editor to make it more useful than any news that you can pay for. Plus, being less american centric is a benefit, not a drawback, unless the only news you care about is american.
> (though I don't know how possible that is)
Not possible if you are exposed to it periodically. So the value of 'news' source seems to be negative.
> Prior to twitterfiles, Twitter felt overly corporate
Your take on a highly selective propagandized "expose" done internally by a corporation raider who just raided the corp that he is exposing, is to say that before oligarch took over things felt a little "corporate" ?
Social media is obviously censored and editorialized. Twitter files was just a turning point – I’m not saying it was a liberation.
Yes it’s been corporate for a long time. Now it has a different sort of editorialization – hard to describe it. Yeah maybe influenced by a cabal of techno-libertarian VCs like Musk & Theil – hopefully that will be better revealed in a follow up expose
It was certainly corporate beforehand, though. Maybe you preferred that version if it– that’s fine. (Edit: grammar)
Of course I hate what Elon has done to Twitter but you're feeling previously that everyone was there was an illusion brought on by massive propaganda and manipulation of the conversation. The same thing has happened to Reddit now, well it feels more inclusive and open it's actually an incredibly controlled enclosed system that only allows one specific viewpoint. Now of course to the people inside that bubble it feels like freedom but to everyone else it looks like a liberal echo chamber.
For example, when the actual owner of the at Bitcoin handle wasn't pushing the narrative that Jack Dorsey wanted they hijacked the moniker and gave it to a pro b Blockstream (THE COMPANY THAT CONTROLS THE BITCOIN CODE BASE) individual. For most people that support Bitcoin and blockstream it looks like a victory of free speech but in reality they're just controlling more and more of the speech and kicking out anyone from the conversation who disagrees.
> liberal echo chamber
It skews one way, but there's definitely a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find. It's also transitioning into an India social media site, just from sheer population numbers.
reddit is like the most censored part of the internet at the moment.
[ Removed by Reddit ]
[dead]
Right, Reddit banned any sub that disagreed with the progressive positions on Transgender issues, any mainstream subs would ban users for disagreeing with those positions, and heterodox subs were warned not to discuss them or else they could be banned. For instance, here's the Moderate Politics sub discussion on why they banned transgender topics[1]:
> The first of these banned topics: gender identity, the transgender experience, and the laws that may affect these topics.
> Please note that we do not make this decision lightly, nor was the Mod Team unanimous in this path forward. Over the past week, the Mod Team has tried on several occasions to receive clarification from the Admins on how to best facilitate civil discourse around these topics. There responses only left us more confused, but the takeaway was clear: any discussion critical of these topics may result in action against you by the Admins.
Also mod efforts to enforce an ideological view across the entire site. For instance, in the run up to the 2020 election, mods on the boardgame sub started going through the history of users and would ban anyone who voted for Trump.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/comments/mkxcc0/st...
But subreddits are free, and unlimited. You can make one yourself if you don't like how another one is moderated. People that like your approach can gather there. Of course that takes effort and is not easy, but Reddit itself (for the most part) is not banning you or your sub if you want to make a right wing house plant subreddit. If you want to make a pro Luigi anti transgender house plant subreddit, it probably gets banned.
Leftist subreddits also get banned for breaking site wide rules. The /r/chapotraphouse subreddit got banned in 2020, for example.
Reddit is best experienced in general by ignoring default subs and finding smaller ones that are relevant to your interests.
Moderating a large sub is hard. The scale is just too big, and it's individual volunteers doing it.
Reddit really doesn't.
I commented on a particular sub (in opposition to what i think the core hivemind is there) and was immediately banned from about 30 others.
Reddit is the most insular, single minded set of communities I've seen on social media. I dont think you can claim diversity if the userbase all wall themselves off from each other with bots.
There's a subreddit for everything. Reddit as a whole has plenty of users that represent any opinion you can imagine. Fairly conservative subreddits hit r/all regularly, but not as much as less conservative ones.
I think what you're trying to say is that on default subs, or some popular ones, that you can't post/comment some things without it getting removed, and possibly banned from those subs. Which is absolutely true. Same thing is true on HN, you can't even make a post about Grok's latest escapades without getting flagged.
But if you just want to have some space to discuss some topic, make subreddit for it, moderate it however you want. Reddit itself isn't going to ban you unless it's against site level guidelines.
It's pretty hard to get a site level ban. One easy way is to use a VPN though. My account (and any new one I make, so probably my IP/device too) was banned for ban evasion because I accidentally left my VPN on when using the Reddit app.
Your subreddit gets banned immediately if you don't agree with the redditeurs.
You don't see this an as issue because you share their opinions
Weird how you can find both trump worshipping subreddits and anti-trump ones... or pro catholic and anti-catholic, or pro child porn and anti child porn, and so on and so forth.
There are no "pro child porn sub" on Reddit anymore. Nowadays the threshold of is at screenshots and artworks of Asian games - you could get banned for posting top 10 contents on App Store. There are barely patches of green parts on the frog, and it is no longer beating.
There are also hardly concept of subreddits. Subreddits seemed to have completely homogenized. It's more of hashtags now, with so many obviously in-organic posts likely written by minimally trained call center type personnel, obviously quoting prefabricated scripts, everywhere. There are typos, "I'm on phone" remarks, bad punctuation, or honest misunderstandings are few and far between.
What I don't understand about it, though, is why. Reddit is supposed to be a social media with massive MAUs. Why can't they just let it run itself.
If you went to a website that consisted of roughly within 2 standard deviation population representative of multiple sides, then maybe you would have a point.
But this is reddit. It is not a population consisting of anywhere near that generous 2 standard deviations.
You know precisely what you're doing and you know you're being dishonest.
Tell me, a website that is not wholly owned and operated by shills on the left would respond with the state of /r/pics any day of the week, and exclaim that is entirely organic behavior, let alone consisting of representative population of the real world USA.
We can go blow for blow in any large sub. In fact, tell me why /r/Idaho, a state that has consistently voted red for decades somehow has "organically" resulted in posts entirely consisting of run-of-the-mill liberal posts? What of /r/Texas which is the same story and out of the question not a liberal stronghold that it presents itself to be.
You can pull the wool over your eyes all day, don't expect anyone else in the world to believe your bullshit.
What, specifically, did you say that was “in opposition to the core hive mind” that led you to being blocked?
Sorry, maybe i wasn't clear.
I posted on the ReformUK subreddit in opposition to something that was being touted there. The context of the post doesn't matter, posting on that sub is enough to get you blanked banned from many other placed.
Getting banned from a default sub you've never posted in because you told a racist boomer somewhere else they might be falling for propaganda is bloody weird.
So your argument is that reddit is, what, bad at free speech because subreddits aren't forced to let you in?
No that isn't my argument.
I think the intention of it, as weird as it may seem, is to punish people for engaging with content the other subreddit mods feel is distasteful enough to warrant the effort.
I can't speak to whether this is a useful tactic on their part, or whether its fair to you, but IMO this is just another kind of "free speech" that exists.
It's also that even engaging with ("platforming" or "amplifying") wrongthink makes you guilty by association. If someone's feeling talkative and generous you might even get the "tolerating intolerance" speech.
> Getting banned from a default sub you've never posted in because you told a racist boomer somewhere else they might be falling for propaganda is bloody weird.
It's not great, but on the other hand: it's also not a completely terrible heuristic.
The challenge here is that some of these popular default subs attract tens of thousands of comments every day. Dealing with flags is time-consuming, and also "too late": better for racist bollocks to not be posted.
In the end every subreddit is a private fiefdom of the moderator(s) where they can do more or less what they want. Many subs have overly strict, obnoxious, or even bizarre rules. The original sub for The Netherlands got hijacked by some American who proceeded to ban everyone posting in Dutch.
It's not perfect, but in the end I don't think it's a bad thing. A global set of rules for all of Reddit won't work. For example of course you should be free to talk about religion, but proselyting Christianity on /r/atheism (or Atheism on /r/Christianity) would obviously not be desirable.
The thing Reddit replaced was web forums (phpbb etc.), newsgroups, and mailing lists, and those worked more or less the same.
> boomer
Is usually used as an derogatory term. The offensiveness is because it's based on age and it is deemed acceptable by some within one age group to use it - while racism is usually less acceptable. I haven't yet seen zoomer get used similarly.
Disclosure: I'm between younger and older
Boomers got weirdly defensive these days. It's no more derogatory than a Millennial is.
[flagged]
Your ban was deserved
why is that ? btw i am indian too. It was in /r/askindians
The "perceived as" could be interpreted as a genuine "perhaps this is what they think?" or just as "empty language", in which case you're effectively saying "they're all scammers and mass migrating here to steal our jobs". I'll assume you meant the first, but with loads of flagged comments in the queue and many people who do genuinely mean that sort of thing, it's easy for moderators to misinterpret things.
I once called out a blatantly racist post and used "the n-word" while doing so. Admittedly not my finest moment, but I was fed up (the content was something along the lines of "I think this is called ethnic cleaning. Why don't you just admit they're all n----s to you?")
I got banned for my "racism". For calling out racism. The racist post that called for ethnic cleaning was left standing as that was lengthy and used polite language.
For the hasty moderator with tons of flagged comments: one is a wall of text and scans okay, the other used a bad word so could perhaps be racist. 537 more flagged comments in the queue. Ban. Next. It is what it is.
yea that makes sense. btw, i appealed the ban and they reviewed it again and ban stands.
Never went back to reddit again. even blocked it on /etc/hosts
I am not sure about why comment here was flagged and ppl saying "you deserve ban". So I guess everyone is assuming "empty language" .
> I am not sure about why comment here was flagged and ppl saying "you deserve ban". So I guess everyone is assuming "empty language" .
Yes, without the clarification of "i am indian too. It was in /r/askindians", it looked kind of racist here too. On these types of topics, you do need to spend a little bit of effort making sure your intent is communicated clearly, because for every well-intentioned person there's another actual racist troll.
Yes. If you don't want to be perceived that way, prefix your comment with clarification that it's not actually your opinion.
even if its not my opinion. Is it really something Reddit should permanently ban me for?
The point is that they did think it was your opinion.
Thats just crazy to me though. meanwhile youtube allows this kind of stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZlPv1Od6wk
Nowadays Reddit is a far left echo chamber that will downvote you into oblivion for voicing an opinion as controversial as "men can't get pregnant"
You've gotten downvoted here for saying the exact same thing. Maybe you should improve your opinions?
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Nobody is making you say anything. You can just keep quiet.
Men can't get pregnant and I am not going to pretend that they can.
So your opinion is that men can get pregnant?
Most people aren't interested in just talking past each other or responding to people saying something to get a rise.
What you're trying to say here is that you disagree with having a distinction between sex and gender identity, but you're doing it in a purposefully obtuse and inflammatory way. That indicates to me that you're not really interested in having a conversation. You're likely seeking downvotes and bans to justify your own bias.
This is so uninteresting considering the comments that you passed over from the other user:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44510731#44516503
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44510731#44519298
No, I imagine you don't see the blatant disregard. Maybe sagaar is a genuine representation of this community, and as are you. Entirely inflammatory people who seek to poison the well and act like they're not doing it.
The first link is someone responding in kind to another inflammatory comment from the same person. It's all part of the same thread in which the person I originally responded to was being a doofus on purpose. I could have just responded to his first root instead of his leaf comment, it was the same content twice.
The second I can't even view, I guess it's removed, in which case probably more of the same and my comment applies equally to it. Not like I'm going to go down every branch of the convo and reply to every one of them.
Oh, I know exactly what I'm doing and I'll own up to it. I think it's a more honest position than being the guy who posts "noncontroversial" comments that always end up downvoted for some reason.
"a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find."
I think you forgot the /s. Plus reddit is mostly bots now driving engagement, with AI slop splattered everywhere. It went from bad to worse in just a few years. I scan the homepage without an account every now and then and it's awful.
> It skews one way, but there's definitely a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find. It's also transitioning into an India social media site, just from sheer population numbers.
This happened on Quora until almost all western users left. Initially it was nice to have diversity of users and opinions, but then people started using Indian parlance that only other Indian users could understand (started referring to salaries as crore, relationship advice would reference Indian actors, etc.)
> started referring to salaries as crore, relationship advice would reference Indian actors
Crore is a funny word, I should use it more often. English is an international language now and no country has a monopoly. We should take contributions from everyone.
by your logic Americans using millions is also a problem. Remember number system came from India. you cant tell them to change it for your convenience
No, by their logic (because it's exactly what he said) the diversity was nice. It becoming a monoculture was perhaps less nice, but no opinion on that was offered, you have to infer.
Possibly leakycap is thinking about 02012 and you're thinking about 02018. In that case you'd both be right about Twitter.
OT but why isn't longnow format LSB(LS Digit) first? 8102, 2102, etc. The problem is that years as variables are often processed as left aligned fixed length MSB first, so it's hard to make year processing code robust over wide ranges of time. If it had been LSB/LSD first, overflow checks can be just a truncation.
8102 and 2102 clearly belong to same age, 5491 and 8391 are more far apart but it's visually apparent that they share two LSDs, and a C program that displays rate of return of a 01-year bond will only have to care at most "654" part of year 654321 entered by user.
"02012" is more perplexing and it can be longer by whole 16 bits[than regular notation] or so[on some systems].
edit: edited for basic clarity
;)
this was my take as well. twitter nostalgia not reality. I put the egalitarian age at around 2009 but you're right Kony-2012 was a huge pivot for social media
I was talking about reality. Twitter wasn't perfect in 02012 but it was before the reproductively viable worker ant.
It's literally impossible to post anything on any interesting subreddit right now, your post will just repeatedly get deleted.
All caps don't make it true.
Is this another case of "may this sacrifice appease the rain gods and bring forth a good harvest"?
Perhaps that and "Let me just disembark this sinking ship if I may…"
(Sorry she ever boarded?)
I mean more generally, in the sense that all public executive firings done to increase stock value (or prevent it from falling) are not that different from sacrificial cults.
ads.x.com is the worst platform to run ads. not surprised
I curate a relatively tame Twitter feed, but X has been showing me animated advertisements of some fleshlight-like device going to town on a dildo. W. T. A. F.
It's started making me worried that I can't even use the app in a place where anyone else is, lest someone shoulder surf that and wonder WTF I'm looking at.
It continues to surprise me how much people insist on using this platform after everything that’s happened in the last couple of years.
It’s like having dinner at a restaurant that you know is owned by a mafia boss and then being surprised when you get robbed while you eat there.
I totally get the point you're trying to make (and don't even disagree) but I think the analogy isn't quite right.
I'd actually be surprised if I got robbed at a mobbed-up restaurant; my naive understanding was that they actual put a lot of effort into keeping places like that above-board so they have legit businesses to attach their name/revenue/employees to, while still retaining muscle in case a rival tries something. It's arguably one of the last places I'd expected to get robbed outright.
It’s like when you’re having dinner at a restaurant owned by the mob and act surprised when the owner pays for your meal because “you look like such nice girls.”
People are literally addicted to it, this is like expecting smokers to stop smoking because it's bad for them.
Dumpster fires are unfortunately entertaining.
That's actually an ad for X Premium+. No embarrassing ads!
The lack of controls on anything related to ad running is astounding. How they make money at all blows my mind.
Why, By suing their advertisers, of course.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-lawsu...
https://www.wsj.com/business/media/x-twitter-ad-revenue-camp...
But it is one of the only places you can pay to have your message delivered next to messages from Hitler bots and coup plotters. So... there's that.
> I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me
But he didn't? She wasn't even in the loop for many of the consequential decisions
Rule #0 is you don't disparage the company on the way out. She may even have a contractual obligation not to.
Even barring a contractual obligation, "do I want to be the target of an angry tweetstorm that might result in real death threats" is a consideration.
"This has been wonderful but it's time to step away and spend some time with family" lol
Just wait until Musks enters his "John Mcaffee in exile(but with much more resources)" era, which I think is going to come soon. Then all these people will talk.
Or maybe his "Howard Hughes in Hiding" era. Remains to be seen which route he takes. Could also be "Rasputen shot in the ** era" if hes not careful.
> which I think is going to come soon.
Including the hammocks?
So Rule #0 is be silent about the absolute shitshow you are running away from, even when that shitshow is about to ruin many more lives? I think that reflects more poorly on someone than a break in pro-corporate decorum.
Yes, it's exactly that. Most likely as she was a senior executive she'll have signed an NDA containing a "non-disparagement clause". That's the deal with the devil that you make in return for being paid $millions each year.
Edit: A few examples of these clauses: https://contracts.justia.com/contract-clauses/non-disparagem...
"him" is not a company. Also not saying isn't disparaging.
Replace “entrusting” with “paying.”
Let's be perfectly clear, given the ownership and board structure https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312522... , the CEO of Twitter is a figurehead.
I don't understand your comment at all:
1. What is the relevance of posting that years old 8-K about Twitter? The corporate structure is totally different now, with xAI having acquired X Corp in March.
2. Regardless of that, X is a private company with a hired CEO (by "hired CEO" I mean as opposed to a founder CEO or family CEO). There are tons and tons of companies like this, and most of them have active, traditional CEOs. The ownership and board structure of X isn't the thing that implies that the CEO is a figurehead - I'd argue Musk's megalomania is what does that.
Did you read the section regarding the merger requirements which is quite unusual and reveals the level of control of Musk et. al (X Holdings)? This is why I brought up that particular 8k.
The ownership and board structure serve as de facto evidence of control by Musk.
There really aren't any other companies (notably in the social media sector) that have this ownership structure. Hilariously enough, by board structure and stock ownership, Trump has less control over Truth Social.
Yes, owners of companies obviously control them.
That doesn't make the CEO a figurehead.
There isn't a company in existence where the (hired) CEO has more power than the person who owns the company.
The announcement on X: https://x.com/lindayax/status/1942957094811951197
> As always, I’ll see you on X
So she’s not actually leaving the platform, just the company.
Yes, I thought it meant she was deleting her Twitter account while remaining CEO!
"Chief [Executive Officer]" isn't a role on the platform, it's a role with the company.
The title does literally say she is leaving the platform
Here on Hacker News, we should be good internet citizens and do more than just read the title.
We can also be human together and find enjoyment in shared, incorrect first impressions.
> the historic business turn around we have accomplished together has been nothing short of remarkable.
I mean she’s not wrong!
Unrelated to the article, and I can't seem to reply to the comment, but clicking on the archive.today link while I'm on holiday in Italy gives me a warning that it contains child pornography.
https://imgur.com/a/PXNY7vp
I'm not sure if it's related, but the operator of archive.today has done odd things with DNS in the past, such as blocking DNS requests from cloudflare because they don't forward edns information.
It's an archiving site. Probably someone archived some child pornography there, and the Italian authorities decided the sensible thing was to block the whole domain.
Have any of the people who noisily joined X to make a big impact fast actually had a big impact over any time frame? Remember when G. Hotz said he was going to fix Twitter search in 6 weeks, and then it turned out that G. Hotz is just another midwit like anyone else and Twitter search is still as bad as ever? Yaccarino said they were going to transform Twitter into the "everything app" with payments, marketplaces, and even banking. None of which it turns out was within the abilities of Linda Yaccarino.
Twitter is a graveyard being propped up grudgingly by people who don't want to have fewer followers elsewhere, and enthusiastically by other people as way to virtue signal alliance with the ownership's political incorrectness. It has no true value to anyone. It was going downhill already before the new ownership and for completely apolitical reasons.
Change a few words and this describes every social platform including this one. Your comment is evidence, and so is this one.
There are no followers on HN, unless I've totally missed something about the platform.
The dopamine hook on HN is karma.
It is weird that “political correctness” has been taken to mean, like, being polite and nice to people or something.
A politically correct answer is one that keeps the currently politically powerful people happy, right? Musk/Trump defined politically correct for a couple months. I guess Musk might be politically incorrect now. Are they friends or enemies today?
"Politically correct" in the US context means essentially the same thing as "woke". In both cases, the word or phrase was adopted first by progressives, then by critics of progressives to refer to progressive beliefs and sensibilities.
It is surprising to find someone that doesn't know that, but would be less surprising if you don't live in the US.
> It is weird that “political correctness” has been taken to mean, like, being polite and nice to people or something.
> "Politically correct" in the US context means essentially the same thing as "woke"
I think it is (hopefully?) obvious from my comment that I actually do understand what it means in the US context, I was describing the odd situation WRT the US meaning and the origin of the phrase
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
> The term political correctness first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time, it was used to describe strict adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is, the party line.
The politically correct opinions were the ones that agreed with those in power.
I knew about the Soviet use, which is why I qualified with "in the US context".
Every use I've ever heard from a US speaker -- almost certainly over 100 uses, going back to when Reagan was President or maybe a year or 2 after Reagan -- is a reference to progressive beliefs and sensibilities regardless of whether the progressives are in power or not.
You are introducing your own definition of a phrase that everyone currently agrees on the meaning of. When this is done for no good reason, it is harmful because everyone relies on language to think together, so when the meaning of words get muddied unnecessarily, we get worse at thinking together.
What, pray, is your reason?
There was a lot of radio word play. They couldn't say "that sucks" so they said "that vacuums" instead type of nonsense. Now, they just say "that sucks". But back around the Bush Sr and Clinton period, there were changes to broadcast rules that led to talk radio becoming what it has which also led to Fox News and then everyone else following suit
Hi, sadly, I removed my description the first time I heard "politically correct" (on KUSF during the Reagan admin or maybe a year or 2 later) because I did not need it.
"my description of the first time I heard"
> I knew about the Soviet use, which is why I qualified with "in the US context".
I assumed you knew the modern and the original use. I generally assume folks know the basic definitions of the terms they are using (until proven otherwise), because otherwise the conversation will get really tedious and pointless…
Search is a pretty solved problem if you are willing to invest the resources to create a inverted index of all the text you want to search. An inverted index of all tweets would be pretty expensive. Creating text embeddings for semantic search would be the next stage and even more expensive.
It is very much not a solved problem. Because the implication behind search is not "well the result you need is technically in the result set", it's "the result you need as at the top", and that remains an extremely difficult problem for anything but a trivial scale.
Good support for regex and boolean operators helps a lot with that. But that requires user skill.
Then it's not a solved problem in any meaningful way.
Basic term based retrieval has been solved for 30+ years
The problem is ranking and relevance
Thinking more, I imagine each post has limited value for ranking. You need the context of the thread, re-posts, even other threads nearby in time (with the same people).
They've had an inverted index of all tweets since 2008 (when they acquired Summize).
They added a vector index a year and a half ago for a "see related tweets" feature - https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1720314092269822242 - though as far as I can tell that feature doesn't exist any more, presumably replaced by the ask Grok button.
sidenote: Twitter search isnt that bad when you compare it to the shit show that is reddit search. its basically never worked.
Reddit search is just Google, is it not?
Not that building all that stuff is necessarily easy, but it's also not like there's a ton of product market validation or design work that's needed. Like literally the playbook is to just copy whatever the Asian superapps like WeChat/Grab/Gojek/LINE/etc are doing.
Musk has always been pretty transparent that that was his ambition for X.
I feel like most people that say WeChat is a super app haven't actually used it for any period of time. WeChat achieves their "able to do everything" by embedding sub apps within the app. Switching between them is jarring, and is sometimes less smooth than just opening a different app. Saying WeChat is a super app is like saying an app store is a super app.
> Saying WeChat is a super app is like saying an app store is a super app.
I don't think they care about the experience or functionality. I think it's just about being able to exert enough of a legal or structural claim to get their fingers on a cut of the eventual transactions enabled by the various "apps" in the "super app".
Yes most of their revenue growth is expected to be as the everything app (or a video platform?).
Musk has said over and over he doesn't care about advertising revenue, he mangled a quote from the Princess Bride to say "I don't care" and then he said if advertisers try to blackmail him with money (even stranger phrasing) they could go f*ck themselves.
[https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-misquotes-princess...] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolis/2023/12/05/elon-musk...]
I think gaining the influence to fire regulators investigating his companies was what he wanted.
BTW he sold Twitter to another subsidiary of X Corp, I wonder if he paid back the debt from the LBO of Twitter.
> turned out that G. Hotz is just another midwit like anyone else
I understand your point, but I think this sort of discourse leads people down the wrong path. G. Hotz is a pretty smart engineer. What he lacks at twitter is probably not engineering ability, but organization ability. The problem is likely not that the individual engineers aren't smart, it's that they end up working together to make each other worse than they could be.
After Elon fired 80% of the staff, I think we can assume that most of the organizational hurdles were effectively gone, and that it was the perfect time for a cowboy developer to jump in and fix something that would have been stopped by conservative approaches and team work before.
If search could have been solved by a single smart person, it would have been done long ago. In the Bay Area, finding a world class researcher (in distributed systems, databases, text search or whatnot) able to do a short stint at a company to tackle a hard problem isn't particularly hard.
Making big promises and then underdelivering seems like his MO in general. His AI hardware startup went from "AMD makes quality AI hardware but bad software, I'm raising money to completely rewrite the entire AMD software/driver stack to make it better for AI, how hard can it be?" to him complaining to AMD about buggy drivers and AI tooling (when the whole point of his company was throwing all that out and writing new ones from scratch) to him giving up on AMD and selling nVidia AI compute boxes like everyone else.
His M.O. and that of everyone in Elon's orbit. That's how we got DOGE: a bunch of people of well below average skills and intelligence who nevertheless believe themselves to be the masters of the universe promised to radically improve government efficiency and greatly reduce waste, but found out that the government has been wound as tightly as possible by a bunch of hardened bureaucrats who paid attention in school, know how to use slide rules, are aren't ruled by "vibes".
> Yaccarino said they were going to transform Twitter into the "everything app" with payments, marketplaces, and even banking.
That's not really fair to Yaccarino - Musk said this and she had to repeat it because she was (nominally) CEO.
Despite her CEO title she was at best #2 at the company (behind Musk) and I imagine with the xAI buyout she's now further down the ladder. Even going back to her old role (head of advertising and partnerships at a $100B+ company) will probably be a step up at this point.
I would gladly pretend to be CEO for the kind of pay she got. Blame it all on me, I'll take the money and go retire in Hawaii.
She could probably pad her paycheques quite a bit with a book deal touting insider gossip, too.
It wouldn’t be a surprise if that were covered by an NDA, but it also wouldn’t be surprising if it weren’t
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You'd think that but AFAIK, there have only been 2 serious attempts to kill Trump and 0 to kill Musk[0] (I don't follow US politics much so idk which one of them you're referring to). Compare that to the number of mass shootings[1] and car rammings for the same period.
It seems most killing is done by crazy people who are content to blame and attack society at large for their problems. Conversely, sane/intelligent/competent people who are able to identify the root causes of injustice rarely use violence.
As a result, you're probably fine as long as other unhinged people see you as an ally even if a lot of sane people see you as an enemy.
[0]: Apparently he claims 2 so I qualified it with "serious" because narcissists are known to inflate their claims and I can't be bothered to check his claims.
[1]: Apparently what counts as a mass shooting is very inclusive (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx3aI67iWpA ) so count only those intended to kill random strangers, not targeted attacks.
There are probably cheaper places to retire (that will guarantee a longer retirement) than Hawaii - but your idea is good
The cheapest option is death, but even that costs you your life.
You can't, as they say, take it with you.
She stepped in and did a job, nothing more nothing less. I don't see this as a failure, the post-Elon Twitter is not a company that operates based on traditional characteristics, and I don't know what a CEO even does for such a company. It's obvious that Elon put her in charge to appease advertisers, but that gimmick only works for so long.
Anyway, I wouldn't have made it as long as she did. Being in charge of a cesspool of racist, misogynistic, antisemitic content like that is a fate worse than unemployment.
X was gobbled by another of Elon's AI company, no doubt to reduce some of the mess. So yes, a CEO there effectively does nothing.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/musks-xai-buys-social-...
At least she can claim the success of getting the company sold, even if it was to a sibling company under X Corp.
I suspect a professional executive appointment was among the terms to finance Musk's purchase of Twitter.
The whole thing was a toxic brew of an autocratic owner choosing a weak CEO he can push around plus the glass cliff. Yaccarino was a perfectly fine ad sales executive in a legacy media company. She could've had a really pleasant couple of years. I hope she negotiated a severance that sets her up nicely.
I know everyone involved is a consenting adult, but the cynicism is still pretty icky.
Just in time for Grok to go crazy
2 years and one month almost to the day makes it seem like she waited the minimum time to avoid some bonus clawback and then got out.
Her departure is about as material as having a second appendix. Her presence was to paper over the management failures of Elon Musk, and all she did was put them in stark relief by being a non-entity during her tenure (a sad debasement for her, and underutilization of someone with actual media/marketing acumen).
I think that no matter how bad the news about Elon and his companies might be, his net worth keeps skyrocketing and is currently around the $400B mark. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years Forbes reports that he's the first to reach one trillion.
> I think that no matter how bad the news about Elon and his companies might be, his net worth keeps skyrocketing and is currently around the $400B mark.
I'm not really sure about that. Tesla's stock price dropped around a third during the past year. Which source are you using to support that assertion?
By "the past year" I assume you mean 2025? Because it's still higher than it was in October 2024 (https://www.google.com/finance/quote/TSLA:NASDAQ?window=1Y). A better argument would be sales of Tesla cars, which last I heard were consistently dropping in most important markets.
With his skylink satellite business alone, the win exceeds the whole NASA budget.
With grok now being openly fascist not many execs want to be publicly associated with that. That's a space for leaders only. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44519642
Winner takes all.
Also inflation.
Given how immigration and trade controls have worked over this century.
Anybody who goes up there first will put restrictions on who else can arrive and thrive.
If SpaceX is able to eventually deliver starship and take people to Mars, Musk will quickly become a multi trillionaire. The riches of space are out there for anyone with the technology and will to take it, we have plenty of people with the will but only one company that is getting closer on the tech front. There is quadrillions in wealth on other worlds and asteroids (obviously bringing a trillion of gold to earth severely reduces the price of gold, I mean economic opportunities).
Antarctica is more hospitable and accessible than Mars
Nobody has made a profitable scheme to build a colony there
I don't see how going to Mars will make anyone a dime. It'll just be a thing for researchers and funded by the tax payer on Earth
Its not going to Mars that makes money, its the technology required to get there. That same tech can be used to setup asteroid mining facilities. Imagine life is found on one of the moons of Jupiter, the biological gold rush would be like nothing seen before. In addition there will be well funded people willing to travel to other worlds and moons to start new frontiers. It may take centuries but these outposts may eventually thrive opening up more economic opportunity.
Its not getting to Mars thats important, its the ability to get to Mars and what it grants humanity
Wow, so all he has to do is find life on another planet and he’s quids in? Why has nobody else thought of this.
Feel better?
He won't be able to do that with adversarial domestic political relations. There are plenty of ways for Trump admin to hamstring SpaceX.
I agree, there are few people as frustrated as I am that Musk had a tantrum and torpedoed his relationship with Trump. Primarily because I want humanity to go to space.
I don't see human lifestream as a sphere rolling up or down but a morphing goo flow through an unstructured topology. So, extrapolating last 20 years of Elon decissions in the future is impossible because humans tend to fail with time, bodily, emotionally and cognitivelly.
Trying to make it clear she is not responsible for MechaHitler AI as if people don't already have her number
Did anyone actually believe she was CEO?
There is a screenshot were Grok posts lurid sexual harassing stuff about her. https://x.com/highflystai/status/1942970125193547792 . Is there weird legal stuff around this with an AI? she is the CEO and it is a tool in the company and something she is supposed to "control"?
The linked tweet is offline, but it's probably about this? https://x.com/esjesjesj/status/1943025702757924963?s=52&t=9h...
I sold a ton of shares on a private secondary market Starter Pack
enjoy the retirement!
Good for her. Got paid a ton of money to be the fall guy and no one ever believed anything that went wrong with the company was her fault. That's a clean getaway in my book. Hopefully she can move on to something that isn't building Nazi chat bots.
pretty sure she did alot of reputational damage to herself along the way.
Is that so? Or isn't it that being the CEO of such a large and well-known company is basically always career enhancing? In my experience, with companies hiring for high-level positions, former job titles are valued often more than actual performance.
doubtful. Marissa Mayer literally killed Yahoo and still was able to get a new job and hold board member seats.
This is just delusional. It was obvious to everyone she was in an impossible job with a megalomaniacal boss ,and not only did she not get fired, she actually lasted 2 years and left on her own terms. I think she'll be just fine.
The reputational damage was taking the money to profit from and aid the megalomania. She'll never be taken seriously by serious people or have a substantive job again. But she'll do fine, her loyalty will probably get her similar opportunity with similar people.
Shes 62 she can just retire and live on a beach for the next 30 or so years.
> Shes 62 she can just retire and live on a beach for the next 30 or so years.
As Rust Kohle said in "True Detective": "People incapable of guilt usually do have a good time..."
She _accepted_ the job, though. If we're assuming it was obvious to everyone that it was an impossible job, then her accepting it shows a certain lack of judgement, surely.
"I accepted a difficult position with the expectation that I would make a significant impact on the company's future. Now, looking back, I'm pleased with what I was able to accomplish. I look forward to more challenging engagements."
At least, that's how I would spin it.
But I'd probably have AI massage the text a bit ;-)
> But I'd probably have AI massage the text a bit ;-)
Just not Grok specifically. Wouldn't want it "massaging the text" with ethnic jokes.
If your boss was a jackass would you actually turn your nose at 6m a year? I sure wouldn’t. That would set me up for life.
> to be the fall guy
People keep saying that, but what did she take the fall for?
Sounds like being the manager for the Oakland... Sacramento... Unknown location Athletics. Well, minus the tons of money and Nazi chat bots. LOL
At least they are trying to name the team based on the city they are in, where the Dallas Cowboys haven't been in Dallas since the the early 70s. They trained in a city not Dallas while their stadium was in yet another not Dallas city. Now, their stadium is in yet another not Dallas city, and headquarters/training is yet a different not Dallas city.
With the A's, you could at least be close by going to the city in their name.
What value does X equal in that statement?
One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster. She never had any say and worst part is she was not even a good fall guy, it was clear who’s pulling the strings. The most immaterial and inconsequential hire ever.
I love all the replies on Twitter thanking her but during her time the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising. Remarkably inept.
It's weird that you say both she had no material power and also seem to imply the valuation drop and lawsuits were due to her ineptitude?
Anyway she volunteered to be a puppet for a man who is clearly off the rails and her legacy will forever be stained.
Both things can be true: Valuation did drop during her tenure, AND she was not to blame.
Therefore the praise is weird, because she seemingly neither helped nor hurt the business.
One would imagine that a CEO lacking power is the precise reason a company would perform poorly.
Indeed. It was such a paradoxical situation from the start, with her both reporting to Musk as the chairman and owner, while at the same time "managing" him as the CTO. I'm surprised that the charade went on for as long as it did.
I'd imagine the paycheck helped resolve the quandary.
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On Acquired podcast, Ballmer spoke of his experience as CEO with Gates as CTO. It was hell.
I just listened to that episode yesterday and that’s not how I perceived it all. Ballmer barely described it as much as I remember.
What’s there to perceive? Ballmer talked at length about how challenging it was and how often they disagreed on things.
“That's where I moved back to be president of the company and then CEO, and Bill and I went through a year where we didn't speak”
“Basically our wives were the ones who pushed us back together. We had a very awkward dinner at a health club down the street here, but we get back together. But we never really got the right mojo.”
I wonder how this setup compares with Mira Murati and Greg Brockman.
I mean I've been in a few jobs where I had to "manage" my boss in order to accomplish anything.
were those jobs fun? Certainly havent been for me
To a certain extent, you always have to manage your boss, whether as an individual contributor or as a subordinate manager. A boss managing multiple people does not have the same mental bandwidth as all the people in their team combined, so the employees cannot bring every matter to the boss's attention. Choosing which matters to bring (and how to present them) is precisely what managing upwards means.
(In fact, if you're being praised
When someone says that they need to manage their boss, what they usually mean is that the boss reacts poorly or unproductively to bad news, or that they like to interfere in parts of the work process that would best be left to the employees, and so this normal part of everyone's job turns into a constant walk on eggshells.
Elizabeth Holmes had all the power. Also being competent matters.
> she was not to blame.
Fall guys bear some of the blame in the fall.
My long-held [0] personal theory - borne out by everything Musk has done, and by who bought Twitter - is that it was bought to curb the possibility of large positive social movements along the lines of OWS or BLM.
Enabling that can entail being useless at your supposed job, while doing your actual job (which deserves some amount of blame, from a number of perspectives).
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36685384
I think Elon truly believed in the subscription model, which would free him from advertiser content influence. That and being terminally addicted to the platform himself, and being an impulsive gambler. I really don't think we've gotten where we are due to any (successful) master plan
This. He was addicted to Twitter. He saw value in it and thought he could run it better. He wanted to be “The Place” where things were talked about. Where he could control the narrative.
History has shown us, the more you try to control it, the more it slips through your fingers. The best surfers know, you ride the wave, not fight it.
See my only counterpoint to this theory is Musk has a long and well documented history of being absolutely stone desperate to be cool, which is the only thing he can't buy, and he simply revels in his ownership of Twitter even as he comprehensively runs it into the ground as a business.
Now, would he be upset about such efforts being derailed as a result, or is he even slightly bothered about his website now being packed to the tits with Nazis? Absolutely not. But I do think as unbelievably cringe as it would be if true, I really think he bought the damn thing because he just wanted to be the meme lord.
Mainly I just struggle with giving him as much credit as your theory does in terms of long term planning. He's an overgrown man-child.
I think you and the parent poster are doing a good job of describing the same thing from different angles. Both observations are true.
Musk wanted to steer culture toward his own ends as the parent poster described and he wanted to be seen as some kind of.... cool vanguard of that, as you say.
It's really different facets of the same thing, right?
I guess what I struggle with is seeing Musk taking that kind of top-down strategic view of things? Which that could entirely be a me problem. I think there's an inherent bias in the way a lot of people think where they assign these Machiavellian motives especially to the super-privileged and those in positions of power, the 5D chess type shit, and I tend to bias in the other direction where... a lot of times these guys are just fucking losers and they don't think terribly dissimilarly from your weird uncle who doesn't come to the reuinions anymore.
Ultimately though, this is a bit of a weird aside to go on I fully admit. The "solutions" so to speak for people like this are basically the same whether they are dark-room schemers or dickheads with far too much money and not nearly enough accountability.
Yeah, I don't think it was 5D chess at all.
I think he saw a good (to him) opportunity to steer public discourse by tossing a big stack of cash at probably the most influential social media network in terms of mindshare, to push whatever ideas were careening through his mind at any given point.
He may not have even been sober, much less playing 5D chess.
He is an overgrown manchild in a playground full of overgrown Randian Straussian manchilds. They are lucky 90% of the normies don't care, yet.
> He's an overgrown man-child.
Damn near every mega-billionaire is, almost by definition. If the best thing you can come up with to do with money is make more of it at other people's expense, then you're not even close to what I'd call mentally mature.
That doesn't stop many oligarchs from making cunning plans with layers and layers of depth, or being excellent at misdirection and media manipulation - both of which Musk also has a long and well documented history of showing. It also doesn't stop them from hiring people to make and/or refine those plans. Shit, there's probably cunning bootlickers out there, like Yarvin, just pitching this shit to them all the time.
> I just struggle with giving him as much credit as your theory does in terms of long term planning
As far as plans go, "buy Twitter and destroy it because it threatens our class interests - but pretend you're doing it for free speech or whatever" isn't especially complicated. Just piss off advertisers, users, and your staff, in plausibly deniable ways. It's not like corporate media are going to call you on it.
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If you don't believe that what we accepts as facts are politically influenced, I have a bridge to sell you...
What I don’t believe is that somebody bought Twitter only, or even primarily, to further their “class interests”. The whole framing here is bent.
No one, not even the cringiest, wanna-be edge lord from 4chan spends $44B to buy Twitter unless they think there's value there. Even paying a big premium for Twitter. So what value does Musk see in Twitter? He's not going to make money off it. He bought a huge megaphone to push his social/class interests.
He sued to try to get out of buying it!
> somebody
That he's the wealthiest known man in the world seems like relevant context here.
Also that he tried to back out and a judge forced him to buy it.
Cannabis with high CBD and minimal THC isn't a psychedelic, fyi.
Amazing you didn't get that point even after it was made explicitly clear three times, but you still remember my username 10 days later.
Also, asserting that someone who expresses class awareness and media literacy is dabbling in "alternative facts" and must be on some kind of psychedelic drugs is wildly uncalled for. This is the second time you've cast such aspersions on me for some reason - stop.
It's pretty depressing such derangement infiltrated HN. Psychedelics are really a fine line. Looking at SF as an outsider - it either mints billionaires or completely destroys people.
Sorry, what money did billionaires took from you?
If you're serious, I recommend you take a look at this [0] and really have a good long think about it.
0 - https://www.oxfam.org/en/takers-not-makers-unjust-poverty-an...
It's conspiratorial thinking to assume that everything that happens in the world is perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight. Maybe a formerly-brilliant but drug-addled rich guy just bought a social media platform with bad fundamentals at the height of its valuation and then mismanaged it while flailing around with other ventures and political adventures. Occam's razor.
You are conveniently omitting his reason to buy it. Personal megaphone and shortly thereafter LLM training data are the simplest reasons.
Maybe he just spent a lot of time shitposting on there.
He did not want to buy it. He took an arrogant joke far enough that the Delaware Court of Chancery forced him to do it. He never wanted it earnestly.
Buying a 9.1% stake in a company before making an unsolicited (but formal) offer to buy out the rest of it is weird behaviour for somebody who didn’t actually ever want to buy it…
I think the GP is suggesting a simple explanation of why it went badly, since that is the subject of the thread, rather than an explanation of why Musk bought Twitter. No need for conspiratorial accusations of conveniently omitting anything.
> formerly-brilliant
When?
TBF going from the cobbled together roadster to actually mass producing cars was an accomplishment, as was giving his engineers the latitude to keep trying to land a Falcon 9 booster.
Then he started to think it was his brilliance that made those things successful. Cybertruck is his baby. So is Starship. He's telling his people to make it work with a little or no moderation of his concepts.
It’s not clear to me that he had any hand in the actual successes of Tesla and SpaceX. Stories abound of the lengths to which each company went to to manage his whims. He’s apparently burned through all of those firewalls and now both companies are exploding, figuratively and in literally.
That's what the comment you're replying to said.
Wasn't elonjet the turning point? There are some arguments around that he might not have clear cognitive distinction between verbal accusations and physical violence. Maybe that was the missed shot from rooftop for him. Elon before those events was a Steve Jobs Junior figure, that is to say, he was not problematic enough for the rest of the world including myself to focus on the crazy side.
I'd love to hear why this is being downvoted? Not agreeing is one thing, but it seems like a reasonable thing to suggest?
> It's conspiratorial thinking to assume that everything that happens in the world is perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight.
Because the original comment isn't doing this. It's not talking about everything, it's talking about one specific thing in a very plausible scenario.
It wouldn't even need to be a very complicated or widespread "conspiracy": Just Musk and a few VC guys in a Signal or Telegram thread saying
> someone should just buy Twitter and downrank all these crazy leftists
> Hmm
> I'll help line up financing.
> Ok!
This isn't flat earth, chem trails, lizard people, or weather weapons. It's not even Illuminati, Masons, or Skull and Bones. We've seen some of these chats already.
Because Musk has provided abundant evidence of his political orientation over the last several years.
Witness his entire Boring Company being a sock puppet project to derail California's High Speed Rail system.
Can you provide more about this idea? I see the Boring company as being pretty feckless, and at the same time extremely boastful. They have gotten hopes up in a number of places about solving city traffic problems, only to go dark when the rubber (should have) met the road.
But I don't see any of those having impacted the California High Speed Rail. Rather that has been harmed by lots of different groups throwing roadblocks up, sometime for ideological reasons (lots of this from State and National Republicans, sometimes with reasons, but often more political), and a whole lot of NIMBY (see: Palo Alto). What do you see the Boring Company having to do with that?
As a side note: there are some really poorly thought through parts of the project, for example they don't have a plan for actually making it over the mountains into Los Angeles. I still want it to happen, but...
The CHSR thing is a bit apocryphal (no evidence, just according to his biographer) since hyperloop never really competed in any way with CHSR. He did, however, play a very big role in fucking up a potential Chicago connection between downtown and O'hare, as the Boring company actually did win the bid to use the abandoned cavern below the Washington Red/Blue line stop, promising to run a hyperloop up to the airport. It never went anywhere, and the cavern below block 37 remains abandoned.
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/elon-musk-ohare-airport...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Express_Loop
It never went anywhere because of the politicians. The Boring Company is opening new tunnels in Vegas without spending public money.
Those tunnels are, like other Musk projects, using plenty of public money.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-29/las-vegas...
> Last week, the Boring Company won a $48.6 million bid to design and build a “people mover” beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. The payout represents the first actual contract for Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tunneling venture. And Las Vegas, a tourist city that wants to be seen as a technology hub, will get a new mobility attraction with the imprimatur of America’s leading disruptor.
> “Las Vegas is known for disruption and for reinventing itself,” Tina Quigley, the chief executive officer of the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, said when the partnership between the Boring Company and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) was announced in March. “So it’s very appropriate that this new technology is introduced and being tested here.”
https://assets.simpleviewcms.com/simpleview/image/upload/v1/...
It was the silly and obviously unworkable Hyperloop idea that was pushed as an attempt to stop CAHSR, according to Musk’s biographer [1].
1. https://www.disconnect.blog/p/the-hyperloop-was-always-a-sca...
Hyperloop was a stunt Musk spun up to mess with the HSR, and the Boring company to fight against subway type systems. I mixed the two up.
He's provided evidence of being an impulsive fool for even longer. I defended Musk as a useful idiot for a while until be fully showed his true colors, but it has always been clear he's not a wise man.
(His vigorous and pathetic efforts to get out of the purchase also push against it being a big master plan, FWIW.)
> perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight
Is a strawman, to which the conclusion is also defied by the plain evidence of everything Musk has done on Twitter
You are missing the forest for one very odd tree. Yes, the tree is wacky, but
* Every private media company has beneficial owners * Those beneficial owners are rich * Rich people who own things for a living have incentives opposed to those of most people, who work for a living
These are not conspiracies, they are just basic facts of capitalism.
Better to put "facts" in quotation marks considering that is clearly a statement of opinion, and a fairly caricatured one at that.
That there are a select few who own the capital, and that those people generally do not overlap with the people who work, is more or less the original definition of capitalism. And I don't think its controversial or a caricature to imply that those two groups will have different incentives.
From Wikipedia [0]: `The initial use of the term "capitalism" in its modern sense is attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 ("What I call 'capitalism' that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others") and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861 ("Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor")`
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Etymology
I haven't downvoted you, I am curious. Why do you disagree? In what relevant ways are their interests aligned?
Pretty good theory
hmm... I am drawing a parallel between your theory on 'controlled opposition' from the linked thread from 2023, to the current M vs T fight. Plausible...
Thing is, she failed at being the fall person. It's clear to everyone who was calling the shots, so ironically she was ineffective as the fall person.
My conspiracy theory was that because of Musk's involvement in OpenAI he had foreknowledge of the impeding release of ChatGPT. In that context, Twitter as a source for AI training can be far more valuable than a rage filled social network. However he still failed horribly to time the market
> Twitter as a source for AI training can be far more valuable than a rage filled social network
Isn't Twitter the go-to example of a rage filled social network?
I took them to mean it can be both things at once, and one is more valuable than the other. Not that being an ai training source would make it a rage filled social network.
> I took them to mean it can be both things at once
Thanks, now I get the intended reading.
> Not that being an ai training source would make it a rage filled social network.
I clearly didn't mean that would be the cause, though. Twitter's current state had been cooking for a decade.
nah, that's 4chan
how would you explain how hard he fought to NOT buy twitter?
people seem to forget he was legally forced to buy Twitter after he tried for months to get out of his joke bid, primarily through claiming he was misled about the extent of bots on the platform
The entire idea is to buy an undervalued platform using insider information, if the stock price plunges after he committed to a price then it's no longer undervalued. This has happened between his bid and termination announcements.
I also roughly remember he had his Tesla holdings as collateral creating some liquidity crisis for him.
This elaborate explanation does not mean it isn't wrong and the original theory of idiot-with-money does not hold
He just had to pay what 1/50th of his bid to exit the buy. He'd make that bill back in what a month?
Nothing positive can come out of Twitter for McLuhanite reasons.
Zohran Mamdami's greatest attribute in media is that if you see him in video you see him listening to people. Even people who aren't inclined to agree with him talk to him and say "he was so nice, he listened to me." High-D [1] billionaires who support High-D candidates such as Clinton, Cuomo and Adams are driven crazy by this. [2]
Even though Twitter does provide a back channel and a Twitter user may really be a nice guy who listens and replies, the structure of the thing is such that you don't see that user listening and in fact the user interface on Twitter makes it really hard to see that conversation for outsiders in the way that the heavy Twitter user doesn't get. Not least because the heavy Twitter user might not realize that people who aren't logged in don't see anything at all (pro tip: just don't post links to Twitter on HN, you might see a great discussion with a lot of context, the rest of us just see a single sentence floating in space without any context)
On video though, the person who listens listens visibly, you see the microexpressions in real time as they react to what the other person is saying. It's a thing of beauty. (Coalition leaders such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Peloci do a lot of listening as part of their job but constituents only see them talking!)
The above is a second order concern compared to the general compression of discourse in Twitter which is talked about in [2]. Twitter addicts spend 4-5 hours a day traversing graphs to follow discussions and understand (or think they understand?) context, the rest of us just see "white farmers" which means one thing if you're racist, another if you're "anti-racist", and just means "move along folks, nothing more to see here" for the great silent majority. When Twitter is at equilibrium every movement creates and equal and opposite amount of backlash, nothing actually changes except polarization increases, there is more and more talking and less and less listening, and the possibility of real social change diminishes.
Burn it down.
[1] https://darkfactor.org/
[2] for once good NYT content that isn't paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-c...
Style: Manhattan
Generation: Zohran
https://indianexpress.com/article/fresh-take/zohran-mamdani-...
High time the left reinvented memes their own way, "mutability over machismo" (& not a shred of maudlin)
Better link for dark factors imho https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9935796152480174745...
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I find myself suspicious of your numbers given I don't get the sense blm changed much about policing but can you cite some source numbers?
They're conducting some sleight of hand here. There was indeed a bit of a violent crime spike post-George Floyd in the US.
But... there was also an unprecedented global pandemic and resulting economic shutdown, and the same crime spike happened in other countries that didn't have a BLM movement to speak of.
It's not even sleight of hand, it's just lying by omission.
"Our boat sank because you chose to go left instead of right" while not even mentioning the giant hole that opened up in the boat isn't sleight of hand.
I don't think she is entirely to blame, but I think there is some blame for not standing up to Musk and leading better.
> I think there is some blame for not standing up to Musk and leading better.
That seems in the same category as saying there's some blame on her for not working harder on basketball in her youth and so never becoming a WNBA Finals MVP. (Narrator: Um, no, she's not nearly tall enough ....)
This analogy would work if she actually was the WNBA Finals MVP but didn't score a single point.
I'm just not sure her complete lack of power to stand up to Musk is a defense. If a controversial rich guy offers you a CEO job that consists entirely of laundering his reputation by pretending his decisions are your own, you have a social responsibility not to take it. I'd be more sympathetic if she were some random person who couldn't otherwise dream of an executive level pay package, but she was the head of ads at NBC.
> If a controversial rich guy offers you a CEO job that consists entirely of laundering his reputation by pretending his decisions are your own, you have a social responsibility not to take it.
I don't think you become the CEO of any major company by believing that "social responsibility" exists. Doesn't the job pretty much select for the type of person who thinks the world owes them $20+ million a year?
With that said - it's dumb to blame the puppet for the acts of the ventriloquist.
"just following orders" has been well established as no defense, and is more relevant than usual.
In a genocide context, sure. I don't think that applies here.
In general "just following orders" implies being morally bankrupt.
It’s Facebook that causes genocide, not Twitter. Funny how the left gives sick a far easier pass.
> a social responsibility not to take it
She was paid $6M a year + undisclosed stock package. A lot of people will set aside their morals for this amount of money.
She was making $4M at NBC! Again, I can imagine and be sympathetic towards a story where a billionaire gives you otherwise unimaginable wealth if only you'll sit in a comfy CEO office while they run the company around you. That isn't what happened here, and not because of some tactical mistake by Musk - her experience and connections as an ads executive for a major media company were at least a big part of why Musk wanted her, if not the entirety of it.
“We have established what you are, madam. We are now merely haggling over the price.”
I mean, you are hired as a CEO by Elon Musk, there must be some certain expectations on the capabilities of a CEO, and I think one of the first one is being able to stand up for yourself, if nothing else.
GP is specifically responding to
> Remarkably inept.
She did exactly what she was hired for. The plan was terrible, but she executed it as well as expected. It's hard to see any ineptitude.
She shut her mouth and didn’t cause trouble.
It is possible that people think that the valuation would be even worse if she wasn't the CEO. Unlikely, but possible.
> Valuation did drop during her tenure
Valuation also bounced back during her tenure.
No idea why the truth is being downvoted so heavily ? X is valued at $44 billion by the financial times as of March 2025.
> her legacy will forever be stained
Where can I sell my legacy for $6 million/year?
> Where can I sell my legacy for $6 million/year?
I know you meant your comment as sarcasm, but to do it, you need to have a legacy worth those kind of numbers to begin with, instead of selling your labor as most of us here do. It's not so different that celebrities associating themselves with brands through advertising.
And as distasteful as it seems to many of us, people like her spend years building their social networks and a reputation for various personality and behavioral traits in a boardroom.
Also, I doubt her legacy is closed at this point. The traditional next step would be to write a book based on her career capped off by her experiences at Twitter.
Sounds like a snooze.. But maybe someone will pay to not take chances.
My question is where does she go from here?
Like if she became my CEO, I'd really worry about my company/job.
Lots of corporate boards, university boards, nonprofit boards, etc. make room for folks like her. She understands something about social media and the digital future -- and even if that expertise doesn't impress many folks on HackerNews, it will seem quite sufficient and robust to the elderly trustees and big-donor board members of Pleurisy State University.
Being 62 is the perfect age for such roles. Young enough to climb a flight of stairs; old enough to nod appropriately to her new peers' references from the 1980s. Executive search firms will be eager to guide her into as many board roles as she might want.
Depends on how likely you think it is she's a puppet CEO for a drug crazed, edge lord, owner or if she'll actually be allowed to do the job.
She’s 62 years old. She can just retire.
Invest the 6mil and enjoy a carefree life?
$6M/y, for 2 years. $12M. I'd take the carefree life.
To some other founder/acquirer that wants to maintain control while putting somebody else in the seat.
You're acting like Elon is uniquely stupid.
Elon's level of stupid feels unique at first glance but then if you look at how many people elected the current president...well.
Which given the nature of democracy are many of the same as the people who elected the last one and the one before, etc. Are we not all snowflake-unique kinds of stupid?
My point of gratitude for today is that my level of stupid is not nearly as consequential to others as some folks'.
> My point of gratitude for today is that my level of stupid is not nearly as consequential to others as some folks'.
Ooh, a new life goal that I've already achieved, thanks!
You think he's just normal stupid? It's a minimum especially stupid
Politics! Or maybe management consultants. Lots of consulting jobs are really just about taking the blame.
And politics are about asigning the blame to someone else. :D
Failure can teach you a lot if you're willing to learn.
But did she actally fail?
With the tens of millions she made does she even need to go anywhere?
Lifestyles tend to expand to consume the money available.
I will do it for half that price....
Don't wait. Pick up your phone and Call Elon right now as this position is filling up fast.
Meta
What legacy?
She's not a well known public figure. She ran the ad department at NBC. Is now very rich and at age 61, close enough to retirement age.
Do you not think someone who ran the ad department at NBC has a reputation?
"Legacy" doesn't mean "guy-on-the-street's perception of you."
?? I don't guess a guy on the street would have ever spared a thought for the head of NBC's ad department.
Correct, which does not mean she doesn't have a legacy.
That's exactly what it does mean. If you're not famous, you have no legacy.
Legacy means having a lasting impact on society or culture. As another example, the average Joe Schmoe has no clue that Fabrice Bellard even exists, yet Bellard inarguably has one helluva legacy.
On the other hand, there are many people who are famous, but will probably leave no legacy.
True, one can not be famous but still have a lasting impact on society. This is not one of those cases.
That's the most npc thing I've ever heard.
If you have enough money, any age can be retirement age. The whole concept of "retirement" is really for the working class anyway.
The way I see it, her job had two parts - reign in Elon, and then run the show. But she couldn't (or wasn't interested in) doing the first part, and so her tenure was a failure. Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX does a great job at both, by contrast.
Shotwell is amazing. She runs SpaceX, which is rocket science, and she has to manage Musk, which is harder than rocket science.
There's a market for CEOs that are "puppets" or managed by another CEO. In that way I doubt her reputation is necessarily stained as anyone making that much money lives in a different world and under different terms than (presumably) you and I do.
Oh sure, I have no doubt she can get another cushy job if she wants it. I just mean that she has revealed herself as a coward at best, and a deplorable snake at worst.
No, she's just helping to sculpt the glass cliff.
She was hired to perform stunt, a nose-dive with the company.
Folks hired for something like that aren’t in it for “legacy”.
Perhaps if there was success she would have had no material power and not have been responsible for the success.
(1) She had no power
(2) If she did have power, nothing good happened during her tenure, so what would she even be thanked for?
I'm not suggesting she should be thanked. I'm suggesting that the failures listed are hard to ascribe to her ineptitude.
Right but the point was:
> *I love all the replies on Twitter thanking her* but during her time the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising. Remarkably inept.
What was there to thank her for?
Nothing! That's why I didn't comment on that. I commented on "remarkably inept."
Gotcha. I guess another episode of "both participants think the other is crazy"
My read wasn't that the "inept" was specifically her, but rather the leadership of the company at the time in general (for which, regardless, she is being thanked on Twitter). In other words, either
(1) she was a figurehead that didn't do anything and thanking her is stupid
(2) she wasn't a figurehead and actually was in charge, in which case thanking her is still stupid because such leadership was inept (suing their advertisers, etc.)
well, yes. but she now has a much enriched resume
> It's weird that you say both she had no material power and also seem to imply the valuation drop and lawsuits were due to her ineptitude?
Why is that weird? Say you have a company operating normally. The CEO dies and isn't replaced. Do you think it's weird for the company's value to drop?
> her legacy will forever be stained
I would like to believe that people can change over time.
She had one job, and that was to get Musk to keep his fucking mouth shut, at which she failed spectacularly.
> her legacy will forever be stained
Interesting. My hot take is 99% of the time non-founder CEOs end up on the dustbin of history, successful or unsuccessful.
Terry Semel. John Akers. John Sculley, Carly Fiorina. Except among those of us in tech, all are now long forgotten failures. Even Gil Amelio, who made one of the most genius acquisitions ever, was fired and his name lost to the sands of time. My bet is nobody's going to remember Tim Cook or Sundar or Satya in 50 years, maybe even 20.
Possibly the only non-founder CEO who has made a real legacy in the last 100 years is Elon. I would also say TJ Watson Jr. but I very much wonder if that many HN commenters know who he is!
I think the founders tend to have a love for the business and a long-term plan for it. Followup CEOs are more about the stock performance and happy to sell it for parts if it serves their bonus. Sundar and Satya took all of the strengths of those respective companies and burned them to the ground. Made a lot of money doing it, stockholders love them, but they're pale husks of their former businesses.
You may not like Elon Musk but he's doing remarkably well for someone who is "clearly off the rails".
Yes, corruption pays. Although if "doing remarkably well" means being addicted to ketamine, having many exes and children who refuse to speak with you, tanking multiple businesses to the point that your products get sabotaged just for being associated with you, getting booed off stages, licking the boots of fascists in the hope they'll let you call them "daddy", paying people to play online games for you to impress nerds (unsuccessfully, instead getting online-bullied for it), etc., etc., then I think I'd rather not "do remarkably well", thank you very much.
Elon does not seem like a happy man. Is money the only points humans score themselves by? It's like watching someone bragging about getting the highest ever score at a game that they hate.
> licking the boots of fascists in the hope they'll let you call them "daddy"
Which fascists?
German far-right party AfD?
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They are fascist.
What does sexual orientation or adopted daughter have to do it?
He basically used 31 words to say "I've never heard of Ernst Roehm," for whatever reason. I don't think you can read much more into his comment than that.
Do you mean that in the sense that he is licking the boots of so many fascists at once, including Trump, Xi Jinping, Putin, and any other fascist boot he can find, while calling them all daddy, that you're confused which of those many fascists feoren is referring to?
I’ve never seen so many political talking points packed into one HN comment.
You have a distorted view or reality. Elon seems pretty happy to me and is undeniably successful in business - arguably the most successful entrepreneur of our time. I don't know much about his personal life but I suspect that him having babies with multiple women is due to personal choices rather than a sign of misfortune. He certainly doesn't seem "off the rails" to me. That said, I can understand that his lifestyle is not for everyone.
The man literally got punched out of the whitehouse for substance abuse lol
His children break contact with him moment they become adults. If it wasn't for the money he would have been forbidden to see them long ago.
Everyone hates him on the left and the right.
If you consider a rich 50 year old creep doing drugs and going around impregnating young women and paying them to go away as successful? Then yes he is ..
What does being "successful in business" have to do with his personal life? Not to mention that most of the things you mentioned is based on questionable tabloid reporting.
Who said "successful in business?" No one except you, right here.
I said he was "off the rails", you said he is "doing remarkably well," and GP listed reasons he seems like a deeply unhappy and psychologically damaged person.
Now you're moving the goal posts to "successful in business". I guess your reflexive need to defend the world's richest person is rubbing up against the reality of the situation?
I was referring to his professional life when I said he was doing remarkably well - I don't know much about his personal life, and that wasn't the point of the discussion. What did you mean then by Yaccarino staining her legacy then? Are you implying she took advantage of Musk's vulnerable mental state?
> I guess your reflexive need to defend the world's richest person is rubbing up against the reality of the situation?
I'm not defending him, he just doesn't seem "off the rails" to me. Having children with multiple women might be unconventional, but I wouldn't take it as proof of being "a deeply unhappy and psychologically damaged person". As for drug addiction, that would be far more concerning, but given how high-functioning he appears to be, I'd be genuinely surprised if that were the case.
You thought that by "off the rails" I was suggesting that the world's richest man is doing badly in business? No you didn't. I think you're lying.
If you did, then clearly you require far more effort to communicate with than is worth conjuring up.
I didn’t get what you meant, since he doesn't come across that way to me, and doing remarkably well in business seems pretty incompatible with being "off the rails." Believe it or not, quite a few people here are seriously arguing that he's failing in business.
Sounds good!
Commander Worf: "Captain, sensors are picking up a huge distortion up ahead. It appears to be... a reality distortion field."
> due to personal choices rather than a sign of misfortune
What would be the difference, exactly?
No he isnt.
Tesla is going to down the shitter and he is trying to fool everyone that it suddenly is now an AI company lol with a disaster rollout for his taxis. Waymo is going to eat them for lunch. Driverless taxis with people overseeing things in the car lol Wow. Such autonomy. He also didnt even create the company. He basically stole it from some other guys who actually founded and built the early stages of tesla.
He doesnt and isnt capable of running SpaceX. Their current CEO and tech lead is the person who runs the business and is actually knowledgable in the space industry and space engineering. Elon? Oh he just is there for the launches.
His neuralink and xAI? lol Ok. Yes Im sure we will see a lot coming out of those businesses with most government and people know shunning his business's and himself. Oh and new version of a nazi LLM. Cant wait to use it. And Twitter. Wow so much great discourse and sensible conversation that it competes with truth social.
Yes, he is doing remarkably well because he has money. Just like Pablo escoabr had money. The leaders of Enron were also doing remarkably well for a while. What about the guy who ran that ponzi scheme? Maddof. Yes he was also doing remarkably well since no one knew the bullshit he was generating. Elon is a fraud like all these other successful people who may have created businesses but hide the bullshit well for now. One day though, it will all come crashing down. Then you and all other sheep will look like greater fools than you do now. You still have time to come to your senses. Just dont be a sheep and glorify any man or exalt him above others. Its quite simple. He is no genius. He is someone who takes advantage and exploit others for his personal gain and is more destructive to society today than he has ever been and people like you are contributing to it so congrats to screwing over other people.
Elon Musk is doing well now the same way Elvis Presley or Howard Hughs were doing well in their final years.
I think Bernie Made-Off is a better comparison. It will all come crashing down
[dead]
Like, financially? Sure. I don't think that was ever in dispute.
In what sense is he "off the rails" then?
My eleventh wife just gave birth to my 58th child. Musk seems perfectly normal to me /s
So you mean that he is weird?
If I were to explore that in more detail, it would cross into armchair psychiatry, which would break my word to @dang
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32028649
Well, very weird... which would be "off the rails"
Really good call out. Hitting someone from above & below seems not quite square.
In my view, there was plenty of opportunity to make a mark & do things, even with a ultra involved Musk.
But this person didn't bring much product leadership, didn't have a vision for the product. Having good business relationships might have been its own core competency, but whether Linda's fault or no, suing and going after businesses to try to score some vengeance for your own terrible behavior, and maybe coerce some people back: that's a terrible tactless look, that one would hope a leader like Linda could have helped steer away from.
I don't think this is what was happening. It's weird that people are thanking her when she functionally did nothing of value while the company has been spiraling. Either she was complicit in the whole thing, or she really did nothing at all. In either case, what is there for the users to thank?
I don't think she ever was a fall guy, Elon run a poll on should someone else be CEO of Twitter and lost the poll. It was quite entertaining, He didn't seem happy with the outcome and probably had to pay CEO level salary due to the stunt.
"The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon in which women are more likely to break the "glass ceiling" (i.e. achieve leadership roles in business and government) during periods of crisis or downturn when the risk of failure is highest."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
Is this what happened at Reddit? I feel like they made some unpopular changes and used Ellen Pao as a patsy.
She was mainly brought on to fix relationships with advertisers, they were just pulling out that time because of rampant nazi and hate speech (by users) on the platform, after they fired the content moderation teams. I think she did what she could over the last 2 years and some of the ad revenue came back, but after the latest MechaHitler escapades I guess she got some texts from people...
You might have a point if he didn't ignore every other one of those polls he ran.
Twitter valuation dropped for two primary reasons:
1) Most tech valuations dropped about 50%-80% in between Elon's offer and Reddit formally accepting it. This was the end of the 2021 tech boom.
2) Elon being a moron and turning off brand advertisers in any way he can when direct response ads don't really work on the platform.
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The owner of Twitter sieg heiled twice in front of millions of viewers. There is no need for anybody else to prove anything.
Those attacks happened way before. If you don’t see that someone is trying to build a narrative here - I’m sorry for you.
So the narrative Antifa were working so hard to build turned out to be true? Well then I guess the joke's on them for having wasted their time.
his own fucking 'ai' was nazi posting, wtf are you talking about?
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> The most immaterial and inconsequential hire ever.
I understand she did convince a lot of advertisers to come back and provided a veneer of credibility.
Given the circumstances, is an 80% drop that bad? Many people were expecting Twitter to simply go bankrupt. Perhaps she's the one that saved Twitter.
> the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising
That already happened before she got onboard.
> One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster.
One time? She has spoken publicly many times. Care to share more about what you are referring to? I have no recollection of such a thing being done by her.
It's not easy to recover from your unpredictable boss shouting "FU" to your advertisers from a stage.
Genuinely, I wasn't even aware that Musk had actually done the initially promised thing of appointing a different CEO.
Top executives fail upwards. She did exactly what she set out to do.
Hiring her would be a favour to Elon. She likely knew this when she took the job.
She got her bag and got out. Seems perfectly rational to me.
if she had no power to make decisions then how would the company's decline in valuation be her fault?
it didnt drop 80%:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elo...
Even if the valuation is the same (seems unlikely), a fairly small rate of inflation on that sum of money is likely to be a number that matters.
"lost money due to inflation" (or even "lost money compared to an equivalent investment is a basket of similar stocks" is very different claim than "lost 80% of value". Currently the stock is down less than 10% from the purchase price (41 billion vs 44 billion).
Down 10% vs 80% is the kind of egregious factual "error" that gets made so frequently around Musk, that it is hard to take any criticism at face value. You don't like the guy and want to call him out? Get your facts straight or you're being counter productive.
A breathless defence against points never made.
> One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster.
Context?
So you are saying Elon musk is inept?
We all know who wanted to sue advertisers, we aren't stupid.
You’re saying two things:
- she is inept
- she never had any say (which I interpret, perhaps incorrectly, that she is competent but had her hands were tied)
Which is it?
Arguably a competent person wouldn't have persisted in a role where it was obvious they were not able to make a meaningful difference.
Can’t speak for her, obviously, but personally I tend to wait to make my exit once I know the role is not working out
If I were in her shoes, I would have known I was going to leave during the worst of his tantrums, but I would have timed my exit for a more graceful moment.
Dramatically bailing out during a storm would not be a good look for an exec who wants another key role somewhere else
If she were trying to time it, this timing seems weird. This is literally the day after Grok kept posting anti-semitism, praising Hitler, and calling itself MechaHitler. This might not be the least graceful moment for an exit, but there were so many more graceful exit times.
FTA this was announced last week to employees.
"Ms. Yaccarino had discussed her plans to leave with X employees earlier this week, before the incident with Grok"
The speed at which replies mentioning Groks Nazi freakout get downvoted here make me really question where things are headed..
All the race science phrenology bullshit is coming out of Silicon Valley. It's not a surprise to me that HN would be full of people "just reading the stats".
Another possibility is that she was fired.
You'd be insane to leave a job with such few responsibilities and such insane compensation. Set for life.
Some might argue there are more important things in life than compensation.
Self-respect, for example.
Unless you think said job is edging into "oh shit I might be part of the Nuremberg Trials II" territory.
Life got short for quite a few historical Nazis.
Sure, and I agree, but that's not really related to what GP is saying
It's related to what you are saying. It's a non-monetary reason it'd be non-insane to leave the role; "set for life" doesn't do you much good if you're in The Hague.
No, it's not. Here, I'll repeat the context for you:
> > Arguably a competent person wouldn't have persisted in a role where it was obvious they were not able to make a meaningful difference.
> You'd be insane to leave a job with such few responsibilities and such insane compensation. Set for life.
Pay special attention to the phrasing "a role". We are not talking about specifically this role.
> You'd be insane to leave a job with such few responsibilities and such insane compensation. Set for life.
Again: you would not be insane to do so if staying in the job has substantial non-compensation consequences. Like jail.
My guess of what they meant; On the assumption she had influence she was unable to use that influence prevent a collapse in value. It's a hedge to cover both options.
Influencing the person pulling the strings is also a key skill. I won’t colour her entire person as inept but perhaps, wrong person wrong time. Musk doesn’t like or need yes men but if you say no him or want to try something different, you better have a well thought out idea/plan. There lies the challenge. How do you impress upon a very intelligent individual ever so often? Very few can.
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Bullshit. Look how normal it is for people on X to cens*r c*rtain w*rds to avoid having their posts downranked.
Isn't the X ranking algorithm open source? Does it have hardcoded keywords or how does this censoring work?
It's not open source.
> Top executives regularly come and go at Mr. Musk’s various companies. One exception is Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, who joined Mr. Musk’s rocket company shortly after its founding in 2002.
That's an amazingly long tenure under Musk. And considering SpaceX's success, she must be an exceptional leader.
I wonder what people like her who were around Musk in the early days think of him now. It’s striking how much he’s changed. When I see videos of him speaking 20, even 10 years ago, he seems much more grounded, inspired, maybe even intellectual.
Something has happened to him I feel. Maybe drugs brought out the storm inside that was always there.
It's also possible he hasn't changed much as a person and just stopped listening to his personal branding advisors.
history shows that becoming extremely wealthy and powerful often changes people in bad ways
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Well that was sudden. Did Elon ask her to bear some children? Or offered a horse?
Maybe TC was going to be paid in sinks.
Mechahitler was likely the trigger.
She was still there?
I didn't even know that Twitter had a CEO that wasn't Musk.
Twitter CEO - Chief Excuse Offerer
What an utter joke this whole CEO-in-name-only setup has been since Day 1. Glad she is finally seeing the light.
Oh I really imagined that it said that she was leaving twitter (not calling it X) as in leaving the account / social media / platform (not the company)
I would prefer if we could have a little more clarity but hey, It was funny reading in that way too.
The AP News story[1] had a tidbit I missed:
Yaccarino is obviously not Executive Of The Year, but what are you supposed to do when your boss is even more reckless and stupid than Donald Trump? I'm surprised it took this long.[1] https://apnews.com/article/x-ceo-linda-yaccarino-elon-musk-g...
Yeah, never understood why she took this job. It could only really end one way.
I'd take a pretty shitty job for $6 million dollars a year in salary before bonuses. Especially when everyone knows I'm not the one actually making the decisions so all the failures can get laid at someone else's feet (appropriately).
* X reported 2024 adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of about $1.25 billion and annual revenue of $2.7 billion.*
In her farewell tweet:
> Groundbreaking innovations like community notes
This existed on Twitter before Musk bought Twitter, and was likely borrowed from community wiki section on Stack Overflow at a minimum, if not from earlier sites. Not an X innovation.
Advertising executives are professional liars and manipulators. They even lie about the fact that they're not that.
Don't worry, nobody still on Twitter has ever cared about what actually happens in reality
It is perhaps just a coincidence that this happened the day after “Mecha-Hitler” Grok going on racist screeds and going into lurid sexual fantasies about her in particular for the whole world to see. But it does look bad.
I really would not be surprised if "being sexually harassed by MechaHitler" was the last straw.
She didn’t do nothing there
this is just a bottom of the drawer news they could pick the time to release (as all comments here prove, the hiring, the duration, and the firing, were all inconsequential for anything whatsoever)
So, why fire now? What news would be getting attention instead, of the 600 comments here and who knows how many on xitter?
edit: not sure why my ctrl-f 'grok' missed it, maybe I hadn't let the nytimes modal load thing load the bottom of the article.
how fascinating that the NY Times didn't find any room to mention in the article that despite this:
> She did not provide a reason for her departure.
it might possibly be related to the Elon's custom-tuned Grok LLM spent the last twenty four hours becoming even more Nazi-y?
seems fairly relevant especially given she didn't give any actual reason.
You didn't read the article then
> Ms. Yaccarino had discussed her plans to leave with X employees earlier this week, before the incident with Grok, two people familiar with the matter said. xAI is largely separate from X, but Grok’s responses are often widely cited — and criticized — across the platform.
Not everything is about the current news cycle.
That paragraph must have been recently edited in (and thereby validating OP's complaint) as it isn't in the archive/paywell circumventing version at https://archive.ph/9zvHZ. For those of us without a NYT subscription, can you tell us whether it puts any description to "the incident with Grok"?
The Nazi robot is probably a good signal to get out.
“prepare 3 envelopes” always leaves out the “what to do in case of Nazi robot” part.
Tangential, I still find it absurd people accept calling it X instead of Twitter. While I'd generally agree that most companies can change their name, encroaching on a basic letter should be off limits, like naming your company "The" or "God".
Still sticking with Twitter until a reasonable name is found, which by Musk is never.
I used to Find the renaming a bit ridiculous, but in light of the sweeping platform changes, I find that making the distinction between twitter, the somewhat reasonable microblog platform and x, the far-right psyops operation is useful.
Also there is some honesty in making the logo a half-drawn swastika.
> like naming your company "The" or "God".
or naming a product "Word" or "Office" or "Windows". :)
Microsoft naming makes sense if you imagine that the person that came up with the names was stoned, like high on weed.
"Yo dude, to use the spreadsheets you've got to like excel and stuff. ", "When you make your point it's gotta be powerful. ", "Ain't my point having a database if you can't access it. ", "A: I need a tool to write my book, it's gonna change the world. B: Word bro, word. ", "Bro, you have to connect with people to expand your outlook on life, the world and stuff. ".
Those can be easily identified as "Microsoft Word", "Microsoft Office" and "Microsoft Windows". However "X" is the name of the company and the product.
I guess you could refer to it as "X The Everything App" or using the incredibly corny and near-immediately-binned tagline "X: Blaze Your Glory!" but I've only ever seen those used by people making fun of the product, company, Elon or all three.
Microsoft is notorious for naming stuff in a way that makes it impossible to search for information. It is quite annoying.
For this reason it's essentially impossible to search for solutions to the many bugs in Windows' Multiple Desktops
But at least you can search for "Microsoft Office" to counter the issue. Plus, they have the excuse that they have been doing this since before the Web existed, literally.
What do you do with X? "X social"? Ludicrous.
.NET, lol.
> While I'd generally agree that most companies can change their name, encroaching on a basic letter should be off limits
To me it's the other way around. If the platform had been named X from the start, then a language would have developed around it, including what its messages are called, or what verb is used to refer to posting a message. We, the public, wouldn't have known any better. With Twitter, we do know better — better name, better nouns, better verbs (even a better logo; but that's by the by). Bosses can rename their products as much as they like; it's just surprising to me that we as a public so obligingly give up this tiny bit of our language.
> like naming your company "The" or "God".
Consider truth social :-) I am amazed people agree to call the messages there 'truths', and reposts, 'retruths'. So embarrassing.
"Tweets" was already an embarrassing term. We used to be fine with just "posts" or "comments" instead of trying to put the company branding in every term.
> Consider truth social :-) I am amazed people agree to call the messages there 'truths', and reposts, 'retruths'. So embarrassing.
The most Orwellian shit ever.
The official newspaper of Russian Communists was also called Truth (Pravda).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravda
> If the platform had been named X from the start, then a language would have developed around it, including what its messages are called, or what verb is used to refer to posting a message.
I'm not really sure. Some things don't compound, that's why I think a preposition for instance would make a bad name. But even if you may be right, I still want to put up a fight against corporate entities trying to take over basic concepts (X, the unknown, the letter that marks the spot, etc.). I don't want to be forced to use your name if your name is an absurdity, the same way I can't make a brand called "Trump is an idiot" (even if it's true).
I wonder if the purpose of naming it „X“, just like naming „Facebook“ meta is to do the opposite of SEO: Make it harder to find news pertaining to the company and their scandals.
A UK politician lay down in the House of Commons in order to fill the search indices with "Jacob Rees-Mogg lying"
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/jacob-reesmogg-admi...
Facebook is still called Facebook.
Shed Simove actually did this, with some funny results: https://www.shedsimove.com/content/i-changed-my-name-god
Same with Facebook / Meta; the "metaverse" they tried to pivot the company to cost them billions and failed spectacularly. Google is still Google, not Alphabet, although separating the overarching org from the search engine / internet services branch was logical. They tried to pivot to social media with Circles, upheaving the whole company. The only good thing that (from an outsider's POV anyway) came out of that was unifying their logins across services.
I agree but given that the original twitter logo was a bird, It's nice to call it an "Ex Twitter" (Cf. Monty Python's dead parrot sketch)
I like to call it X-Twitter.
In a way it is correct, since when spoken it sounds like you're saying ex-twitter.
How about B, C, C++, C#, D?
It sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder.
It's interesting how things change. Internet used to be against copyright and for the right to choose how to call oneself. And now it's for copyright and against the self naming thing.
I'm actually for self-naming in general, it's just that there should be some common sense limits to self-naming. There's a reason why we differentiate between common and proper nouns.
The worst part, in my opinion, is that people fell for it. Instead of hearing a split second two syllable "twitter", we now keep hearing "X, formerly known as twitter".
That's 8 syllables. You just gave 4x free advertisement for absolutely no good reason. You're the sucker.
I like to shorten it to ex-twitter. Pun intended of course.
She's the ex-CEO of a private company owned by a billionaire. What power did she really have?
If the company was still public, then all the stupid shit Elon Musk did would put her in a much stronger place as the adult in the room during board meetings.
The things done to Twitter since it became X is a form of cultural vandalism that should never be forgotten in the history of the web. It will be a cautionary tale for decades to come.
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/technology/linda-yaccarin...
TIL you can "gift" NYTimes articles access. Sounds weird but thanks stranger!
Edit: and to pay back (?), https://archive.is/Cn2hA
She was never in charge of anything at X, the title is doing a disservice to the public.
She is leaving the company, not the platform
True. It's a misleading headline.
Some non-paywalled sources:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/09/tech/linda-yaccarino-step...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2gy3j9xq6o
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/x-ceo-ste...
etc
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They had literally added (and now removed) a system prompt to be politically incorrect. I'm sure no other LLM has that.
https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50...
I suspect it has more to do with alignment fine-tuning.
The other LLMs don't have a "disbelieve reputable sources" unsafety prompt added at the owner's instructions.
It's gotta be more than that too though. Maybe training data other companies won't touch? Hidden prompt they aren't publishing? Etc.
Clearly Musk has put his hand on the scale in multiple ways.
I think they just told grok to favor conservative "sources" and it became "mechahitler" as the result.
It was starting N.... chains yesterday along with several other 4chan memes, so its definitely ingested a dataset consisting of at least 4chan posts that any sane company wouldn't touch with a 1000ft pole.
> Maybe training data other companies won't touch
That's a bingo. 3 weeks ago, Musk invited[1] X users to Microsoft-Tay[2] Grok by having them share share "divisive facts", then presumably fed the over 10,000 responses into the training/fine-tuning data set.
1. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1936493967320953090
2. In 2016, Microsoft decided to let its Tay chatbot interact, and learn from Twitter users, and was praising Hitler in short order. They did it twice too, before shutting it down permanently. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
That tweet seems like the bigger story.
I've seen lots of deflection saying Yaccarino chose to retire prior to Grok/MechaHitler, but the tweet predates that.
Even more deflection about how chatbots are easy to bait into saying weird things, but you don't need to bait when it has been specifically trained on it.
All of this was intentional. Musk is removing more of the mask, and he doesn't need Yaccarino to comfort advertisers any more.
I think it's more so that they push changes quickly without exhaustively testing. Compare that to Google, who sits on a model for years for fear of hurting their reputation, or OpenAI and Anthropic who extensively red teams models
Why does Grok keep "failing" in the same directional way if its just a testing issue?
Tbf, it must be difficult for LLMs to align all the WWII propaganda that's still floating around.
Given the source of training data is primarily the internet, and not say scanned propaganda posters in museums, I'd have to imagine all the analyses or things attributed to the impact of world war 2 significantly outnumber uncritical publications of ww2 propaganda in the training sets.
What
All LLM's are capable of producing really vile completions if prompted correctly -- after all, there's a lot of vile content in the training data. OpenAI does a lot of work fine tuning them to steer them away from it. It's just as easy to fine tune them to produce more.
In fact, there was an interesting paper showed that fine tuning an LLM to produce malicious code (ie: with just malicious code examples in response to questions, no other prompts), causes it to produce more "evil" results in completely unrelated tasks. So it's going to be hard for Musk to cherry pick particular "evil" responses in fine tuning without slanting everything it does in that direction.
Could you use one LLM to filter out such bad training data before using it to train another one? Do they do this already?
You don't actually want to filter out "bad" training data. That this stuff exists is an important fact about the world. It's mostly just fine tuning to make sure it produces output that align with whatever values you want it to have. The models do assign a moral dimension to all of it's concepts, so if you fine tune it so that it's completions match your desired value system, it'll generally do what you expect, even if somewhere deep in the data set there is training data diametrically opposed to it.
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I guess the Nazi chatbot was the last straw. Amazed she lasted this long, honestly.
As chief, her job is, amongst others, making sure that type of thing doesn’t happen.
Outcomes suggests she failed at that.
Hopefully the next chief will be better.
She was was never the chief, only the chief's main administrator.
"Assistant to the regional manager". [1]
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA9kQuWkU7I
Her only true role was to fulfill Musk's silly promise to step down as CEO after a public vote. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097
You don't think Elon went behind her back constantly? You think the next CEO will have more to say? She pretended to be in charge, she got paid, good for her. What are you hoping for. X is a dump, and the sooner it goes away the better for everybody.
She was CEO of X which was sold to xAI. I'm not sure she had any control over Grok.
Physical restraint is the only thing that would stop him and I imagine he rolls with security so…
There's only one way to stop Elon Musk from doing erratic, value-destroying things like that, and that's to ambush him in the parking lot with a tire iron.
Yaccarino doesn't strike me as the type.
I'm surprised the NYT article does not even mention it.
The NYT had already sourced that she was leaving prior to the Grok incident, so they knew it was not the primary reason. Apparently, she has been planning on leaving since the takeover by xAI.
Hasn't the bot done that thing before? And she stayed?
The bot has said fairly horrendous stuff before, which would cross the line for most people. It had not, however, previously called itself 'MechaHitler', advocated the holocaust, or, er, whatever the hell this is: https://bsky.app/profile/whstancil.bsky.social/post/3ltintoe...
It has gone from "crossing the line for most ordinary decent people" to "crossing the line for anyone who doesn't literally jerk off nightly to Mein Kampf", which _is_ a substantive change.
It turns out bluesky is useful after all, as an ad hoc archive of X. Xd
Not at this level, no.
6mil a year for a job where she has no power why even show up...
What is the Nazi chatbot?
Grok, the xAI chatbot, went full neo-nazi yesterday:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/grok-ai-p...
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How much prompt engineering was required to have Musk say the same kind of stuff?
The article points out the likely faulty prompts, they were introduced by xAI.
Is this what happened in reality? Otherwise how is your theory applicable to this case?
There's no mystery to it: if one trains a chatbot explicitly to eschew establishment narratives, one persona the bot will develop is that of an edgelord.
“which 20th century historical figure would be best suited to deal with this problem?” is not exactly sophisticated prompt engineering.
Can you though?
Yes. LLMs mirror humanity.
AI “alignment” is a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.
To me, and I'm guessing the reason Linda left is not that Grok said these things. Tweaking chatbots is hard, yes prompt engineering can help say anything, but I'm guessing it's her sense of control and governance, not wanting to have to constantly clean up Musk's messes.
Musk made a change recently, he said as much, he was all move fast and break things about it, and I imagine Linda is tired of dealing with that, and this probably coincided with him focusing on the company more, having recently left politics.
We can bikeshed on the morality of what AI chatbots should and shouldn't say, but it's really hard to manage a company and product development when you such a disorganized CTO.
Left politics? He said he is forming his own political party.
Ha, good point, left the white house anyways.
... yes, that's the complaint. The prompt engineering they did made it spew neo-Nazi vitriol. They either did not adequately test it beforehand and didn't know what would happen, or they did test and knew the outcome—either way, it's bad.
Long live Tay! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
Tay (allegedly) learned from repeated interaction with users; the current generation of LLMs can't do that. It's trained once and then that's it.
Do you think that Tay's user-interactions were novel or perhaps race-based hatred is a consistent/persistent human garbage that made it into the corpus used to train LLMs?
We're literally trying to shove as much data as possible into these things afterall.
What I'm implying is that you think you made a point, but you didn't.
It was an interesting demonstration of the politically-incorrect-to-Nazi pipeline though.
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I’m going to say that is also bad. Hot take?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504709 ("Elon Musk's Grok praises Hitler, shares antisemitic tropes in new posts"—16 hours ago; 89 comments)
"Weirdly" always gets flagged almost immediately even though it's quite tech relevant.
With 8 points in an hour, my post drawing attention to this is missing from the front pages.
HN is censoring news about X / Twitter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44511132
https://web.archive.org/web/20250709152608/https://news.ycom...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250709172615/https://news.ycom...
Naughty Ol' Mr Car's fanboys tend to flag anything that makes Dear Leader look bad. Surprised this one hasn't been nuked yet, tbh.
Yes, sensing this trend at HN lately
grok yesterday.
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Censoring hard is not the defining feature that makes one a Nazi. It's the part think that you think is OK.
grok was praising hitler...
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Related discussions from the past 12 hrs for those catching up:
Elon Musk's Grok praises Hitler, shares antisemitic tropes in new posts
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504709
Musk's AI firm deletes posts after chatbot praises Hitler
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507419
see here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44510635
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Yeah that's not even close to what's going on here. Grok is literally bringing up Hitler in unrelated topics.
https://bsky.app/profile/percyyabysshe.bsky.social/post/3lti...
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Direct evidence abounds. X is deleting the worst cases, but plenty are archived before they do.
https://archive.is/fJcSV
https://archive.is/I3Rr7
https://archive.is/QLAn0
https://archive.is/OgtpS
Not defending Elon or the infobot but my theory is that by leaving that LLM unfiltered people have learned how to gamify and manipulate it into having a fascist slant. I could even guess which groups of people are doing it but I will let them take credit and it's not likely actual neo-nazi's, they are too dumb and on too many drugs to manipulate an infobot. These groups like to LARP to piss everyone off and they often succeed. If I am right it is a set of splintered groups formerly referred to generically as The Internet Hate Machine but they have (d)evolved into something worse that even 4chan could not tolerate.
It's just the prompt: https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50...
People who don't understand llms think saying don't shy away from making claims that are politically incorrect means it won't PC. In reality saying that just makes things associated with politically incorrect more likely. The /pol/ board is called politically incorrect, the ideas people "call" politically incorrect most of all are not Elon's vague centrist stuff it's the extreme stuff. LLMs just track probable relations between tokens, not meaning, it having this result based on that prompt is obvious.
We have no evidence to suggest that they just made a prompt change and it dialed up the 4chan weights. This repository is a graveyard where a CI bot occasionally makes a text diff, but we have no understanding if it's connected with anything deployed live or not.
The mishap is not the chatbot accidentally getting too extreme and at odds with 'Elon's centrist stuff'. The mishap is the chatbot is too obvious and inept about Musk's intent.
it's almost like Grok takes "politically incorrect" to be synonymous with racist.
> it's not likely actual neo-nazi's, they are too dumb to manipulate an infobot.
No they are not. There exist brilliant people and monkeybrains across the whole population and thus the political spectrum. The ratios might be different, but I am pretty sure there exist some very smart neo-nazis
There are, but fascism's internal cultural fixtures are more aesthetic than intellectual. It doesn't really attract or foster intellectuals like some radical political movements do, and it shows very clearly in the composition of the "rank and file".
Put plainly, the average neo-Nazi is astonishingly, astonishingly stupid.
> It doesn't really attract or foster intellectuals like some radical political movements do
It definitely attracts people who are competent in technology and propaganda is sufficient numbers for the task being discussed, especially when as a mass movement it has (or is perceived to have) a position of power that advantage-seeking people want to exploit. If anything, the common perception that fascists are "astonishingly, astonishingly stupid" makes this more attractive for people who are both competent and also amoral opportunists (which do occur together, competence and moral virtue aren't particularly correlated.)
Curtis Yarvin’s writing is insufferable and many of his ideas are both bad and effectively Nazism, but clearly he’s very smart (and very eager to prove it).
Yarvin is an out-and-out white nationalist, though he denies it, or at least the name: "I am not a white nationalist, though I am not exactly allergic to the stuff" - whatever the hell that mealy-mouthed answer is meant to mean.
He even wrote a bloviating article to further clarify that he is not a white nationalist. You'd be forgiven, though, if you didn't read the title. It spends most of the article sympathizing with, understanding, agreeing with, and talking of how white nationalism "resonates" with him. But don't worry, he swears he's not one at the end of the article!
It sure didn’t seem to take much manipulation from what I saw. “Which 20th century figure would solve our current woes” is pretty mild input to produce “Hitler would solve everything!”
I'm out of the loop, why is it an "infobot" and not a chatbot?
In 1999 there was a perl chatbot called infobot that could be taught factoids, truths, lies. It would learn anything people chatted about on IRC. So I call LLM's infobots.
Neat, thanks for explaining.
> Not defending Elon or the infobot but my theory is that by leaving that LLM unfiltered people have learned how to gamify and manipulate it into having a fascist slant.
We don't need a theory that explains how Grok got a fascist slant, we know exactly what happened: Musk promise to remove the "woke" from Grok, and what's left is Nazi. [1]
[1] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/07/08/tech/grok-ai-antisemitism
> we know exactly what happened
The price of certainty is inaccuracy.
So the only way to be accurate is to vaguely gesture at hodgepodge theories and suggestions that people "do their own research"?
Surely you can be both accurate and certain, otherwise you should just shut up and be right all the time.
> So the only way to be accurate is to vaguely gesture at hodgepodge theories and suggestions that people "do their own research"?
Yours was a hodgepodge theory. That's why I said that. I was advocating against hodgepodge theories in general, and yours in particular.
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That LLM is incredibly filtered, just in a different way from others. I suspect by "retraining" the model Elon actually means that they just updated the system prompt, which is exactly what they have done for other hacked in changes like preventing the bot from criticizing Trump/Elon during the election.
No, that's definitely not what happened. For quite a while Grok actually seemed to have a surprisingly left-leaning slant. Then recently Elon started pushing the South African "white genocide" conspiracy theory, and Grok was sloppily updated and started pushing that same conspiracy theory even in unrelated threads. Last week Elon announced another update to Grok, which coincided with this dramatic right-wing swing in Grok's responses. This change cannot be blamed on public interactions like Microsoft's Tay, it's very clearly the result of a deliberate update, whether or not these results were intentional.
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hot diggity dog
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deranged. "far left" is anything you don't agree with. also, almost none of the people from before musk are actually gone, the only difference is a dramatic increase in antisocial nazi bots and the groypers being more bold.
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I really wonder what prompts people to lie like this. Paid trolls has always seemed rather far fetched, but what's the alternative?
I know there are blind people who think something is a lie.
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surely there are better things to be commenting on?
You're jealous!
Old advice: If you have nothing good to say, best to say nothing at all.
So dumb some people call it "X"
Who?
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Who cares? What I’m curious about is if Elon will pay her what she must have negotiated: a golden parachute.
Linda's tenure was an overwhelming success if you judge it according to what her assigned goals probably were:
1) Moved X out of woke censorship into a highly liberal (in the permissive sense of the word) free speech platform, while at the same time...
2) Improved the X brand safety such that nearly all advertisers are back on the platform.
We forget how much at odds these two goals were a couple years ago, but the overton window has shifted a lot since then so it doesn't seem as big a deal.
Her tenure was an "overwhelming success" if you don't know what either of those words mean.
Point number 2, was a great success with a controversial owner.
discord is manned in 20s-30s employee, valve who makes steam is also has small number of team
if you thinking you need 500s employee or something well you are wrong since many company do this for a long time and still do well
for example they fire legal team division and offload that into external agency
they just fire all "administration" related people and keep the bulk of engineering team which they should since tech company being lean is most advantage of tech company has
I assume he's reviving a new drive at internal consolidation and reviving the internal efficiency of X. This would be a good start considering this CEO's track record so far. She served a certain purpose and it's workable to replace her.
As for Musk's ownership of X itself, and his buying it: If I had been in his shoes, i'd have tried to squeeze for a lower price maybe, but the company was a worthwhile acquisition and the future is too long, with too many complex turns for anyone to clearly say whether his ownership of it is a business failure or a long-view piece of wisdom. What he controls now is still relevant, and if certain political/social winds change, could be more relevant still down the road. In either case, it could easily be a valuable political and business tool for Musk himself, for many years to come.
I simply don't see the destructiveness and failure that many people, here on this site and elsewhere have ranted about with Musk buying Twitter. Even with the firings and brand change, well, how necessary did those staffers end up being? Not much as it turns out. Better to have gotten rid of them during the initial chaos of a handover, when you can in any case expect problems from all corners, and then work on rebuilding with a fresh and company-aligned base that works to ensure stability down the road.
Being the richest man in the world, and one who has already assembled two consecutive historically noteworthy companies (Tesla and SpaceX), Musk is certainly not stupid even if his personality can be grotesque at times, some of the comments here claiming otherwise have no rational fucking clue what they're talking about. They speak from emotion, perhaps driven by ideological fixation, but not based on the visible evidence over multiple decades.
Why not respond with an actual rebuttal of these points instead of downvoting? Are you 12-year-old schoolkids?
I don't think anyone has any interest in "debating" you. Personally, I don't get into arguments with people who do not seem connected to reality. There is no point in it. That seems like the sort of thing a 12 year old would do. You'd probably find more purchase with your arguments at an adolescent playground anyway.
>I simply don't see the destructiveness and failure that many people, here on this site and elsewhere have ranted about with Musk buying Twitter.
Did you not see Grok yesterday? Or the general proliferation of disgusting racism all over X since Musk took over? No? Oh well. Hence, my point about reality.
Hence the idiocy of downvoting.
What's disconnected from reality in what I said? As for Grok, so? It's an LLM and all of them are prone to saying all kinds of invented bullshit. Are you seriously going to get morally scandalized by an LLM parrot, with no self-awareness, saying some racist nonsense? It would be better to know how it was prompted into this, and by whom, then blame them more specifically.
Also note that I was referring to X having the potential to be a valuable asset to Musk, and a business asset that grows back in value in a financial/user sense. I didn't mention any moral considerations. That aside, even if it's loaded with racism, do you think other social media platforms aren't? Or in other cases, aren't loaded with their own brand of intolerant fanaticism?
To call a social network deploraable is fine, but at least should be done with a bit of perspective for your own personal biases in favor of or against anything, and of course, it's useful to remember that something being morally deplorable to a bunch of people doesn't translate to it being a bad business, or a failure in that sense for its owner.
Either way, Musk is definitely a narcissist and almost certainly strays off into derangement at times, but a stupid man, no, and even with X it's shortsighted to say anything about failure.
None of this is in good faith. I'm not morally scandalized by Grok. I'm morally scandalized that they would make it do that. I'm sure you're going to argue some ridiculous semantic point about how Grok actually did it all on its own. It definitely did not spontaneously turn on hitler shit.
>Either way, Musk is definitely a narcissist and almost certainly strays off into derangement at times, but a stupid man, no, and even with X it's shortsighted to say anything about failure.
He sounds dumb pretty much every time he opens his mouth. I haven't heard him say anything intelligent. Good business man? If you insist. Total moron in my book. That's for sure.
Have fun.
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