alt Hacker NewsI'll be stepping back from leading product for X
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The long press blurred image thing was a disaster, the app no longer usable.
There are some of us who are old enough to remember Twitter’s true time of “unprecedented growth.”
I miss old Twitter.
I thought it would be a decent guy saying he wouldn't work anymore for unethical companies. How is just someone realizing his profits. No news here.
People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there seems to be even more internal stuff he's improved that we haven't seen.
Haha, he seemed to do a pretty good job in the end. I stopped posting on Twitter the week Charlie Kirk got shot because I didn't want to watch a guy shot and Twitter is less controlled about this stuff. I've since gone back to read because it's definitely a good source for AI news, which I am interested in. He was given a couple of bum deals haha. The link deboosting one is something he kept going around telling people they didn't have to do but Elon's decision there stuck and now everyone does the "link in comments" thing. Watching him go around saying "hey, btw you don't have to do that" to everyone prominent was quite amusing. Did he have a social media intern dedicated to doing just that?
Maybe it is me, but for a random Wednesday in August there have been a strange amount of big moves today. Normally you expect quiet or nonsense.
The first SpaceX stock lockup expiration is tomorrow, timing seems nice assuming he had some in his pay package.
https://xcancel.com/nikitabier/status/2085105586966827343#m
The most consequential change in recent years has been to pay users for posting controversial content. For me that killed the service. Anything else is secondary.
> We've climbed 70 spots in the App Store since this time last year.
Shows how valuable the Play Store is to them
As a random lurker, since Nikita took over I mostly only see racist, misogynistic, and pornographic content other than Elon Musk's tweets.
Twitter used to be a better place than this. I hope he is happy with the engagement that he brought on to the site.
Nikita did plenty of good for X, this is a big loss.
I bet the position is backfilled with Grok.
one recent UX change that sucks is app reload always shoehorning you into the "for you" feed instead of your own timeline -- something that previously worked since the beginning
imho Nikita did a good job and I wish he stayed on.
Twitter is 100% better now than a year ago. For one, I haven't gotten a single bullshit click-farm fake-ass sock-puppet follower in months. Secondly, I see very few low-effort reply guys lately, human or otherwise.
I recently had my account hacked - it was a pure lurker account, I only scrolled elephant videos and such, and never posted or did reactions or anything.
Someone logged in to my account from a state I'd never logged in from before and posted a bunch of spam for an hour.
X perma banned my account. They told me I was banned for life, and any account I ever tried to make in the future would be banned. I appealed, explained that my account had obviously been hacked. It was denied.
So, ok.
I went and canceled all of my business subscriptions to Super Grok, and removed any business relationship I have with them. I've been banned for life, after all.
After a couple months, I have to say, it's been a total positive development. I miss the elephant videos, but I absolutely don't miss the constant background anxiety from political outrage/engagement farming. I liked grok, got some laughs from unhinged mode, but don't really notice not having it anymore, lots of good options out there. Hell, I get 90% of what I want (better search experience, summaries) from Kagi.
It's wild to think that people are going to be relying on X for financial stuff now.
Hope their accounts don't get hacked.
Here's some fun stuff that this guy's boss has been posting recently:
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
The fine folks working in the upper echelons of Twitter have been perfectly happy with their site turning into something indistinguishable from Stormfront over the last few years. May the taint from this repulsive project follow them around for the rest of their careers.
I guess he decided he had ruined the platform enough. Before he joined X had already implemented the login wall stuff that only let you view a single post, by the time he left it would show a tapping animation trying to beg you to install the app, open the App Store immediately if you interacted with anything, and put up a bunch of popovers. I hope that his changes increased engagement in the way he had hoped.
Man this guy was obnoxious. Even his farewell post is dripping in annoying quips.
What an absolute miserable experience Twitter is now, even more than before, I can feel my cortisol spiking every time I open that website.
> X is, and will remain, the most important communication technology in history.
A little cocky.
> X is, and will remain, the most important communication technology in history
Reality check, when there is a fire or another emergency what do you use to call the emergency services?
Never smell your own farts.
Now we just need everyone else who works for X to do the same.
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In 2022, Twitter / X was supposed to have completely shut down according to many doomsters at the time. It is clear that many in [0], [1] and [2] also would like to ask the same question why Twitter / X still hasn't shut down.
Turns out almost 4 years later, we are going to waiting even longer for the collapse.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984823
I'm honestly surprised he held on for so long.
Can't tell if it made a difference, though, as I haven't used Twitter for about decade.
I'm having a somewhat hard time understanding the world's "infatuation" with X. I never miss any important news despite having been off it for so long.
The people who say censorship has ended under musk need to really check reality. Almost immediately after musk took over he suspended anyone remotely investigating or reporting on any company he was associated with. This has continued to this day except now anyone reporting on folks like catturd also get protected by musk et all.
Would also like to know what actual censorship folks complain about in the beforetimes, the twitter files were full of nothing, and if you complain about government takedown requests, trump round 1 had far more requests than under biden so uhh yeah.
There's a lot of negative about twitter here, especially related to timeline being shit.
I'd like to give a different perspective - it's an algorithmic feed like anything else, it surfaces what you engage with. There are good niches on it. My feed is a mix of designers and AI engineers - not leaders, but people on the ground making things.
There's definitely been weird things politically with it, but content wise it really isn't as bad as people demonize it to be.
X has been great lately for me, especially compared to any of the big alternatives. Things like having auto translation, community notes, a followers tab that actually works, and account location are all fantastic.
My experience with X is you get back exactly what you seek out and put into the platform. If you are engaging with toxic political nonsense, engaging with clickbait negativity, or try to farm engagement with hot takes that's the posts you get back. If instead you simply follow PEOPLE you find interesting, ignore the noise, block the really bad, within a week your feed is cleaned up and fun to go through.
Honestly those who are still crying about X and Elon are coming off like clingy ex-lovers who can't accept that the other side isn't thinking about them anymore. Move on if you don't like Elon or X, it's fine, be happy elsewhere... we don't need to listen to the belly aching.
Being an X user is literally giving the world's most virulent propaganda a fast path directly to your limbic system.
I got it for work at some point because my industry uses it heavily but it was just not worth it. Don't miss it.