38 ms·

Linda Yaccarino is the new CEO of Twitter

• mjfl 3y ago
  I think people who are angry with Twitter, really tend to overestimate how many people leave. Only 1/61 of my followers left twitter after Musk took over, and this includes a few outright leftist/communist types who stayed.
• steakscience 3y ago
  Fancy name for a VP of Sales ;) That seems to be her real role while she reports to Elon anyway
• belter 3y ago
  The FT got the scoop: https://www.ft.com/content/edfead7f-27b5-441b-8971-8a161bad4830 https://www.ft.com/content/edfead7f-27b5-441b-8971-8a161bad4... "@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology." Looks like he found somebody to have the CEO title, while he keeps deciding the product strategy. So still runs Twitter while saying he kept the promise from his Twitter poll...
  • gsatic 3y ago
    Someone else to deal with summons from govts. That said spam seems to have dropped and recommendations I get are pretty interesting so hope that continues.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • atonse 3y ago
    This is actually a smart model given Musk’s strengths have always been in building things and not in the day to day running of companies. They are different skill sets. It’s worked remarkably well to have Gwynne Shotwell run things at SpaceX (she’s an awesome COO and also an aerospace engineer). I have wished for years that he do that at Tesla. Having an ad exec run Twitter will take care of all the “how do we pay the bills” part of running the business while he does the “fun” stuff of focusing on product. Update: Updated Gwynne Shotwell's title to COO, not CEO (and fixed spelling of her name).
    • greenyoda 3y ago
      > Having an ad exec run Twitter will take care of all the “how do we pay the bills” part of running the business while he does the “fun” stuff of focusing on product. And apparently, Twitter has millions of dollars in bills that it hasn't been paying. See this other interesting article, posted today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35918253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35918253
      • megaman821 3y ago
        Not paying vendors and landlords as a negotiation tactic seems slimy. I assume they will eventually sue Twitter and win, but is there any punitive damages? If not, I am guessing Twitter will be rewarded for not paying by getting better terms on existing contracts.
        • dboreham 3y ago
          They would at least get interest. But yes there isn't much in the way of consequences for being an asshole regarding AP.
        • mrguyorama 3y ago
          I don't think it's uncommon. Big companies have always played dumb games with billing and contracting unless you can nail them to the wall with an ironclad "you pay us X on Y day or you pay us an extra Z per day" contract.
        • failuser 3y ago
          Big companies have a lot of leverage. Vendors don’t want to antagonize them in hope of getting paid eventually and due to a risk of retaliation. Going to court might be a suicide by legal expenses.
      • concordDance 3y ago
        Tenporarily not paying vendors is pretty standard for cash strapped companies. (I've worked for some, we got away with a lot)
      • 3y ago
  • frellus 3y ago
    Elon just wants to build things, have autonomy and also dictatorial control of the process. He doesn't care about how things are monitized (although in the case of Twitter, where he didn't build it from the start, he has to worry about it quite deeply). There is nothing more complicated in his decision here. Elon is a visionary and a builder. That's all his ventures.
    • belter 3y ago
      What is the vision for Twitter?
      • bfors 3y ago
        WeChat
        • nailer 3y ago
          This. The everything app that uses chat to push payments and other commerce.
        • creaghpatr 3y ago
          Haven't seen that theory before, very interesting and makes sense.
          • sixQuarks 3y ago
            I'm not surprised, if you don't follow Elon closely and only read the nonstop clickbait headlines, you will be severely misinformed. Elon has been talking about the "everything app" forever. Elon has had the idea going back to the X.com days, that's what he wanted to do with Paypal. Another thing you may not know: Twitter will soon be competing with Youtube.
            • morelisp 3y ago
              > Twitter will soon be competing with Youtube. In the sense my walk through the park today "competed" with Kipchoge because we both propelled ourselves forward on legs, sure. Twitter video is by far the least functional it's ever been, and this is a relatively recent (past ~month) development.
  • atestu 3y ago
    WSJ yesterday for what it's worth: https://www.wsj.com/articles/linda-yaccarino-in-talks-new-twitter-ceo-elon-musk-7a006bb5 https://www.wsj.com/articles/linda-yaccarino-in-talks-new-tw... Good writeup And to add to your comment: > Mr. Musk, who has been CEO since buying the company in October, said his role will shift to executive chairman and chief technology officer. But Mr. Musk also made clear he wasn’t about to yield control over the platform, saying he would maintain responsibility for product, software and system operations.
    • caycep 3y ago
      From what I can see of where his interests are, and his attention span...does he really WANT to deal with reliability/uptime/systems engineering? Seems like a poor fit (AFAIK, the businesses that do well have Gwynne Shotwells at the helm who are good at milking him for selective insights, then insulating the staff from his worse impulses...not really a great fit for the DNA of a cloud services company)
    • tootie 3y ago
      He's only handing off the fiduciary duty. Basically he'll do what he wants with the platform and make someone else figure out how to make money with what he does.
      • classified 3y ago
        Doesn't matter now either way, he's destroyed twitter for me and I'm not coming back.
        • jacquesm 3y ago
          Likewise, especially because (1) he still owns it and (2) he can revert this at the drop of a hat and (3) he will likely be one heck of a backseat driver while she takes all the heat for his fuckups.
        • AlchemistCamp 3y ago
          What change "destroyed" it for you? Was it extending the tweet length limit? Opening up verification for individuals? Organization labels? Bringing back a "following" timeline? From my POV, it's gotten objectively better at a rapid clip over the past 6 months and I've been seeing less off-topic stuff in my feed (which is basically anything not programming-related) or a few other accounts I follow.
  • mcguire 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
  • justinator 3y ago
    Glass Cliff.
  • yumraj 3y ago
    So effectively the COO, but with the title of CEO.
  • nazka 3y ago
    So they have 2 COOs basically… and he is still acting as a CEO in the spirit of it.
  • lencastre 3y ago
    Technically the truf
  • ryanisnan 3y ago
    This is almost doomed to fail. Imagine being a puppet CEO with almost no control of your product.
• neom 3y ago
  It was interesting to see Amanda Silberling try to sus this out through deduction, Elon follows 30 women and of those 30 only so many are qualified: https://twitter.com/asilbwrites/status/1656764510311514113 https://twitter.com/asilbwrites/status/1656764510311514113
  • rkuykendall-com 3y ago
    Try? I would call giving 5 names and being right is a win.
• TurkishPoptart 3y ago
  What is he thinking? Putting this person in charge, with her ties to the global censorship-obsessed WEF, seems contrary to Elon's mission to make Twitter a place for free speech.
  • dbbk 3y ago
    I mean you could apply "What is he thinking?" to almost anything he's done with Twitter. Which leads you to the obvious conclusion... he does not think.
  • kgwxd 3y ago
    > Elon's mission to make Twitter a place for free speech How much unambiguous proof does he need to provide before all people realize his stated mission is not his actual mission?
    • frellus 3y ago
      And what is his actual mission?
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • runesofdoom 3y ago
        My best guess is that he wants to raze it to the ground and salt the earth on which it once stood so that nothing can grow there again. Not just destroy it, but destroy it so thoroughly and comprehensively that it cannot be rebuilt.
      • coolbreezetft22 3y ago
        My best guess is he's just an idiot and doesn't really think things through, just saying/doing whatever dumb idea pops into his head at the moment
        • TurkishPoptart 3y ago
• srameshc 3y ago
  Hiring a new CEO won't erase the bad policy decisions that Elon made and what he stands for. Jack Dorsey has a better chance of success since he knows the game. However, I am truly hoping Mastodon or federated social network will succeed.
  • lazyeye 3y ago
    What if they aren't bad policy decisions and his critics are too short-sighted?
    • dorkwood 3y ago
      I agree. People are saying no one wants the blue check mark anymore because it is no longer “cool”. I say give it time. It will become cool again once people realize all the features they can get for only $8.
      • boldslogan 3y ago
        kind of agree as well. linkedin premium is a good case people will pay for irl video game points.
      • d23 3y ago
        What features? Pay to be ranked higher in the cess pool along with the phrenologists?
        • dorkwood 3y ago
          Bold and italic text, NFT profile pictures, two-factor authentication, and you can upload videos that are an hour in length. The list goes on.
      • Me1000 3y ago
        The value of the check mark (to twitter and non-verified users) was never that it was "cool", it was that you knew the account wasn't a random bot/troll/throwaway. That's something Musk clearly didn't understand because the blue check now has basically no value at all. The fact that a lot of people think it's uncool to have a checkmark now is just another self-inflicted challenge the company has to overcome.
• jmclnx 3y ago
  Per the link seems she believes in science in regards to vaccines. So I guess this is an improvement I guess. The thread in there are some rather nasty comments.
  • TurkishPoptart 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • kashunstva 3y ago
      > there was never any good reason to give them to children Except for lower rates and severity of SARS-CoV-2 infection in this population. See for example this recent meta-analysis: JAMA Pediatr. 2023;177(4):384-394. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2022.6243[1] [1]https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2800743 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
      • 10xDev 3y ago
        > While most children developed local AEs, severe AEs were rare, and most of AEs resolved within several days. > Future studies with longer follow-up are warranted to monitor the long-term safety of mRNA vaccines. The above seem reasonable enough to not give the vaccine to children who aren't vulnerable.
      • TurkishPoptart 3y ago
        That's what I'm saying. The risks of testing this technology on children does not outweigh the possible benefits. More children have died of drowning in pool accidents than covid-19. Furthermore, young men and boys are at higher risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis, which is why some countries have stopped giving them this jab altogether. In the study it notes "Moreover, the risk of vaccine-related serious adverse events (AEs), including myocarditis, in this age group was reported to be low.16,18."
• scythe 3y ago
  Previously, Linda Yaccarino helped launch Peacock, the NBC/Comcast streaming service that was provided free with our Internet connection for a few months. I would have to give this strategy credit: we actually watched it quite a bit. Unfortunately, the Peacock UX is quite bad, since resuming an episode often simply doesn't work and jumping forward forces you to watch commercials twice. So we may not end up subscribing when the free period ends. If this was Yaccarino's decision, that's good marketing. But you need some follow-through as well.
  • seshagiric 3y ago
    It does seem like Peacock's success was a factor in her getting chosen as Twitter CEO. I find it hard to believe there's any nefarious intent e.g. finding a scapegoat. Its more like there are not too many takers for the job and they had to go with the best possible choice.
• nancyhn 3y ago
  Elon has a strong track record of hiring great women leaders, like Gwynne and Shivon. I would give him and Linda the benefit of the doubt before jumping to any conclusions.
  • _Microft 3y ago
    That’s Gwynne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX btw. Maybe the best that could happen to SpaceX. The other one is Shivon Zilis. What role does she have nowadays?
    • fargo 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • _Microft 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • fargo 3y ago
          [flagged]
        • asadm 3y ago
          [flagged]
      • nancyhn 3y ago
        And she's happy about it. Why is that a problem for you?
        • afavour 3y ago
          It certainly speaks to a level of professional conflict. If you have children with an employee it could very easily affect the way you treat that person in the workplace. It can easily undermine them in the eyes of co-workers. She may well be perfectly happy with that but the OP was specifically holding her up as an example of Elon's track record with women in the workplace.
• starkparker 3y ago
  Goes right into the textbook definition of "glass cliff". Musk still gets to sabotage the product, the CEO gets to be the chief executive of whatever Elon thinks is dull but not the company, and she still gets fired if things go sideways and Elon keeps doing whatever he's doing.
  • chasd00 3y ago
    > Musk still gets to sabotage the product when is this going to happen? It's been a while now and seems to be the same twitter as usual.
    • smcl 3y ago
      Top replies to tweets are from blue-checks (nowadays, generally the worst posters) so to see any good interactions you either have to scroll pretty far or have used a blocklist. Twitter Blue is now completely tarnished - even if you just want to pay $8/month for the ability to edit posts or include longer videos in your tweets and don't care about "verified" status you're going to be lumped in with a really odd group of people and mocked for your blue check (i.e. he turned a consumer choice into an unpopular political statement). I'm not personally a heavy user anymore (moved to mastodon when they killed Tweetbot's API access), but either there's a lot of downtime or I've been really unlucky when I have returned as I've encountered a lot of issues with accessing the app - being completely locked out for a couple of days once. Also he unbanned a bunch of really pretty shitty people, who have picked up where they left off in directing their substantial following to abuse whoever they feel wronged them (usually someone in the LGBTQ+ community). It's still largely usable as a service, but it has absolutely gotten worse and to describe it as "sabotage" is definitely not a stretch.
      • misiti3780 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • mjcl 3y ago
          I might pay $8 to not see all the blue-check shit floating to the top of replies, but I'm not going to pay $8 to join the shit.
• majikaja 3y ago
  I don't understand how other people can tolerate using Twitter. I just want to view people's comments in a compact form - one line per tweet, even if RSS or equivalent is not supported. How do people have time in their day to scroll down the page to see all the tweets (&ads) on their timeline when they're following hundreds/thousands of people? If I can't integrate it into my RSS reader realistically I have <15 minutes per day to spend on such a platform.
  • paulgb 3y ago
    Fun fact, early in Twitter's life, RSS was supported. There was even a brief period where it supported XMPP! I remember following along with 2008 election tweets in Pidgin.
    • belter 3y ago
      Fun fact, many years ago, Google had a SOAP interface. But it got removed as machines are not interested in Internet Ads. :-) How time flies... Edit: http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/12/google-deprecates-their-soap-s.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/12/google-deprecates-their-soa...
      • paulgb 3y ago
        I remember building an early "infinite scroll" search interface with it!
  • adamiscool8 3y ago
    Tweets are often rich media and aren't designed to be one line, but Twitter has a Lists function that does basically this if you're willing to make manual groupings of users by topic.
  • Palomides 3y ago
    there are two ways to use twitter: curate a small number of follows you read most tweets from, or follow many and treat twitter more like an endless river to sample from
• prh8 3y ago
  He's going to continue running Twitter into the ground while now being able to make her the scapegoat for it. Typical glass cliff
  • nprateem 3y ago
    Well that might be a strategy if it wasn't his own money he was burning.
    • prh8 3y ago
      [flagged]
  • ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
    Dude havent you come to terms with the fact that hes competent? Twitter never went down after firing all those engineers?
    • chucky_z 3y ago
      Twitter never went down because of those engineers and the great work they did. Elon has been making all kinds of shit up as he goes. He is not an engineer, and never will be one. He can be a great businessman (and at times -- he has made great decisions for businesses.) and be a terrible engineer. He seems to be stuck on the latter even being possible.
      • xeromal 3y ago
        What's your criteria for Elon's decisions being bad? I'm curious.
      • Danjoe4 3y ago
        He is chief engineer of SpaceX. The rockets seem pretty good to me.
        • karpierz 3y ago
• DueDilligence 3y ago
  [dead]
• weinzierl 3y ago
  When I go from Musk's Tweet to Linda Yaccarino (@LindYacc) I see a tweet that starts with "If we abandon our history [..]" and ends with "You’re unable to view this Tweet because this account owner limits who can view their Tweets. Learn more" Why does it say I cannot see a tweet in a tweet I can see?
  • sonofaplum 3y ago
    She quote tweeted a tweet from an account that was later probably set to private
  • sp332 3y ago
    The text you can see is a quote-tweet. You can see the comment she added, but the tweet she quoted is from a private account.
  • JosephRedfern 3y ago
    Most likely because she quote-tweeted a another tweet, originating from a private account.
• jimhi 3y ago
  Bad tech CEOs all have the same playbook. Google “glass cliff.” Elon will step down and have this new CEO execute all his most unpopular decisions. Then he’ll swoop back in and be CEO again hoping to be the hero. Reddit did this. Yahoo did this. The lamest part is it kind of does help their image.
  • nprateem 3y ago
    What unpopular decisions are left?
    • closetnerd 3y ago
      Ya I think he's actually unlike most other CEOs. The man does super unpopular decisions in front of everyone.
    • gtweg 3y ago
      Reverting to the status quo before be bought the company and limiting free speech again to attract advertisers. When Tucker Carlson announced that he'd post his new show on Twitter, Musk already sent a cryptic mail saying that Carlson would be subject to the same "community notes" as everyone else. We'll see how it goes, I'm just getting vibes that everything will be reverted to a standard SV company.
      • nailer 3y ago
        That makes sense - online raconteurs were trying to act as if Twitter had some kind of unique deal with Tucker Carlson, so reiterating that Twitter is interested in factual truth, rather than partisan politics was a solid response.
    • fullshark 3y ago
      Returning verification back to the previous system and admitting it was a mistake.
  • mbreese 3y ago
    Didn’t @jack kind of do this too? But it’s different when the founder/CEO is replaced only to return later. That’s a Steve Jobs play. When the CEO takes a new role, but still owns the company, that’s completely different (and certainly fits here).
• hn_acc_2 3y ago
  Success is a lousy teacher. Mr. Musk has been dreaming about his "everything app" i.e. X.com for a very long time. The fact that he thinks the sinking Twitter ship will bring it to fruition is laughable.
  • lazyeye 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • runesofdoom 3y ago
      Perhaps his parents owned two emerald mines, making his judgement twice as good as Elon's?
      • concordDance 3y ago
        Elon'a parents didn't even own an entire Emerald mine...
    • mr90210 3y ago
      Ad Hominem.
• ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • mkr-hn 3y ago
    There are plenty of reasons to not like him. Few of them relate to business.
    • lazyeye 3y ago
      Tons of reasons to like him too.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  • frellus 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
      > What more is there than that? The people who hate on him have never done a single important thing in their entire lives. Exactly, its just resentment. "How you feel about Elon is how you feel about yourself."
      • rvz 3y ago
        It is indeed resentment. It is also hilarious to see this sentiment in the comment sections in HN, Mastodon, Reddit, etc. In reality, almost no-one cares and the 220M+ users continue to use the platform. All the eternal Twitter doomsters are still praying for the downfall that never happened, which is why they are very emotional and angry at Elon Musk and the fact that Twitter did not collapse as they expected either.
    • kashunstva 3y ago
      > The people who hate on him have never done a single important thing in their entire lives. That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it? For one thing, who gets to decide what’s important? If you want to take a utilitarian perspective, that’s fine; but you can’t legitimately condemn as unimportant the work and lives of others who happen to dislike Musk.
• obblekk 3y ago
  I think this is exactly the right profile for him to have hired. She led advertising (sales) at a top 3 media publisher. This is probably Elon's greatest area of weakness, and she's particularly good at it. I imagine this will be a bit like SpaceX where Sales and Ops is done by someone very good at that, and engineering is done by Elon. It takes a realistic, self-aware person to hire someone who's better than them at their weaknesses, and is harder done than said.
  • rscho 3y ago
    Engineering is done by Elon?
    • sebzim4500 3y ago
      I'd hope so, he is the lead engineer of a company which is currently on a ~200 mission long streak of successful missions to space. Figuring out how twitter should work seems easier than that.
      • pprotas 3y ago
        Didn’t they blow up that huge rocket 2 weeks ago? Seems like there is some leeway in the definition of “successful mission” here xd
        • sebzim4500 3y ago
          Yeah I'm just considering actual missions where a customer is paying them to deliver something to space (crew or satellites). If you include tests then they obviously have a much worse record.
        • aik 3y ago
          Is your argument that SpaceX is a failure? Wow the slant in this entire thread. When did HN become such a fervent Elon hate machine. Honestly curious, is most of this from his actions at Twitter?
• tric 3y ago
  Here's the nitter link: https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1657050349608501249 https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1657050349608501249 A few days ago, Twitter started requiring cookies when not logged in.
• theshrike79 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff > The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon of women being likelier than men to achieve leadership roles, such as executives in the corporate world and political election candidates, during periods of crisis or downturn, when the risk of failure is highest.
• WestCIDR 3y ago
  I could care less about who is in charge of Twitter or if there is such a platform. Twitter is a private corporation and therefore has no legal obligation to provide nor promote "free speech." To imply that it has this authority is to flatter it, over-state its power, and misrepresent it as having any interest in or obligation to the US Constitution, which it clearly does not. That said, prior to Musk, the Twitter owners/leaders behaved terribly by "de-platforming" voices and sources of information. In so doing they debased themselves, demonstrating that they have no moral compass and demolishing what little trust there was in the technocracy and its faux institutions. Musk claims to intend to restore "trust" in Twitter (I guess for those naive bubble people who obediently believe everything they read on the Internet). I could care less if he means what he says. But Musk's stated positive mission is there for all to witness. So I don't get why he's being pilloried for it. What's all the clamor about? Just another stage-play from the Drama Dept, I imagine.
• lazyeye 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • chasing 3y ago
    I think for most Elon lovers here, claiming people don't like him because he's "not being sufficiently left-wing" is a way to distract from the fact that his stewardship of Twitter has thus far been an embarrassing disaster of unforced errors.
    • lazyeye 3y ago
      Twitter is running fine with lots of improvements in the pipeline (video and E2E DMs due soon). It will be interesting to see how it evolves now that the company is back to focusing on the product rather than activism/censorship etc. Like I said...
• hartator 3y ago
  Seems like a boring ads-friendly pick, she was leading advertising at NBC for the past 11 years?
• nimbius 3y ago
  call a spade a spade: this is a last-ditch effort coming about six months too late. In the seven months since Musk bought the company he singlehandedly fired nearly every employee, accidentally locked the remainder out of the headquarters, turned blue-check validation into a living nightmare for international brands, un-banned some of the most notorious and repugnant users from white nationalists to bigots and racists, mis-branded news outlets as state-sponsored, threatened to open a news agency to impersonation on his platform, cancelled most of the API, and tried to extort the very brands his platform depended on in a cash-for-validation scheme that backfired spectacularly. This is 44bn of musks backing investors finally waking up to the fact that the willy-wonka they trusted to shepherd a communications platform was in fact just a billionaire heir to an emerald mine on track to grift them out of their dosh for his own petty feud with 'the libs.' Frankly its astounding theyre permitting musk to continue to do anything at all, albeit i suspect his new r&d role is about as authentic as his college credentials.
  • sixQuarks 3y ago
    You are severely misinformed. You just repeated all the BS talking points from the MSM. Stop reading clickbait and actually follow the guy closely if you want to know what's going on.
    • fckgw 3y ago
      It's literally a list of all the things he actually, factually did. Maybe you're the one who is misinformed?
      • switchbak 3y ago
        The editorializing going on there is miles away from being an objective summary.
    • ubermonkey 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • 3y ago
• bryan0 3y ago
  I'm not a regular twitter user, but do people really get decent information from this platform? The comments to this tweet are a cesspool of anger and conspiracy theories.
  • jeffbee 3y ago
    Why would this tweet ever come to anyone's attention? I see tweets of people I follow, a few hundred users, most of whom I know in real life and the rest of whom are experts in fields of interest.
    • madeofpalk 3y ago
      Musk is the most followed user on Twitter. On average, it seems like it would come to the attention of 'most'.
  • sixQuarks 3y ago
    There's incredible content that is found on Twitter. It takes time to curate your feed though, but once curated, I would say it's definitely in the top 3 best sources of info on the internet.
  • dorkwood 3y ago
    I follow artists and developers who post interesting things they’re working on. It’s the best place online I’ve found for this content.
    • manicennui 3y ago
      I do the same and don't have the complaints that many people have. I never check the trending hashtags and recommended nonsense. I unfollow anyone who gets involved in and retweets a lot of Twitter/political drama (they are free to use their account how their like, but I don't need this sort of thing in my life).
  • delecti 3y ago
    Twitter recently implemented a change to prioritize replies from Twitter Blue subscribers over all others, so the replies you're seeing first are all people who paid for Twitter. That means they're either people who support Elon, or people for whom Twitter is a significant part of their job, either way they're likely to be terminally online and probably insufferable. The top replies to any prominent account tend to be awful these days.
• tonetheman 3y ago
  [dead]
• luckydata 3y ago
  he hired a COO and called her CEO
• prng2021 3y ago
  So if Twitter fails, she’ll be the one to blame. If it succeeds, do you think she’ll get the credit or will people assume it was all his doing?
  • flavius29663 3y ago
    > So if Twitter fails, she’ll be the one to blame not really, it's still his Twitter
  • patrickmay 3y ago
    I think it's a win-win for her. If Twitter pulls out of its nosedive, she'll be seen as a genius. If it splatters all over the ground, everyone will blame Musk and agree that she was put in an impossible position. I just hope she's getting paid upfront, given Twitter's current cashflow issues.
  • maximus-decimus 3y ago
    Everybody seems to blame everything that goes wrong on Musk and everything that goes right on his employees, so if anything she'll get all the credit and no blame ever.
• ratonofx 3y ago
  IMHO, Twitter has so much network effect that it kept frozen in time lacking features. It's one of the best study case on MVPs as Craigslist, Reddit, Slashdot, 4Chan... Musk just showed us how a "not anti-capitalism" product management, from top down, could make Twitter catch up and keep up on the Zeitgeist of Internet User Experience. Twitter and part of the public discourse was saved, Musk companies can benefit a lot from the same leadership and governance model spearheaded by Google on the 'Alphabet move'. It's sad that people just want to buy the media buzz and witch-hunting because 'it is too much power in one person's hands'. I don't see this amount of critical thinking about Sergey and Larry, Besos or Zuckerberg.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • smcl 3y ago
    The biggest complaint I've seen hasn't been that it's too much power in one person's hands, it's that he's just been fucking around with the service and annoying people.
• oldtownroad 3y ago
  [flagged]
• secretsatan 3y ago
  Is this that thing where someone else is setup for the fall?
  • mr90210 3y ago
    I truly hope she made a good deal and got herself a loaded contract because the challenge ahead is simply not worth it.
• tinyhouse 3y ago
  The only reason for her to get this job is to have her name known in public. No one knew who she was until now (not saying it as a bad thing). She is taking a sinking ship with lots of issues she won't be able to fix, like the thousands of lawsuits the company is facing. Now Elon will have someone to blame for the disaster he created. Google luck Linda, you'll need it.
• karaterobot 3y ago
  People have been screaming for him to step down as CEO of Twitter for a long time, and he's doing it. It looks like the general reaction in this thread is that this is somehow even more evil than not stepping down. What makes this either a catastrophic mistake, or a malicious act?
  • shmatt 3y ago
    I think they were expecting someone who has been a CEO before. My money was on Marissa Mayer personally
    • cvalka 3y ago
      I also had her in mind. Though she does not get social?
  • sebzim4500 3y ago
    If Elon Musk (or one of his companies) cured cancer tomorrow a significant part of the population would find a way to hate him for it.
    • Larrikin 3y ago
      The more realistic outcome would be that Elon promises a cure for cancer is coming next year and repeats saying that every year until all of his competitors have caught up.
      • danaris 3y ago
        ...or he finds someone who's just about to find one, buys the rights from them to say that it was him, and then charges $millions a head for the cure.
      • wilg 3y ago
        Yes, because famously his competitors have caught up in rockets and electric cars.
• machdiamonds 3y ago
  A lot of people in this thread saying "Musk isn't an engineer." According to Jim Keller, John Carmack and others, this simply isn't true: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evidence_that_musk_is_the_chief_engineer_of_spacex/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
  • AlexandrB 3y ago
    For me at least, this perception comes from the level of hubris that Elon exhibits in public. Statements like "At this point, I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth" is not something you hear from good engineers very often because it reeks of Dunning Kruger. Elon also frequently chooses to make statements with high certainty about areas far outside his expertise ("Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April") and consistency overpromises and under-delivers with some technologies (FSD). So I don't know. Maybe he's a good engineer when he's not on camera. But as a public figure I think he's massively overexposed, largely by choice, and it's doing him no favours in terms of perception lately.
    • neurobama 3y ago
      >But as a public figure I think he's massively overexposed, largely by choice, and it's doing him no favours in terms of perception lately. I think you'll find there's a significant split in perception between, for example, the average American and the pseudo-elites who inhabit Bluesky and Hacker News. Or the latter and the average actual hacker, for that matter.
      • paulryanrogers 3y ago
        Golly, how do average Americans perceive Elon? Is there direct evidence of Elon's personal engineering prowess? All I can find are his own boasting and second hand reports of folks impressed by his familiarity with jargon.
        • neurobama 3y ago
• gjvc 3y ago
  Who?
• AlexandrB 3y ago
  I have to admit to eating crow. I thought for sure that Elon was quietly hoping people would forget about the "Should I step down" poll and he was going to stay on as CEO. I was wrong. For me personally it's largely academic at this point since I'm not coming back to Twitter without Tweetbot. But it's nice to see the follow-through on this one.
  • HellDunkel 3y ago
    I am not returning either the vox populi polls were simply intolerable.
  • moskie 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • dang 3y ago
      Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. Regardless of how right you are or feel, it's not what this site is for and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • felistoria 3y ago
      More right wing or just more neutral?
      • user982 3y ago
        More right-wing.
  • yalogin 3y ago
    I think you are not eating crow. He had no intention of stepping down. He thought he would be loved and tried but realized he is not going to be able to pull through the management stuff. I think the poll and this decision aren’t related.
• celtoid 3y ago
  [flagged]
• jmkni 3y ago
  Great! Good luck to her. The negativity here is weird.
  • bluescrn 3y ago
    To the left, she's failed the purity test already by following a handful of 'evildoers' on Twitter. To the right, the WEF connection is concerning, and her commitment to free speech is in question. But perhaps she just wants to make money from both sides of the political divide?
    • djur 3y ago
      How does "the WEF connection is concerning" differ from "fail[ing] a purity test"?
      • meepmorp 3y ago
        It's the wrong kind of purity test, you see.
  • fraaancis 3y ago
    Yeah, it is. The only glaring issue I see is that Yaccarino will definitely have to compromise by kicking some of the more radical people off the platform to get the high-dollar accounts advertising on Twitter again, which will draw fire from what is now the most visible user base. Or at the very least, reducing the "freedom of reach" I've seen Elon refer to. Otherwise, she seems to be a decent hire, catering to a lot of groups.
  • deepsquirrelnet 3y ago
    I don’t find the topic of discussion very interesting, which is why I find the popularity and passion poured out here very interesting. I feel like I missed something… Or dodged something.
• rcme 3y ago
  > Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app. I wish this notion of the "everything app" would die in the West. Yes, China has a highly successful everything app, but it exists because the government wants a centralized place to control digital activity. Such a model makes no sense in the west. We already have an everything app, it's called "App Store." So many apps try to this strategy. For instance, Snapchat added games to the app. Why would I want to play a game in Snapchat when I have a nearly unlimited selection of games in the app store?
  • mxkopy 3y ago
    I think everything apps are actually sort of a logical conclusion for HCI. The one that my job uses has redundancies everywhere, i.e. a global search bar, multiple links to the same page spread across the website, etc. It's very disorganized, but I've also found it to be strangely useful. Maybe take this with a grain of salt but when I'm drunk I hate backtracking through UIs and being hampered by organization. I think an everything app would be useful in that case. And in the same vein as "the average human has less than two arms", I feel like the average end user is basically drunk.
  • Klonoar 3y ago
    >Yes, China has a highly successful everything app, but it exists because the government wants a centralized place to control digital activity. You say this as if political parties here wouldn't be interested in that. ;P
    • akiselev 3y ago
      Not if they had to share with each other.
  • pembrook 3y ago
    Along those same lines, the weirdest thing to me about the concept of an “everything app” is that it basically just describes an operating system. iOS, MacOS, Windows, Android, Linux, etc. are already the “everything” apps. Why the do we need an app that can do everything inside of an app that can already do everything? It’s like wearing a hat on top of your hat. I think your thesis about WeChat being more about a domestic choke point over the freedom of computing in China is largely correct.
• samstave 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • jacobsenscott 3y ago
    If anyone else is wondering what WTF WEF is - it appears to be the world economic forum.
• hakanderyal 3y ago
  I think that will turn out to be a great move for Twitter. I don't get the negativity expressed by top comments. Yeah things were hectic at the beginning, but Twitter nowadays is a much better product than it was a year ago for me. Find a good niche for yourself and it's a gold mine for socializing online with a bit of curating.
  • neurobama 3y ago
    >I don't get the negativity expressed by top comments. Lots of ideologically-opinionated users are mad Twitter no longer censors and bans their opponents. They're upset that their patrons who enforced this got fired by Musk. Much seemingly unrelated criticism flows from this. As to the actual Twitter experience, I've always used a chronological feed and never understood complaints about the algorithm. Step one to not being bothered by an opaque algorithm's control of your attention is withholding that control in the first place. I haven't noticed any change in my daily Twitter browsing in this regard under Musk.
    • madeofpalk 3y ago
      > Twitter no longer censors and bans their opponents Unfortunately, Twitter still censors and bans their opponents. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/15/twitter-suspends-accounts-journalists-musk https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/15/twitter-s... https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/elon-musk-twitter-still-banning-journalists https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/elon-musk-twitter-st...
      • nailer 3y ago
        Doxxing rules applies to everyone regardless of their politics.
      • neurobama 3y ago
        By "their opponents," I meant opponents of the previous Twitter owners. The neutral platform is gone. As we were so often and so smugly reminded, Twitter is a private company. They can ban who they like. This is the dog-eat-dog public discourse world you chose.
• drumhead 3y ago
  He's trying to turn it into the Fox News of social media, a hardcore or uses being bombarded with my pillow ads. Seeing how profitable Fox is he seems to want to follow that path.
• cogitoergofutuo 3y ago
  Too little too late. I left Twitter a few days ago after I saw some users complaining about animal torture videos showing up in their feeds and search suggestions, and this was on the heels of the footage of the shooting in Texas making the rounds. It’s a completely unsurprising thing to see when you actively court channers after kneecapping content moderation.
  • neurobama 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • cogitoergofutuo 3y ago
      Yeah those videos are certainly despised by channers, what websites did they run into those videos on in the first place?
      • neurobama 3y ago
        Like CASM, there are groups of sociopaths who share these videos in private and occasionally in public. Everything from Facebook groups to small YouTube channels to private forums. The people who hunt them down, gather evidence and send it to the cops are true heroes in my view, alongside paid Facebook content moderators.
        • cogitoergofutuo 3y ago
          That’s cool, all manner of illegal shock content has always shown up on the chans as well, since day one. “Channer” as a term applies equally to all people in that ecosystem, even those that are reviled by the rest. :)
• Havoc 3y ago
  Not GRD after all haha
• ta8645 3y ago
  IMHO, Twitter fundamentally needed a huge shakeup, which Elon has done. I've enjoyed and used my account more since he took over than in any of the years prior. Still, it's obvious a lot of people are unhappy with the changes; but it's hard to judge how many people are quietly happy with them. Personally, I hope for Twitter's success under Yaccarino's leadership.
  • thomasahle 3y ago
    What changes have you personally experienced? For me it's mostly been (1) seeing less content from people I actually follow (because prioritization of Twitter Blue subscribers) while my own tweets are shown less; and (2) awkward conversations with people, where I can type 280 characters, but they can respond with infinitely long answers.
    • TinkersW 3y ago
      For me nothing much has changed.. It is still a fairly slow and bloated site like always. Need to add lots of filters to block all the politic garbage people spew, and mute anyone that repeatedly does this. Same as always.
    • patrickmay 3y ago
      Killing the APIs used by TweetBot and other third party products has made Twitter close to unusable.
      • 77pt77 3y ago
        Fritter no longer works. At least on the aggregate.
    • nojonestownpls 3y ago
      As a previous non-regular-Twitter user, every time I checked in to see what the hype was about, it was full of people trying to create "personal brand"s and sounding very artificial. It had a very LinkedIn-ish vibe. Regular Twitter users probably had a very different experience, of course, but this average initial experience was a turn off. There are still faux-experts shilling their brand on Twitter for sure, but recently it feels like there are a lot more authentic and casual chat that's easy to get into. It may just be that Elon shaking things up and causing some people to move out destabilized existing cliques, thus making things more approachable to an outsider. But I for one am enjoying the current Twitter a lot more than the past one.
• syngrog66 3y ago
  good she comes from advertising. seemed like Musk wrecked that aspect of Twitter. lets see if she has enough power to impact it given Musk is still the de facto boss
• Waterluvian 3y ago
  I’m going to guess that the either new CEO will quit in 12-18 months or Elon will drift away from being closely engaged with Twitter. I don’t think any decent CEO will tolerate perpetual undermining and I don’t think Elon has a “medium” setting.
  • madeofpalk 3y ago
    What type of person would accept this CEO role? Surely the problems are known, so whoever accepts would be happy with them?
  • panick21_ 3y ago
    Just like Musk will go away from being involved in Tesla that people claimed for many years. Or how all his leadership of all his companies always leave. Except his companies have much more stable leadership teams then their competitors.
• andyjohnson0 3y ago
  So Musk owns ~80% of the shares but Yaccarino is his boss? Good luck with that - I hope she's good at tightrope walking.
  • abvdasker 3y ago
    I give her less than a year. The job description is to be the public face of Twitter's ongoing collapse.
    • RoyGBivCap 3y ago
      ...ongoing collapse? Every usage record twitter has broken has been since he took over.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • andyjohnson0 3y ago
        Usage is not really the metric that counts when Twitter's ad revenue is down 89% since Musk took over [1]. I find it hard to believe they're selling enough $8/mth subscriptions to fill the gap. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-30/twitter-s-revenue-drops-amid-advertisers-concerns-over-elon-musk https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-30/twitter-s...
        • input_sh 3y ago
          Furthermore, there's absolutely zero evidence that Twitter's usage is up. There's no actual data to draw that conclusion from, Twitter is now private and under no obligation to share. If you ask for a source, you're gonna get linked to one tweet of his dated Dec 18th. In totally unrelated news, Dec 18th just happens to be the date when World Cup finals in Qatar were held, before all the mindblowingly stupid changes. But even if it did increase, it's just bots. There's a crypto scam at the top of US trending every day, and when you click on it and then click on latest and scroll down a bit, you just see a bunch of random 5-10 words followed by a hashtag. There's one right now, #Kicks. About 12 hours ago it was #Wednesdaytoken. It's gonna get purged when some employee finally gets around to doing that, and then the next one's gonna happen tomorrow.
• byyyy 3y ago
  Can the CEO fire the CTO if the CTO isn't performing well? If not who is really the CEO?
• 650REDHAIR 3y ago
  The top replies to this tweet are batshit crazy and a great representation of why I nuked my Twitter account. Twitter was never my favorite web property and I checked out a long time ago, but I would come back to read long form tweets, developing stories, and the occasional rant. Now? Few people I look up to are using it and I feel like every time I look at a reply it’s flooded with blue check marks spouting absolute nonsense or hate. Are normal people still using it?
  • whalesalad 3y ago
    totally vibe with this. feels like a community of incels, elon fanboys and jan6 type individuals now.
    • nailer 3y ago
      If all you follow are incels, Elon, and protesters then that’s who you’ll see. Tech twitter is the same as it ever was.
    • panick21_ 3y ago
      Nonsense. I muted Musk and after the initial takeover shitshow. Twitter is mostly the same. A few tech people have left. But in terms of my other interest, there is very little difference. The idea that its not all nazis or whatever is complete nonsense.
  • sebzim4500 3y ago
    Elon tweets have always had terrible replies, I have no idea if they are better or worse than it used to be. Probably about the same. In general I think twitter is slightly better since the takeover. I'm sure that someone who follows and engages with different people could come to completely the opposite opinion.
    • dmix 3y ago
      Every major Twitter account has the lowest quality replies. Always has been. It’s just like popular threads on /r/all on Reddit. Good luck finding something that’s not cringey, blowing things out of proportion, or a bad joke.
• isbjorn16 3y ago
  > She knows all the advertisers and can placate them. I hope she has an infinite supply of lipstick because this pig will need it :|
  • zadler 3y ago
    Twitter is doing great.
    • Xorlev 3y ago
      There is no war in Ba Sing Se. Just saying it doesn't make it true. Twitter has a long way to go to regain advertiser confidence, and Blue is barely a footnote.
      • concordDance 3y ago
        He's probably thinking of it from a user experience point of view, where there are lots of shiny new features and no big downsides.
        • warning26 3y ago
          Is it though? The new verified system was rolled out really poorly. There should have been a migration path from legacy to new verified, but instead they just unverified everyone (including obviously government accounts that under the new rule should retain a grey check).
          • concordDance 3y ago
            That's true, but I don't think it effected the average user much.
        • d23 3y ago
          I must be using a different site from you. Letting people pay to get boosted has turned the top of every thread into a hive of emoji-pasting, cruel, low-effort cretins.
• jacquesm 3y ago
  sCapegoat Executive Officer
• Animats 3y ago
  Who's running Tesla right now? Whomever is in charge of manufacturing over there seems to be doing well. It took Tesla over five years to get their manufacturing act together. (Which is what the manufacturing experts who quit in 2016 said it was going to take.) But they finally did, and at long last, cost per unit started to come down. New product development, though, is not going well. The Cybertruck is still not shipping. Nor is the big truck. A Model 2 has been announced, but is not shipping. And, of course, there's Fake Self Driving, which isn't mentioned much any more. Come to think about it, Tesla as a high volume car manufacturer now seems to work better when Musk isn't around.
  • ex3ndr 3y ago
    How it is great? USS still not available on 100k+ car.
  • misiti3780 3y ago
    a model 2 has been announced?
    • Animats 3y ago
      > a model 2 has been announced? Yes. Quietly. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/03/03/tesla-did-introduce-the-model-2-this-week-at-26000-but-kept-it-quiet/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/03/03/tesla-...
• dang 3y ago
  All: could you please not post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? There are a ton of them in this thread, unfortunately. They're tedious and not what HN is for. HN is for curious conversation, not boo-vs.-yay celebrity wars or mudslinging (or mud wrestling for that matter). If you're about to comment in this thread, please make sure you're up on the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and comment in the intended spirit.
• thejarren 3y ago
  I'm very interested in HN's perspective based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff relative to this news. "The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon of women being likelier than men to achieve leadership roles, such as executives in the corporate world and political election candidates, during periods of crisis or downturn, when the risk of failure is highest.Other research has expanded the definition of the glass cliff phenomenon to include racial and ethnic minority groups."
  • draw_down 3y ago
    [dead]
• agnosticmantis 3y ago
  I’m just gonna leave this here for the sweet irony and the sheer hypocrisy: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/business/media/elon-musk-twitter-ads.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/business/media/elon-musk-...
• ggm 3y ago
  I found it interesting to wonder how viable a CTO he'd be if he had to accede to somebody else's directional drive, or a board. I suspect he wouldn't do too badly because he is sufficiently technical to know when he's being snowed and is also quite driven. The problem isn't that he has no technical ability. The problem is he is unwise, and somewhat of an autodidact, convinced he's right irrespective of evidence. Lacking a source of directing force he is prone to making irrational, personally driven choices. He also miscommunicates frequent. I doubt his "C suite" colleagues would welcome it, and so his directorate or board would be edgy all the time. Being in control makes me wonder if he's surrounded by yes-men and fires anyone who tries to argue back.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• rhaway84773 3y ago
  Twitter promoting “cat in blender” when you searched for “cat” is the last straw for me. Whatever Twitter might do, whether good or bad, I’m absolutely done with that platform.
• usr1106 3y ago
  Hmm, why did I upvote this article? I haven't been logged in to my twitter account for probably more than a year. And when I see an interesting tweet somewhere, my first thought is, why can't that person use a more decent platform?
• Etrnl_President 3y ago
  [dead]