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Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

(www.nytimes.com)
539 points donohoe | 38 comments | 09 Jul 25 14:52 UTC | HN request time: 1.397s | source | bottom
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Hoasi ◴[09 Jul 25 15:21 UTC] No.44511157[source]▶
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.
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mrweasel ◴[09 Jul 25 16:05 UTC] No.44511712[source]▶
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.

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1. moomin ◴[09 Jul 25 16:44 UTC] No.44512165[source]▶
I think it’s hard to conclude that the people weren’t needed given how spectacularly it tanked.
replies(1): >>44512222 #
2. mrweasel ◴[09 Jul 25 16:49 UTC] No.44512222[source]▶
Has it tanked? X is still running, it still has millions of users.
replies(5): >>44512287 #>>44512346 #>>44512716 #>>44516736 #>>44518759 #
3. reverendsteveii ◴[09 Jul 25 16:55 UTC] No.44512287[source]▶
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...)

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4. bpodgursky ◴[09 Jul 25 16:59 UTC] No.44512343{3}[source]▶
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

You can judge for yourself whether bluesky is a competitive threat.

replies(1): >>44512491 #
5. amrocha ◴[09 Jul 25 16:59 UTC] No.44512346[source]▶
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.
replies(2): >>44512737 #>>44512742 #
6. apwell23 ◴[09 Jul 25 17:03 UTC] No.44512394{3}[source]▶
but thats due to musk poising the platform not due to cutting people.
7. mh- ◴[09 Jul 25 17:10 UTC] No.44512491{4}[source]▶
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.
replies(2): >>44512646 #>>44513846 #
8. reverendsteveii ◴[09 Jul 25 17:23 UTC] No.44512646{5}[source]▶
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.

9. jcranmer ◴[09 Jul 25 17:28 UTC] No.44512716[source]▶
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.

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10. ◴[09 Jul 25 17:31 UTC] No.44512737{3}[source]▶
11. mrweasel ◴[09 Jul 25 17:31 UTC] No.44512742{3}[source]▶
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.

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12. basisword ◴[09 Jul 25 17:35 UTC] No.44512779{4}[source]▶
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.
13. mrweasel ◴[09 Jul 25 17:37 UTC] No.44512793{3}[source]▶
> 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.

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14. sjsdaiuasgdia ◴[09 Jul 25 17:56 UTC] No.44513004{4}[source]▶
> for a company that has never been close to covering the cost of building it

Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019

replies(1): >>44513161 #
15. miltonlost ◴[09 Jul 25 18:02 UTC] No.44513054{4}[source]▶
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.
16. mrweasel ◴[09 Jul 25 18:11 UTC] No.44513161{5}[source]▶
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.

17. joering2 ◴[09 Jul 25 18:28 UTC] No.44513334{4}[source]▶
> 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.

18. mvdtnz ◴[09 Jul 25 18:46 UTC] No.44513501{4}[source]▶
They ripped him off? He made an unsolicited offer, signed, sealed and delivered.
replies(1): >>44524912 #
19. moomin ◴[09 Jul 25 19:09 UTC] No.44513731{4}[source]▶
This argument has been made, at length, in court. It was found wanting.
replies(1): >>44514008 #
20. SV_BubbleTime ◴[09 Jul 25 19:18 UTC] No.44513822{3}[source]▶
> 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.

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21. SV_BubbleTime ◴[09 Jul 25 19:20 UTC] No.44513846{5}[source]▶
It goes up and down. The stats site, not BlueSky, that seems to only go down.
22. AtlanticThird ◴[09 Jul 25 19:40 UTC] No.44514008{5}[source]▶
Good thing 35% of the country still trusts the courts https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-joe-biden-courts-ame...
replies(1): >>44524895 #
23. pjc50 ◴[09 Jul 25 19:53 UTC] No.44514144{3}[source]▶
Twitter explicitly down ranks off-site links to prevent this kind of "conversion".
replies(1): >>44516523 #
24. tristan957 ◴[09 Jul 25 22:26 UTC] No.44515335{4}[source]▶
I've seen people report they get better engagement on Mastodon and Blue Sky than they ever did with Twitter, based on percentages.
replies(1): >>44515508 #
25. SV_BubbleTime ◴[09 Jul 25 22:49 UTC] No.44515508{5}[source]▶
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.
replies(2): >>44515801 #>>44526583 #
26. tristan957 ◴[09 Jul 25 23:34 UTC] No.44515801{6}[source]▶
Luckily Blue Sky isn't the only competitor in the space, then.
replies(1): >>44526548 #
27. wasabi991011 ◴[10 Jul 25 01:27 UTC] No.44516355{4}[source]▶
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.
28. Lu2025 ◴[10 Jul 25 02:05 UTC] No.44516523{4}[source]▶
At least it allows links; Instagram doesn't without paying.
29. theshackleford ◴[10 Jul 25 02:08 UTC] No.44516534{4}[source]▶
> The Twitter board completely ripped of Musk.

He ripped himself off because he couldn’t keep his big trap shut.

30. SchemaLoad ◴[10 Jul 25 02:52 UTC] No.44516736[source]▶
The site is incredibly broken. It returns API errors randomly and shows profile tweets out of order. It's on Pintrest levels of broken.
replies(1): >>44517315 #
31. freejazz ◴[10 Jul 25 04:21 UTC] No.44517128{4}[source]▶
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.
32. ChocolateGod ◴[10 Jul 25 04:51 UTC] No.44517315{3}[source]▶
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

33. n4r9 ◴[10 Jul 25 08:43 UTC] No.44518759[source]▶
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.
34. reverendsteveii ◴[10 Jul 25 13:21 UTC] No.44520722{4}[source]▶
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.
35. reverendsteveii ◴[10 Jul 25 20:02 UTC] No.44524895{6}[source]▶
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.
36. reverendsteveii ◴[10 Jul 25 20:03 UTC] No.44524912{5}[source]▶
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.
37. SV_BubbleTime ◴[10 Jul 25 22:46 UTC] No.44526548{7}[source]▶
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?

38. api ◴[10 Jul 25 22:50 UTC] No.44526583{6}[source]▶
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.