Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

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.

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.

> 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.

Birds of a feather flock together.

are we reading the same timeline? what's he posting that's offensive?

> 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"?

> If you "ironically" stab someone, does it matter what your motivation?

...well, the legal system does take intent into account.

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

"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.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

who said anything about offensive? Edglord just means he thinks hes posting hot takes.

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.

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.

> 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.

For everyone getting angry about those things there are three people who’ve personally had a hand in them, I imagine.

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!

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.

A casual glance of his twitter stream makes him look like an ass hole. I dont see anything nice about this person at all.

Jeffery Dahmer has books, TV shows and films too. Your point?

> 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.

HN has become a new reddit :D

I have no idea why people are so negative here

Done plenty of "growth hacking" myself, I recognize that any successful social site did something spammy at one point, but I never targeted kids.

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.

> a checklist of things every person who made it in silicon valley has done.

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 ?

> 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?

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.

What's the source on the making up stories part?

"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...

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

Most of them.

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...

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.

Ah, thought we were talking about Nikita Bier still, my bad.

Yeah, and? The netflix show about Dahmer was popular too... So what?

Wait what

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.

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.