Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

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.

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.

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.