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Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

> Elon is a visionary and a builder. That's all his ventures.

I don't understand how people view him as a product person. How is he making the product (Twitter) better?

Taking away an existing feature like verification and selling an objectively worse version back to people doesn't make the product better. Strengthening the silo effect by banning talk about competitors doesn't make the product better. Charging $50k / month for business verification doesn't make the product better, especially for businesses users.

I thought Twitter might improve because I believed the rhetoric about Musk being a product person, but I don't believe that any more. All of his moves have been short sighted cash grabs.

Is there a single thing about the (technical) product that's improved since Musk took over?

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He also added a ton of features. Bookmarks, encrypted DMs, subscriptions, longform text, pushed the chronological feed, view count, improved video, added meetings, improved notes. I'm probably forgetting something but Twitter has definitely added more features under Musk than the previous 10 years.

I believe Bookmarks existed before Elon, he just made it more visible in the UI (or approved the change, or however it happened).

> pushed the chronological feed

It's funny how many people who did not even know they weren't using a chronological feed before, are now cussing him out for showing a "For You" page - when he just made it much more visible and easier to switch to the "Following" feed.

Bookmarks launched in 2018 https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/28/twitter-launches-bookmarks...

Super Follows in 2021 https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...

Birdwatch (community notes) in 2021 https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...

all launched before Musk took over.

I'm trying to find the source, but I read the other day (I think from a Twitter exec on Bluesky) that all of the features launched since Musk bought Twitter were being worked on long before Musk bought Twitter. Which is as you'd expect, at least for the majority. These things don't happen overnight, or even in the space of a few months.

Also, bookmarks have been there for years. As have subscriptions, and Community Notes.

Chronological feed was always a thing, I've used it for years. In fact, one of the first noticeable changes was that this config stopped being persistent. I had to manually switch to chronological for months and still get "For You" as the default. Community notes precedes Musk too. View count is not only unreliable (because counting things is hard) but of dubious value. What do you get from it? Longform text is literally what twitter is not about, and a major turn-off for so many people.

Twitter as of 2020 was fantastic, and these features added essentially no value to it. On the other hand, the public API is now a mess, twitter circle tweets are being shown to people who were not supposed to see them, I get logged out of all my accounts at least once a week and most notifications have serious delays. I've been using twitter since the whale days back in 2010, and it feels like we lost a decade of SRE progress.

> Chronological feed was always a thing

Yes, that's why I wrote "pushed". Before Musk it was hidden behind a stars button. After Musk it became a huge button at the top of your feed.

> Community notes precedes Musk too.

Which is why I wrote "improved".

> Longform text is literally what twitter is not about, and a major turn-off for so many people.

People have circumvented that since the start with screenshots or 15 tweet long threads. It makes a lot of sense to offer the option that a lot of people have been asking for and using through different hacks.

> I've been using twitter since the whale days back in 2010, and it feels like we lost a decade of SRE progress.

I joined in 2008 and my experience is that the development has been nonexistent for 10+ years. Rebranding bookmarks into likes was probably the worst idea. The fact that it doesn't do video well despite being the #1 news source for breaking news surprises me the most.

There was definitely development and new features - remember tweetpic and "RT @something"? They did the huge work it takes to go from 99% to >99,99% uptime. What did rebranding bookmarks into likes did that you think was so bad? I'm indifferent to it, but I could be wrong. Chronological TL needed only a couple of button clicks - then, after the acquisition, a couple of clicks every time you opened the TL because why not - so "hidden" seems like an exaggeration. Now it's 1, so, kudos to twtr 2.0 I guess?

Let's suppose for a moment none of the objections to these "features" I raise are valid. Why are people not talking about twitter circles being flat out broken? What about the constant changes to the UI which no sane design team would approve - like removing the "RT by @account" text out of nowhere, then putting it back up a few days later. Improvisation and rollbacks to major decisions? Remember when a couple of weeks in they just let people pay to get bluechecks and major advertisers had to deal with verified accounts posing as them? The whole "remove legacy bluecheck" thing?

Twitter was afloat and since 2020Q3, posting profits every quarter, but revenue has crashed as a result of all this. I can't really get why these details like "improved community notes" are more relevant to some people than the blatant mismanagement.

Bookmarks was already there. Adding bookmark and view counts was a bad idea designed to cause people to fight more.

Only use of long form text posts is so you know to block the person without reading them.

He did fix the awful old algorithmic recommendations by just firing the team who were bad at them, but it only worked once; it's not like ad targeting is any better. The new UI is just a slightly different version of forcing you onto the algorithm feed.

Maybe your confusion is because of the scope you're using. If someone says Elon is a product person or a visionary. The judgement was with high likelihood formed well before Musk's involvement with Twitter. As new information comes it will continue to inform that judgement.

There are some people for whom Elon Musk could stroll into their house with a sledge hammer, smash through the walls, douse it with gasoline, and set it on fire---and they would still call him a visionary and a genius.

He's not working on making Twitter better. He bought twitter because it had a ton of users and he can push his X vision to them for free without working to build his own network. This is why the spam account numbers were so important to him. Basically imagine everything WeChat does and put that functionality into twitter for western audiences.

He's annoyed about bots mainly because they replied to him a lot and he thinks his experience is universal.

By associating himself with a novelty crypto especially he opted into having tons of bots replying

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