The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 39 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lieb: Elon Musk's hardware taste does not translate to software
“Jeff Bezos once said that, like, taste is not transferable across domains, and to me, this is like a great example of that. I would say, Elon, like, if I drive a Tesla, I think it's the best car that I've ever sat in, but the taste and the decisions they made …”
Blomfield: Rebranding Twitter to X was total insanity
“I think when you get something short and catchy, and you have the verb, just like total insanity to change, especially for something as meaningless as X, right?”
Hockenmaier: Early big tech growth playbooks mislead startups without product-market fit
“I actually think like the legacy of that growth team, and then like Twitter and LinkedIn and the others that followed is actually maybe problematic when we think about some of the applications of growth later on, because they were applied in this case of like …”
Fake Facebook accounts hold more influence because users expect authenticity
“Because it's so hard to create fake accounts on Facebook, the accounts that are fake might actually be a little bit more powerful because people don't expect there to be as many fake people on Facebook as they do Twitter, and so they might actually have more o…”
Gil: An investor tried to block Mixer Labs' 2009 Twitter acquisition
“When my first company Mixer Labs exited to Twitter, so Twitter bought it back in 2009, we actually had an investor who tried to block the exit as a way to negotiate more of the outcome for themselves.”
Paffenholz: Multi-step, multi-channel candidate outreach campaigns work in every case
“Multi-step campaigns will work in every case, and you'll want to distribute that outreach across multiple channels. So think emails plus LinkedIn steps. Plus if you have a different way of getting in touch, like a Twitter DM can make a big impact as well.”
Lieb: Tying paid subscriptions to blue checkmarks destroyed identity verification
“That makes sense, and if they connect that to the blue check, though, they now overload this term, and now I don't know if it's just a twelve-year-old in his basement paying for Twitter premium, or an actual legit person that I should pay attention to.”
Lieb: Musk said Twitter should make far-left and far-right equally unhappy
“I think Elon explicitly said, when you're using Twitter, you should feel equally bad if you're on the far left or on the far right.”
Blomfield: Community Notes has done a good job flagging fake news
“And I feel like community notes have done a relatively good job of calling out the stuff that's fake news versus real news actually. So in, in one sense, I think that's been a really positive change.”
Lieb: Integrating Grok into X makes zero sense for normal users
“So this is basically ChatGPT inside of Twitter, which to me doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and I'm sure to any normal person makes zero sense.”
Seibel: Many Founders Pitch Contrived Views That Sound Like Investors
“You start having conversation with the founder, and you'll actually feel like you're talking to an investor, to a VC. And you're like, but what about your passion? Like, what, what's your opinion? Like, what do you care about? And it's all kind of like, contri…”
Choksi: Repurposing the same content across every platform is a mistake
“I think people make the mistake of thinking marketers love this dream of repurposing. I'm gonna repurpose it on every platform, and it's like, actually, no, because what you do, what works on YouTube, what works on SoundCloud, what works on Twitter, what works…”
Choksi: Trying to engage interactive social communities is a strategic mistake
“I think a lot of people kid themselves into thinking like, oh, we're going to interact with our community and grow it this way and that way, and I actually think that's a real mistake because then you don't prioritize or know where to prioritize your effort be…”
Dennis: Early startups should scrap paid ads for free validation
“When you're starting a business, first of all, let's just scrap the advertising on Facebook and advertising on Twitter or wherever, and you really need to find out those scrappy free ways in order to see if your product is something that customers are respondi…”
Blomfield: Products requiring user-made tutorials indicate flawed UX design
“When people need to, like, record long videos telling other people how to use your product, you've probably done something wrong.”
Lieb: Twitter's biggest change is shifting to an engagement-based feed
“By far the biggest change that I have seen in Twitter over the last year or so is this shift from a, you know, chronological-ish feed of topics that you have expressed that you want to follow to now kind of like more of a TikTok feed of stuff that you might Be…”
Lieb: Twitter excels in breaking news due to direct first-party publishing
“I think it is that it is so easy for first party information owners to put content onto the platform. So like we saw, like during the assassination attempt, we saw a bunch of firsthand videos that The normal media organization would not have produced for us so…”
Seibel: Founders should unfollow accounts and media promoting investor-style thinking
“Diagnose why you started thinking this way, and if that means, like, unfollowing some people on Twitter, or not reading certain publications, like, to do it. We're susceptible to the inputs that come to our mind, and like, the easiest way we do this is turn th…”
Caldwell: Founders get Bay Area network effects without living downtown
“We get the benefits of living in the Bay Area and having the network effects of the city. Without all living in, like, the, like, our lives are not the Twitter thread. Showing photos of what's going on in downtown San Francisco.”
Caldwell: Founders spending all day on Twitter lose touch with real money
“If you spend all day on Twitter and discord and everything's a game and everything to joke, everything's silly, you can kind of, I just have noticed some folks lose themselves and not realize that the numbers in the spreadsheet are real dollars”
Best: Open podcasts guarantee audience delivery unlike algorithmic feeds
“When somebody subscribes to your podcast, if you make another episode, they're going to get it. In most good podcast players. Whereas if someone follows you on Twitter, and are they going to get your next tweet? Like, you never know.”
Hoover: The Twitter social graph remains underutilized in product design
“The product design was built for leveraging the Twitter graph, which I think today still is underutilized, actually”
Disinformation actors target locally dominant platforms like WhatsApp in India
“The people who want to manipulate public opinion, they're gonna go to where the people are, and the platforms that the people are using. So in the US, we tend to see a lot of these campaigns on Twitter and Facebook, because that's the platforms that the majori…”
Twitter's open API and anonymity allow more automated fake accounts
“Twitter tends to have a lot more of these fake accounts that use some kind of automation. There are also a bunch of tools that allow you to, you know, automate your activity on Twitter, things like Hootsuite and whatnot.”
Gil: High user retention on broken products proves product-market fit
“If your product is broken and people are still using it very actively, or you have high retention on a broken product, that's a clear sign of product market fit. When Twitter was constantly going down in the farewell days, and yet nobody moved off of Twitter, …”
Rusenko: 2008 Silicon Valley consensus was to actively avoid charging users
“In 2007 and 2008, the prevailing thinking in Silicon Valley was that you should actively not charge money. You should actively be not making money. That was the prevailing thinking. It sounds really, really crazy now. But at the time, the logic went that Twitt…”
Twitter's 280-character limit allows users to put ideas in dialogue
“Someone made the point that with 280 characters, it actually gives you enough space. It's not that much space, but it gives you enough space to do something you almost never could with a 140 characters on their own, which is to Present one idea, kind of, like,…”
Twitter and Facebook killed the independent era of blogging
“There's no question. It was killed by Twitter and Facebook, and just really the sense that People moved on.”
Laura Behrens Wu: Amazon is a transactional utility, not an emotional brand
“I think Amazon is great for generic purchases, but It's really, like, you don't see Amazon making funny jokes on Twitter as a corporate account. Like, you don't see anyone tagging Amazon in their Instagram posts. It's just that people in their free time don't …”
DeBaun: Black Americans watch 8 hours of TV daily while driving content
“Black people and people of color actually over index and watching television, so it's about eight hours a day on average, it's a lot, the average person watches about five, and at the same time, we're huge content creators”
Garry Tan: Twitter acquired Posterous for approximately $20 million
“Posturus was dead simple blogs by email. It grew to be a top 200 website on the internet, and then Twitter ended up buying it for about twenty million dollars, so that was sort of like my first bag, really.”
Srinivas: There is still no good way to search X
“There still is no good way to search over Twitter.”
Perplexity's first demo queried Twitter tables using OpenAI Codex
“Twitter. The pre-Elon CEO moments academic access was allowed, legal, so we built a database of Twitter. We organized it in the form of tables. We tried to do it with the OpenAI codex models. This was even pre-GPT-III. We wrote a lot of templates.”
Pokémon GO reached Twitter's 10-year active user count in one month
“In fact, I think Pokemon go by the first month after launching, they had the same number of Active as Twitter, which took them 10 years to get there, and they got there in one month.”
Optimizely pivoted in YC W10 after a failed Twitter referral widget
“This company optimizely went through YC on winter 10, and they put this prototype literally in a couple of days, and the reason why is that they had applied with YC with a very different idea. They started with a Twitter referral widget, and that idea didn't w…”
Sloan discloses he regularly deletes his tweets to keep Twitter ephemeral
“My very tiny kind of lever against that, that system and my way of kind of keeping it something like a cafe conversation with the words just fading away is to delete my tweets on the regular and oh, I can report that it feels great.”
Ricketts: First Round pings Slack when accounts with 10k+ followers tweet
“We even have some mechanisms set up on Slack where if anyone that has over 10,000 followers tweets about a piece of our content, we get an alert. So that we can keep tabs on how many influencers in the space are engaging with and sharing.”
Hoover: Manual Twitter outreach converted 80% of makers to join Product Hunt
“And so when we realized that I would every morning go on Twitter and like search for their Twitter username and say Hey Jill, your product is, is over here. People are talking about it. Do you want to join and answer questions? And like, 80% of the time they'd…”