I've been mostly ambivalent about the Musk-era at Twitter—mostly because I just don't care enough to have an opinion.
This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed.
Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It's accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like "Tweet" into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding. Even with all of the issues, "Twitter" and its "Tweets" have been at the core of international discourse for a decade now.
Throwing all of that away so Elon can use a domain he's sat on since '99 seems exceedingly foolish.
> so Elon can use a domain he's sat on since '99 seems exceedingly foolish.
As far as I can tell, it's the domain of the company he co-founded (X.com), that merged with the company that became PayPal (Confinity), that led to him briefly being CEO before Thiel took over and pivoted to focus on the PayPal service.
2000 - 2017, X.com was property of PayPal.
Musk then buys it back in 2017... and then here we are.
> 2000 - 2017, X.com was property of PayPal. Musk then buys it back in 2017... and then here we are.
I was just wondering how in the world did Elon manage not to sell "x.com" to a porn company for shits and giggles. It being in the custody of PayPal explains that.
Everything Musk does looks a lot like some of my high-level, successful, Mary-Sue-like RPG characters I had. Including desogn rooted in what influenced my childhood, in Musks SpaceX case it seems to be th 50s SciFi. Well, I never had the money to try that in real life, and anyway I outgrew it before I got my drivers liscense. Looking at it from that perspective, it is borderline pathetic and just sad.
Founded in 1999, ousted as CEO within a year, within a year after the merger with Confinity becomes CEO again.
Insists on using Windows instead of Unix based systems, which causes tensions and Thiel (founder of Confinity) nopes the fuck out of there. Technical issues ensue and so, again, within a year of becoming CEO, gets kicked out only for Thiel to replace him as CEO.
All in all, sounds about like what I expected from Musk. I’m sure he’s got a boulder-sized chip on his shoulder about Thiel.
Eh, I imagine people will just keep using the old nomenclature.
Still, while the social network was presuambly the most valuable part of Twitter, gotta figure the brand was a non-trivial part of the 44 billion Musk paid to buy the company. Seems crazy to toss it after a few months.
Also, the new brand is bad. if someone told me to check out "x.com", I would assume they were directing me to a porn site. And the logo looks too much like the button you click to close your browser.
Reminds me of the OS X logo honestly. Maybe apple has a leg to stand on in terms of trademark? Though I find that highly doubtful due to it being a letter of the alphabet.
Musk has claimed for awhile that he wanted to start a new social network, but that starting from Twitter would be faster than starting from nothing.
So I don’t think he is trying to take actions that will improve Twitter, he is trying to morph it into something else entirely while maintaining at least some significant portion of the user base along the way.
I do think it will probably fail, but I’m not sure that it doesn’t have better odds than starting from scratch.
It looks like he wants to turn twitter in to twitter with kijiji. Not really sure what part of this is a social network. He wants a marketplace that he can get some money back.
I think it is very bold of him to claim starting from zero would be slower. He has accrued so much hate that if he were to start one I can't see how it would turn out any different than truthsocial or if Biden started his own social media platform.
Although I do think it's doable if he somehow kept the fact that he is at the helm a trade secret as he gradually grew the userbase until reaching a certain critical mass and finally revealing that he's the owner.
>Throwing all of that away so Elon can use a domain he's sat on since '99 seems exceedingly foolish.
Elon is driven by emotions not rationality but I wouldn't be surprised if he goes back to the Twitter logo and brand after he realizes that nobody cares about his new logo and brand.
Like Gil Amelio said[0] about Apple, I would now say about Twitter: Twitter is like a ship with a hole in the bottom, leaking water and Elon's job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.
> Like Gil Amelio said[0] about Apple, I would now say about Twitter: Twitter is like a ship with a hole in the bottom, leaking water and Elon's job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.
The solution to getting Apple pointed in the right direction was (eventually) to buy NeXT and bring Jobs back. So, the solution here would seem to be - buy Bluesky and bring back Dorsey?
It seems to demonstrate that there is NO ONE in his inner circle that will challenge him or disagree with him. Does he have an inner circle? Or just sycophants who will tell him whatever he wants to hear?
Reminds me of movies like "Top Secret" and "Airplane", where they spend a big chunk of time setting up elements of the story and characters lines, all to deliver a slapstick joke.
Elon is really, really good at a couple of things:
- Identifying inefficiencies in an existing technical solution
- Making people do what he wants
The things that Elon is really good at don't necessarily translate to great success in a long-term strategic vision. In a pure engineering discipline, like automotive production or aerospace engineering, they're very useful, but neither one of those things necessarily lends itself toward making a thing that is better or more appealing for the populace at large.
As an example: The Boring Company. The pure engineering problem of "how do I remove mass from the ground and create a tunnel as cheaply as possible" is a great application of Elon's strengths, and a useful problem to work on, because humanity will always need to build tunnels.
Hyperloop, though, is completely f'ing stupid, because regardless of whether an evacuated tube and car system can transport people efficiently or not, almost nobody wants to travel like this, and the entirety of the system is completely inefficient - trains are better in every case and with every metric.
In both TBC and Hyperloop, Elon wanted a thing, and convinced people to do it. It's just that there was no consideration as to whether the thing Elon wanted was useful or not.
This is Twitter. Elon looked at Twitter as a strictly engineering problem. And yes, Twitter was horribly inefficient, as evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of employees were let go and the service mostly continues to function, but my suspicion is that it is riding virtually entirely on H1B employees who are bound to the job else they are forced to leave the country. People will grind themselves to the bone for advancing human spaceflight and (to a lesser extent, maybe) improving alternative energy, but I don't know of any rational person who would do the same for Twitter, even if Elon bills it as the defacto public square.
Not to defend Elon, because I can't, but to be fair, any person reading this, if they had experienced the successes that Elon has in SpaceX and Tesla, fighting and succeeding against all of the naysayers, would have a non-trivial ego. When you combine that with the echo chamber of Elon's fans who treat him like the second coming, and who seem to honestly think that Elon (personally) can fix any problem, is it any wonder that he starts believing some of the bullshit? When he built the sub that led to him calling the rescue diver a pedoguy, and did it because people asked him to, and so many people constantly lauded him with egostroking compliments that he believed he could. And even though he didn't do anything that ended up saving those kids, he was found not guilty of defamation, so he still walked away with a win.
Fast forward 7 years and when he's forced to buy Twitter, he still feels like whatever he does is the right thing, and will do it regardless, and he will convince people under his influence to do what he wants so that he walks away with a win.
So that's a lot of text to say, yes, you're right, it is foolish. He doesn't care, he wants to win, and he'll do anything he can to walk away with a win, regardless of how it impacts anyone else, because ultimately it's not about the people who use the service, it's about Elon feeling good about himself.
Are they doing a better job that anyone else? Also, anything they make appears to have to be paired with Telsa's, which for mass transportation, is literally the stupidest idea ever conceived.
The Boring Company an Hyperloop are just Gadgetbahns to try to convince State and local governments to not make public transportation.
Now, if The Boring Company could make tunnels for cheap and then install real trains, then it might be a game changer but until then, it is not.
Have they pushed the boundaries though? As I understand it TBMs have been a thing for a while and plenty of pretty impressive and enormous tunnels have been built in the alps or under seas like the Channel Tunnel or the tunnel section of the Oresund bridge.
This isn't my area of expertise but all I've heard so far were a few test tunnels and the Las Vegas Loop, which isn't lighting the world on fire. I mean if they make it easier + cheaper to build tunnels then I'm all for it. I've just not yet seen anything that suggests TBC is particularly interesting.
>Identifying inefficiencies in an existing technical solution
I'm not sure that's true considering why he was (or the public story of why he was) pushed out of PayPal.
IIRC: He forced a port/rewrite of their platform to Windows (from Unix) that eventually led to a code freeze of the existing platform to allow the port to "catch up" to the existing platform. At the same time, they were hemorrhaging money due to fraud and they couldn't do anything about it due to the code freeze.
You're not looking at this with the right perspective. Hyperloop, EV's, solar panels, batteries, huge tunnels, reusable rockets. What's the common thread here?
This is obviously all the technology that Elon thinks is necessary to colonize Mars, and in each case he's doing the best he can to develop it on Earth. However its usefulness on Earth is a secondary concern.
I don't necessarily think his plan to turn Twitter into WeChat for the west is /doomed/ to fail, although it seems highly unlikely to gain traction, but it's certainly a bold plan to turn the flailing social network around into something that could be significant and I respect the ambition.
Throwing away powerful branding is just a hilariously bad call.
He’s said X is an app to do everything similar to WeChat in China. I suspect this will blow over and twitter will remain a sub product within a larger app. No way people are going to change the language they use.
Social media doesn't age well. Look at myspace. This will be controversial, but Google didn't get where it wanted/needed to be with Google+ and they ripped the cord out of the wall; it seemed like it was just google being google but it may have been genius.
I was also critical of FB/Meta buying Insta, I figured it was all going to somehow be Facebookgram but they kept it separate. FB is now for old people and Insta is probably at its peak. I will not be shocked when Meta launches a new video oriented application similar to TikTok or YouTube but somehow different.
Twitter has been toxic from day one, in fact I think the very idea of reducing discourse to something the size of a tweet is bad for the world. Lately it has been a cesspool, I get targeted political content that I absolutely never sought out, very obviously biased. That aside, do you somehow "rehabilitate" twitter? Or do you scuttle it and have a newness? Rebranding seems like the most realistic Hail Mary option, it can possibly be new without rebuilding everything. I don't think it will work and I don't really want it to, personally, but it's a bold play that is way better than continuing to watch it erode. I've heard 2 or 3 different media sources talking about twitter in the last week, partially about the "X" but also very openly about how it isn't the same thing and they don't like it. It might be too late when NYTimes podcasts are openly talking about how the reporters dislike using it anymore.
I'm not a super active participant in or consumer of "social media" but I can't remember one having a second act, once it was no longer "cool" it seemed like the party was over, did I miss one that reinvented itself? Twitter is not cool anymore.
As a Twitter-skeptic for nearly fifteen years now, the single useful feature of Twitter was as a "global PA system", not a means of discourse. It was a way for people to announce events that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, or engage in public PR battles with monopolies and oligarchies. Which is a threat to the kinds of people Musk wants to be.
Sure, sometimes those public announcements of events were "I hate minorities" or "yo look at my dick", but the platform was a global notice board that served a positive purpose in that narrow definition.
> I figured it was all going to somehow be Facebookgram but they kept it separate
I'm still salty that they pulled out the Foursquare location backend and replaced it with Facebook's... whatever it is they replaced it with. Eleven years later and it's still less often correct than it was when Foursquare was providing the data.
I've been on a Twitter break the past two weeks and it's been pretty glorious all things considered. The only thing I really do miss - and will miss if the platform dies - is that ability to be connected to the thoughts of people I want.
The question of what happens to the blogosphere types if/when Twitter explodes matters a lot to me. Idk if Substack is the right answer.
Genius would have been not creating Google+. Which makes Microsoft a genius for not going down that path. I'm a genius for not launch a site either. You probably are too.
> It might be too late when NYTimes podcasts are openly talking about how the reporters dislike using it anymore.
Nytimes is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They pretend to be better than something like Fox News but they’re the same thing. Their css and layout plus their history would have fools believe they are a good source of unbiased news. But they’re just as fake as the other news and cater to the left instead, which is anti-Musk for reasons.
Also with twitter and AI threatening to displace journalists I can’t imagine they’d like it much.
Not necessarily disagreeing with any predictions about what becomes of twitter/X though..
I didn't see anyone mention the rationale. Here it is:
"Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app. This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing.
The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.
In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird."
Perhaps it's not foolish. People have been leaving Twitter in a huff, slamming the door on their way out. "Twitter" was ruined according to numerous articles and memes. Rebranding might be going with the flow rather than fighting against the grain of "old Twitter".
It's interesting to me that the ones who really have a problem with this change are those who already left Twitter. But, having removed themselves from being the target demographic and already indicated that they won't return; I'm very much in agreement with you here that these changes are now much more with the flow.
Since Twitter is a neologism they are in a strong place: if somebody wants to sell “Twitter” sausages at the supermarket Twitter is in a position to do that…. Whereas “McDonalds” really can’t extend its brand beyond hamburger restaurants.
The next question is: “Is he really serious about the super app?”. The horror is that he probably is, but what business wants to deal with a mercurial leader who might stop payments, pay people extra, or impound money in your account for no good reason. What business is going to want to put an “X” logo up by their cash register when it means they are going to have arguments with customers. (I bet it will be a hit for “go anti-woke and go broke” businesses though.)
Twitter is not a neologism, but a word in the english dictionary: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/twitter ("to utter successive chirping noises"). As is tweet: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tweet ("a chirping note").
My knowledge of trademark law is limited, but I guess if someone would like to sell "Twitter"-sausages, they would have to apply for that trademark in the respective category and it could be anyone, as the-company-formerly-known-as-twitter propably doesn't have the trademark for food?
The reason I keep saying 'ketamine is a hell of a drug' is, foolish doesn't adequately describe what's happening.
The wealthiest huckster in the whole entire world has done so many horse tranquilizers as psychedelics that something broke and he is flipping out and wielding his power in unaccountable ways, like any billionaire, but in obvious madness.
He broke. But nobody can do a thing to help, because billionaires are so powerful that the man is completely unaccountable to anyone or anything. It's worse than Ye. Elon broke, after too many horse tranquilizer trips. He's not there anymore. You're seeing the drugs acting in his stead.
There are reasons why societies don't set individuals up with this kind of power.
Twitter? Whats that? You mean 𝕏? I honestly don't get all the hate for it, if you don't like it you dont have to xeet, nobody is forcing you rexeet Elon Musk, dont want to use 𝕏 don't use it!
If it's deemed foolish, then either Elon is foolish and making a fool of himself, or there's a misinterpretation of the action. The success someone like Musk repeatedly attains in business cannot be achieved without a significant capacity for making wise, informed decisions, or strategic moves. If his track record is any indication, he'll probably have a successful venture, and I, for one, am fascinated to see the emotional attachment and arrogance the peanut gallery continues to spout. It's a curiosity to me why those who have little to no actual stake or insight seem to have the highest confidence and volume. Perhaps it's a selection bias.
PayPal. SpaceX. SolarCity. Tesla. Boring. Elon Musk has a signature characteristic of building 10x-ethos companies from first principles at great personal & financial risk.
It's the Muskian Cycle: Innovate, try to garner investment, be laughed out of the room, make it work anyways, laugh all the way to the top of tens of thousands of millions of dollars of net worth. Then stuff all the capital into the next Big Thing.
Steve Jobs said something like "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." As far as I can tell, each of Musk's successful ventures has inculcated iterative or multiplicative innovation into the fabric of technology, society, and interaction.
PayPal spearheaded and won the race for payment processing. It wasn't perfect, but it was in no small part due to Musk why the company succeeded and earned its eBay buyout.
SpaceX, with its obvious contributions to the fields of not only rocketry but every second-order industry around it, including testing/software, etc., has been a game-changer. Again, second-order, competition arises, humanity wins.
Ditto Tesla; not only the AI/ML/CV wizardry in the stack but plenty of other non-primary-field innovation and progress comes alongside (manufacturing, battery tech, etc.). I personally am not convinced EVs are some solution to the "climate problem," given the net-impact of mfg and power consumption, but it is a pre-requisite to self-sustainability that we move toward renewables, and with that optimism I move on.
I don't know a whole lot about the Solar operations at Tesla, but SpaceX + Starlink has made one of those incremental improvements in the internet access game. I've got my biggest gripe with this venture - based on Kessler Syndrome, I'm afraid of trashing our space-way by means of junk, though admittedly this fear comes from Stephenson's "Seveneves" and not facts or reality. Orbital tracking remains a significant challenge to the exploding private space industries.
Bringing us to the Boring Co. Literally nobody is complaining about that, but it's such a banal and useful and imperative tech to develop for the overall goal of Martian exploration, and it's not abstract - it exists and is doing what it needs to do.
Certainly 𝕏 (neé Twitter) and Xai are integral to Musk's overarching vision. For years, I've posited that someone should, or perhaps already has, been meticulously analyzing the entirety of Twitter's data. This data, rich in semantic analysis, interaction templating, linguistics, and more, could be instrumental in training and researching emergent systems. The rapid, mostly unfiltered, and bite-sized nature of the medium provides a unique lens into the human thought process, offering a potential approximation of how "thoughts" might interact.
It's possible we (humans) are destined to reclaim our collective consciousness through technology. It is also possible Elon is the anti-Christ, and we should be looking inward, meditating, and removing blockages to our lineage that has shrouded the collective consciousness, muted our heart and soul, and reduced us to a low level of being, what the Buddhists might consider Naraka.
There are a lot of FUD-spreaders about Neuralink, too, but listening to the technical discussions and grokking the science has me convinced they are approaching another sea change. There are hard engineering problems and there are impossible problems. Elon's companies take the hard ones and just work really hard, then get the solution. I see no reason why this approach to software platforms and dynamic interactivity interfaces would be any different.
People don't like change, and they love to complain about something. So I obviously understand why these > angry and disappointed types are out of the woodwork.
But the thing is, we should celebrate and adore the scientific progress, commitment to science & innovation over pure profit, and - in my opinion as a USA chap - dedication to as much free speech as possible.
Cringe, hate, love, whatever - the guy is objectively successful and objectively delivered on some cool shit. I wouldn't argue he is the most precise or accurate predictor, but he's quite the visionary. When the Starship gets to orbit, there'll be some more creative press and commentary, but I will be watching and as excited as when the Roadster Spaceman went to Mars. Or when I saw the first booster landings.
Everyone fails, we are defined by how hard we try.
> PayPal spearheaded and won the race for payment processing. It wasn't perfect, but it was in no small part due to Musk why the company succeeded and earned its eBay buyout.
Musk was removed as CEO within four months of his company merging with Confinity, who had already developed and written an MVP for PayPal.
This is a bit of a stretch. After that point, Musk's "contribution" to PayPal appears to largely have been cashing dividend checks.
PayPal was not founded by Elon. SolarCity was run by his brother / cousin (?) and was about to go bankrupt before being questionably acquired by Tesla. Boring is not a thing. Even Tesla wasn't founded by him. So his track record is really creating SpaceX (and jury is still out on long term success) and executing on Tesla (where technology, concept was founded by someone else).
You could say all that, yes. Or you could just look at the immediate facts of the case and determine that Musk is being foolish and making a fool of himself.
Not that he does in all cases. Not even that the X looks bad. But the Twitter bird was both iconic and cheerful, and there was nothing wrong with it. Kicking it to the curb is the action of a foolish fool.
The Brand Toolkit page needs updating - https://about.twitter.com/en/who-we-are/brand-toolkit
Not only does it still have the bird it says "Our logo is our most recognizable asset. That’s why we’re so protective of it. Take a moment to think about how you apply it and take a read of our Brand Guidelines for examples of how we like you to use it."
Do you really have to wonder? I think it's one of his episodes, just like the purchase of Twitter itself, where the too quickly decides on something and pushes it through.
The app is also "Twitter", the <title> tag is etc. Everyone is going to keep calling them tweets. It's just the logo and redirecting the x.com domain really. Which makes sense IMO (regardless of whether it was a good idea which I'm skeptical), I don't think they should go hard with the rebranding immediately. You need to slow roll it so people don't get confused. The logo is a good start making people notice and get curious without making a big disruption in Google results and mobile app discovery.
> Anyone looking for a little horror story?
>
> I'm one of the only two in-house designer in the whole Twitter corporate, and I wasn't told anything about this rebranding...
The site favicon hasn't been updated either. I imagine that last employee working at Twitter who hasn't been fired has had a difficult weekend updating the logo.
Wait is this just because they aren’t rebranding Twitter? Just the company that operates it? I don’t have Facebook but I was under the impression that it was still Facebook even though the company rebranded to Meta.
Twitter has managed to get so many words to be common. Like it's a "tweet", not "a post on facebook". It's a "retweet" or "quote tweet", not "something I shared on facebook". Why throw all this deep brand recognition away?
It's like people say "google it", and google suddenly changing the name of their search.
I feel like "to google something" has by now become a generic term that means just to search on the web, not necessarily using Google. In particular, in Russian, I've heard people say "загуглить в яндексе", literally "to google in Yandex".
By the same token, the users of XXX dot com will probably still refer to their posts as tweets. Though as OP points out, "tweet" isn't genericized like kleenex or google, so it is less likely to survive the sudden brand shift.
There are probably hundreds of thousands (millions?) of websites out there that have the twitter bird logo at the bottom either to direct link people to share the article or maybe a link to the profile of the author or whatever.
Aren’t those little share buttons served via a CDN or third party anyway? All you need to do is swap out the image that the URL points to and any site that uses that URL suddenly starts serving the new image.
Elob has a fixiation on the letter. As I understand it, he wants to create a 'meta' platform for everything. I think in China such platforms exist (?). It's not to far away to say, that you need a 'meta' name for a platform like that. Probably wants to leave the 'private company' image and try to create an 'institution'. I hope it fails.
WeChat is extremely popular in China and on the surface it's a messaging app but below that is a whole swath of stuff, the most interesting IMO is the decentralized marketplace. My GF's mom is Chinese and she buys tons of stuff like vegetables and housewares from random people through the app.
People pay for rent and various bills, you can call their version of Uber, order food etc.
If Twitter is going to pull this off they should invest heavily in the DMing UX as messaging is the real interface for this stuff. Almost like a terminal with some extra UIs layered on top.
I like Elon, I think he is smart.
I also think he has too much power and influence.
And along with that comes corruption, non sense and slew of other negative attributes.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Twitter, is in fact, X/Twitter, or as I've recently taken to calling it, X plus Twitter. Twitter is not a social media unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning X system made useful by the X corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full as defined by X.
It's pretty simple to avoid that. And no one really talks about Tweeting outside the context of Twitter, which made Twitter's job way easier than say Google's, where something like "I googled you on Bing" has become an acceptable and common turn of phrase.
Thats's only when applied to things outide twitter, which I don't think it's the case. I have never heard anyone talk about retweeting on facebook or whatever. The fact they don't do this would make their brand even more valuable
It's not pining, it's passed on! This bird is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late bird! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies! It's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible!
Coincidentally, the end of that sketch is how I feel about the platform now:
"I'm not prepared to pursue my line of inquiry any further as I think this is getting too silly."
pretty much everyone I know on twitter is like "I don't feel like using it anymore." and only stays around due to the remainder of the network effect and the fundamental issue of transferring followers to another platform being hard.
and that it's a pretty bad branding doesn't help either, I don't want to eX my friends, imagine saying to your spouse you want to eX them etc.
and I mean people often act stupid but it has limits and if you first go around claiming you will buy twitter to protect free speech and then aX anything which tried to protect free speech in twitter from the inside and have way higher censorship numbers people might wonder if buying X products will aX them and their values and their health at some point. That he aXt anyone believing him to be a serious reliable person due to his public appearances probably won't help either.
I hope that this will push government officials and structures to set up mastodon instances. Like one for the government where each agency has an account.
Europe did this [0] and I find that it's a very good idea to have control over communication (plus since it's open anyone can do what they want with the data)
I’m surprised that the pro sports leagues haven’t tried this given all of their complaining about abuse on Twitter and IG.
NBA teams are about to start paying middle-of-the-road players $60M per year, hiring a full-time mod team to support an official mastodon instance should be a drop in the bucket for them.
+ is great when you want to censor something that one of the players said but they refuse to delete it. Could also just straight up make everything players say go through a review queue and only approve things manually, skipping anything that could cause drama.
Not saying that this would be better/worse for the public/players, but I certainly could see why the owners/companies would want to silo the players voice into platforms they themselves own.
Pragmatic, but a marketing move like that has far-reaching consequences -- both in their relationships with social media companies and the normies that look up mastodon and associate it with "hackers."
The NBA and NBAPA just signed a CBA through 2030, if this does happen it won't be any time soon (and I doubt it would, banning players from using a social media site is pretty far reaching).
This is perfect for a company like ESPN. They have enough sports writers working for them that they could instantly create the place sports talk happens.
It's legally hairy in the United States for the government to moderate Internet platforms. As I recall, some public officials were taken to court over blocking people on the site formerly known as Twitter. There's a court case pending against the government right now regarding its communications with platforms during the COVID crisis.
Oh but registration would be closed for the public.
In the Europe case it serves as a central official communication hub. Since many public officials around the world are using twitter kinda like this I think it would make sense.
It could be using anything else as a platform but Mastodon is kind of an all in one package that would be easier to work with and interoperate.
I don't think it would only reach .1% of their population.
It's talking about replacing all of the Twitter accounts of government agencies with accounts on a central mastodon instance for the government, that would serve the same "information broadcasting" purpose. I'm not talking about people having to create mastodon account or choose an instance or even use mastodon.
I think far more than .1% of people can read a public mastodon feed for information from their government
The very fact you need to create an account on twitter to view tweets should be a blocker for any gov't communication. That twitter rate-limited views is another strike against them. Government information should be open access. I don't know if activitypub is the answer, but they need to get off twitter.
Yes, self-hosted Mastodon are the best way to share official short messages like that. Proprietary consumer services like Twitter should be avoided because it is hard to even register an account there (my attempt was banned instantly) and this egoist idi*t made tweets unavailable to be read without an account.
I'm not sure what you mean, this address serves as a perfect way to see the latest short form information about EU institutions (even more so now, because of the ongoing twitter situation) regardless of the amount of posters.
Do visit https://xcorp.com for a hearty laugh (or slightly frightened chuckle, on how life mirrors art).
X Corp - Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) - UAP Technology
X Corp is one of the largest multinational conglomerates in the world. It is headquartered in the Western Hemisphere and was founded after the consolidated mega-corporate merger between ApostleCorp, The Allied Spacecraft Corporation (ASC), and Tyrell Corporation. It is currently the global leader in the retrieval and reverse-engineering of non-human intelligence technology (NHI).
Compare to our real-life version of X Corp's CEO, Linda Yaccarino:
Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.
Cool play on E-Corp from Mr.Robot! Wonderfully written show where every day that goes by makes it seem more and more like a documentary. Great watch even if you are only vaguely into tech.
It's a calming thought, that once you have too much power, there is no one left to question you and stuff like that is the result. Fortunately there are no actual lifes of people involved here, opposing to some similar political situation of the past.
Bizarre yet totally on-brand for Musk. I’ll bet the people responsible for the rebranding work had next to no notice this was happening. It must be an absolutely miserable existence to need to follow your boss on Twitter to get a jump on his unhinged ideas.
Remember when Facebook was a product of Facebook and not a product of Meta? I don’t know what road this is going in, but maybe the plan is for the product to be called Twitter, and keep the company distinct from it.
The footer is this way for month already. And secondary resources like developer.twitter.com will likely stay inconsistent for a long time (probably forever).
I'm still kinda surprised they actually changed the well known bird logo. I would be even more surprised if they actually try to fully replace the name Twitter.
I agree, its messy. But in a week, it'll all be X, and we won't care.
However, I do strongly feel this is a big mistake and will act as a jarring moment for a lot of people who will not want a 'new' thing. This may be the move that spikes the platform as the relevance of X becomes less and less because now it's history is disjoint from twitter and it's relevance to current events over the last 20 years.
Y'all are trying to make fun of this, but it's really a brilliant tactical move. Think about it; Musk desperately needs to flip Twitter, and this branding change both makes the site much more attractive for a potential buyout from a porn company, and also lowers the valuation of Twitter even further to the point where it's probably within range for a decently sized porn company to buy.
For HN in particular I feel I need to clarify this more often[0] -- but this comment is a joke.
It's riffing on the idea that Elon thinks "X" sounds cool but it actually just sounds like a porn site, that the valuation of Twitter would need to drop substantially for a porn site to be able to buy it (and that this rebrand is likely to further devalue Twitter), and that it would still be a terrible waste of money for Elon even if the fictional "plan" succeeded because he'd be selling at a substantial loss -- but in the context of the joke, it's implied that Elon wouldn't see it that way, he'd see it as a success.
It's meant to satirize Elon's plans for Twitter (and common defenses of Elon's mistakes that show up on HN) by implying that the downsides of "X" are so obvious that Elon would need to be aware of them and would need to be incorporating them into his "plan"; but even so he'd still be the type of person who would make a plan with obvious downsides (ie, selling his company off at a substantially lower price than he bought it for) and just not realize that those downsides exist. The joke frames itself as if it's going to be a defense of the rebrand, but then just goes on to describe an outcome that would be terrible for Elon anyway.
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The actual non-joke reality is likely pretty much exactly what you say -- Elon has owned "x.com" for ages and has always wanted to name something "x.com" and he has a grand vision of an everything "brand" that probably mostly just seems cool to him and that he's convinced would seem cool to everyone else as well. But he's unable to see that to everyone else it just looks like he's rebranding into a porn site.
He's convinced himself that this is a master plan that could lead to his Everything App dominating the Internet. But to everyone else outside of his bubble, the downsides are obvious and the plan just looks silly.
And thanks for the book recommendation, I'll add it to my list :)
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[0]: This is not a criticism of HN, I am myself much more prone to missing jokes than the average person and I regularly rely on context clues to figure out if someone online is joking -- and those context clues are usually missing from HN. So very much no shame to anyone for not catching a joke, I get the confusion and I also regularly miss the exact same jokes.
Mass migration is definitely a concern for potential buyers, but it's fixable. A porn company might be able to slow current Twitter migrations down by implementing smart policies like not rate-limiting their own app.
Also keep in mind the opportunities to regain advertiser trust by pivoting the content focus; many advertisers may prefer having their products shown next to pornography instead of nazis.
Readit News
This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed.
Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It's accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like "Tweet" into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding. Even with all of the issues, "Twitter" and its "Tweets" have been at the core of international discourse for a decade now.
Throwing all of that away so Elon can use a domain he's sat on since '99 seems exceedingly foolish.
As far as I can tell, it's the domain of the company he co-founded (X.com), that merged with the company that became PayPal (Confinity), that led to him briefly being CEO before Thiel took over and pivoted to focus on the PayPal service.
2000 - 2017, X.com was property of PayPal.
Musk then buys it back in 2017... and then here we are.
Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#X.com_and_PayPal
I was just wondering how in the world did Elon manage not to sell "x.com" to a porn company for shits and giggles. It being in the custody of PayPal explains that.
Founded in 1999, ousted as CEO within a year, within a year after the merger with Confinity becomes CEO again. Insists on using Windows instead of Unix based systems, which causes tensions and Thiel (founder of Confinity) nopes the fuck out of there. Technical issues ensue and so, again, within a year of becoming CEO, gets kicked out only for Thiel to replace him as CEO.
All in all, sounds about like what I expected from Musk. I’m sure he’s got a boulder-sized chip on his shoulder about Thiel.
Still, while the social network was presuambly the most valuable part of Twitter, gotta figure the brand was a non-trivial part of the 44 billion Musk paid to buy the company. Seems crazy to toss it after a few months.
Also, the new brand is bad. if someone told me to check out "x.com", I would assume they were directing me to a porn site. And the logo looks too much like the button you click to close your browser.
… which is exactly what many us do now whenever we hit the paywall.
So I don’t think he is trying to take actions that will improve Twitter, he is trying to morph it into something else entirely while maintaining at least some significant portion of the user base along the way.
I do think it will probably fail, but I’m not sure that it doesn’t have better odds than starting from scratch.
Although I do think it's doable if he somehow kept the fact that he is at the helm a trade secret as he gradually grew the userbase until reaching a certain critical mass and finally revealing that he's the owner.
Elon is driven by emotions not rationality but I wouldn't be surprised if he goes back to the Twitter logo and brand after he realizes that nobody cares about his new logo and brand.
Like Gil Amelio said[0] about Apple, I would now say about Twitter: Twitter is like a ship with a hole in the bottom, leaking water and Elon's job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv1pvRDFFqs
The solution to getting Apple pointed in the right direction was (eventually) to buy NeXT and bring Jobs back. So, the solution here would seem to be - buy Bluesky and bring back Dorsey?
Apparently searching for hair loss treatments gets you put on the dick pill list.
>X.com was an online bank co-founded by Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho in 1999 in Palo Alto, California
So he's returning to his roots more than arbitrarily changing to something random
- Identifying inefficiencies in an existing technical solution
- Making people do what he wants
The things that Elon is really good at don't necessarily translate to great success in a long-term strategic vision. In a pure engineering discipline, like automotive production or aerospace engineering, they're very useful, but neither one of those things necessarily lends itself toward making a thing that is better or more appealing for the populace at large.
As an example: The Boring Company. The pure engineering problem of "how do I remove mass from the ground and create a tunnel as cheaply as possible" is a great application of Elon's strengths, and a useful problem to work on, because humanity will always need to build tunnels.
Hyperloop, though, is completely f'ing stupid, because regardless of whether an evacuated tube and car system can transport people efficiently or not, almost nobody wants to travel like this, and the entirety of the system is completely inefficient - trains are better in every case and with every metric.
In both TBC and Hyperloop, Elon wanted a thing, and convinced people to do it. It's just that there was no consideration as to whether the thing Elon wanted was useful or not.
This is Twitter. Elon looked at Twitter as a strictly engineering problem. And yes, Twitter was horribly inefficient, as evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of employees were let go and the service mostly continues to function, but my suspicion is that it is riding virtually entirely on H1B employees who are bound to the job else they are forced to leave the country. People will grind themselves to the bone for advancing human spaceflight and (to a lesser extent, maybe) improving alternative energy, but I don't know of any rational person who would do the same for Twitter, even if Elon bills it as the defacto public square.
Not to defend Elon, because I can't, but to be fair, any person reading this, if they had experienced the successes that Elon has in SpaceX and Tesla, fighting and succeeding against all of the naysayers, would have a non-trivial ego. When you combine that with the echo chamber of Elon's fans who treat him like the second coming, and who seem to honestly think that Elon (personally) can fix any problem, is it any wonder that he starts believing some of the bullshit? When he built the sub that led to him calling the rescue diver a pedoguy, and did it because people asked him to, and so many people constantly lauded him with egostroking compliments that he believed he could. And even though he didn't do anything that ended up saving those kids, he was found not guilty of defamation, so he still walked away with a win.
Fast forward 7 years and when he's forced to buy Twitter, he still feels like whatever he does is the right thing, and will do it regardless, and he will convince people under his influence to do what he wants so that he walks away with a win.
So that's a lot of text to say, yes, you're right, it is foolish. He doesn't care, he wants to win, and he'll do anything he can to walk away with a win, regardless of how it impacts anyone else, because ultimately it's not about the people who use the service, it's about Elon feeling good about himself.
Are they doing a better job that anyone else? Also, anything they make appears to have to be paired with Telsa's, which for mass transportation, is literally the stupidest idea ever conceived.
The Boring Company an Hyperloop are just Gadgetbahns to try to convince State and local governments to not make public transportation.
Now, if The Boring Company could make tunnels for cheap and then install real trains, then it might be a game changer but until then, it is not.
Have they pushed the boundaries though? As I understand it TBMs have been a thing for a while and plenty of pretty impressive and enormous tunnels have been built in the alps or under seas like the Channel Tunnel or the tunnel section of the Oresund bridge.
This isn't my area of expertise but all I've heard so far were a few test tunnels and the Las Vegas Loop, which isn't lighting the world on fire. I mean if they make it easier + cheaper to build tunnels then I'm all for it. I've just not yet seen anything that suggests TBC is particularly interesting.
I'm not sure that's true considering why he was (or the public story of why he was) pushed out of PayPal.
IIRC: He forced a port/rewrite of their platform to Windows (from Unix) that eventually led to a code freeze of the existing platform to allow the port to "catch up" to the existing platform. At the same time, they were hemorrhaging money due to fraud and they couldn't do anything about it due to the code freeze.
This is obviously all the technology that Elon thinks is necessary to colonize Mars, and in each case he's doing the best he can to develop it on Earth. However its usefulness on Earth is a secondary concern.
Except what people in America actually want to do, which is not ride a train outside of novelty.
Throwing away powerful branding is just a hilariously bad call.
Social media doesn't age well. Look at myspace. This will be controversial, but Google didn't get where it wanted/needed to be with Google+ and they ripped the cord out of the wall; it seemed like it was just google being google but it may have been genius.
I was also critical of FB/Meta buying Insta, I figured it was all going to somehow be Facebookgram but they kept it separate. FB is now for old people and Insta is probably at its peak. I will not be shocked when Meta launches a new video oriented application similar to TikTok or YouTube but somehow different.
Twitter has been toxic from day one, in fact I think the very idea of reducing discourse to something the size of a tweet is bad for the world. Lately it has been a cesspool, I get targeted political content that I absolutely never sought out, very obviously biased. That aside, do you somehow "rehabilitate" twitter? Or do you scuttle it and have a newness? Rebranding seems like the most realistic Hail Mary option, it can possibly be new without rebuilding everything. I don't think it will work and I don't really want it to, personally, but it's a bold play that is way better than continuing to watch it erode. I've heard 2 or 3 different media sources talking about twitter in the last week, partially about the "X" but also very openly about how it isn't the same thing and they don't like it. It might be too late when NYTimes podcasts are openly talking about how the reporters dislike using it anymore.
I'm not a super active participant in or consumer of "social media" but I can't remember one having a second act, once it was no longer "cool" it seemed like the party was over, did I miss one that reinvented itself? Twitter is not cool anymore.
Sure, sometimes those public announcements of events were "I hate minorities" or "yo look at my dick", but the platform was a global notice board that served a positive purpose in that narrow definition.
I'm still salty that they pulled out the Foursquare location backend and replaced it with Facebook's... whatever it is they replaced it with. Eleven years later and it's still less often correct than it was when Foursquare was providing the data.
The question of what happens to the blogosphere types if/when Twitter explodes matters a lot to me. Idk if Substack is the right answer.
Nytimes is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They pretend to be better than something like Fox News but they’re the same thing. Their css and layout plus their history would have fools believe they are a good source of unbiased news. But they’re just as fake as the other news and cater to the left instead, which is anti-Musk for reasons.
Also with twitter and AI threatening to displace journalists I can’t imagine they’d like it much.
Not necessarily disagreeing with any predictions about what becomes of twitter/X though..
"Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app. This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing.
The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.
In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird."
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1683656350046232578
Maybe he sold it to the holding company of the company formerly known as Twitter?
It’s for Wall Street so he can take this dumpster fire public again, but with a whole bunch of buzzwords.
Perhaps it's not foolish. People have been leaving Twitter in a huff, slamming the door on their way out. "Twitter" was ruined according to numerous articles and memes. Rebranding might be going with the flow rather than fighting against the grain of "old Twitter".
The next question is: “Is he really serious about the super app?”. The horror is that he probably is, but what business wants to deal with a mercurial leader who might stop payments, pay people extra, or impound money in your account for no good reason. What business is going to want to put an “X” logo up by their cash register when it means they are going to have arguments with customers. (I bet it will be a hit for “go anti-woke and go broke” businesses though.)
The wealthiest huckster in the whole entire world has done so many horse tranquilizers as psychedelics that something broke and he is flipping out and wielding his power in unaccountable ways, like any billionaire, but in obvious madness.
He broke. But nobody can do a thing to help, because billionaires are so powerful that the man is completely unaccountable to anyone or anything. It's worse than Ye. Elon broke, after too many horse tranquilizer trips. He's not there anymore. You're seeing the drugs acting in his stead.
There are reasons why societies don't set individuals up with this kind of power.
> huckster
> has done so many horse tranquilizers as psychedelics that something broke and he is flipping out
> after too many horse tranquilizer trips. He's not there anymore. You're seeing the drugs acting in his stead.
Do you have a credible source for this besides “trust me bro”?
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That would be foolish if that was the point, but that's just a strawman.
I would be surprised if this wasn't in the billions of dollars.
And all discarded...
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But why are you angry about the rebrand?
X... is not.
Watching Elon destroy the Twitter brand is like watching someone throw orange paint on the Mona Lisa.
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PayPal. SpaceX. SolarCity. Tesla. Boring. Elon Musk has a signature characteristic of building 10x-ethos companies from first principles at great personal & financial risk.
It's the Muskian Cycle: Innovate, try to garner investment, be laughed out of the room, make it work anyways, laugh all the way to the top of tens of thousands of millions of dollars of net worth. Then stuff all the capital into the next Big Thing.
Steve Jobs said something like "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." As far as I can tell, each of Musk's successful ventures has inculcated iterative or multiplicative innovation into the fabric of technology, society, and interaction.
PayPal spearheaded and won the race for payment processing. It wasn't perfect, but it was in no small part due to Musk why the company succeeded and earned its eBay buyout.
SpaceX, with its obvious contributions to the fields of not only rocketry but every second-order industry around it, including testing/software, etc., has been a game-changer. Again, second-order, competition arises, humanity wins.
Ditto Tesla; not only the AI/ML/CV wizardry in the stack but plenty of other non-primary-field innovation and progress comes alongside (manufacturing, battery tech, etc.). I personally am not convinced EVs are some solution to the "climate problem," given the net-impact of mfg and power consumption, but it is a pre-requisite to self-sustainability that we move toward renewables, and with that optimism I move on.
I don't know a whole lot about the Solar operations at Tesla, but SpaceX + Starlink has made one of those incremental improvements in the internet access game. I've got my biggest gripe with this venture - based on Kessler Syndrome, I'm afraid of trashing our space-way by means of junk, though admittedly this fear comes from Stephenson's "Seveneves" and not facts or reality. Orbital tracking remains a significant challenge to the exploding private space industries.
Bringing us to the Boring Co. Literally nobody is complaining about that, but it's such a banal and useful and imperative tech to develop for the overall goal of Martian exploration, and it's not abstract - it exists and is doing what it needs to do.
Certainly 𝕏 (neé Twitter) and Xai are integral to Musk's overarching vision. For years, I've posited that someone should, or perhaps already has, been meticulously analyzing the entirety of Twitter's data. This data, rich in semantic analysis, interaction templating, linguistics, and more, could be instrumental in training and researching emergent systems. The rapid, mostly unfiltered, and bite-sized nature of the medium provides a unique lens into the human thought process, offering a potential approximation of how "thoughts" might interact.
It's possible we (humans) are destined to reclaim our collective consciousness through technology. It is also possible Elon is the anti-Christ, and we should be looking inward, meditating, and removing blockages to our lineage that has shrouded the collective consciousness, muted our heart and soul, and reduced us to a low level of being, what the Buddhists might consider Naraka.
There are a lot of FUD-spreaders about Neuralink, too, but listening to the technical discussions and grokking the science has me convinced they are approaching another sea change. There are hard engineering problems and there are impossible problems. Elon's companies take the hard ones and just work really hard, then get the solution. I see no reason why this approach to software platforms and dynamic interactivity interfaces would be any different.
People don't like change, and they love to complain about something. So I obviously understand why these > angry and disappointed types are out of the woodwork.
But the thing is, we should celebrate and adore the scientific progress, commitment to science & innovation over pure profit, and - in my opinion as a USA chap - dedication to as much free speech as possible.
Cringe, hate, love, whatever - the guy is objectively successful and objectively delivered on some cool shit. I wouldn't argue he is the most precise or accurate predictor, but he's quite the visionary. When the Starship gets to orbit, there'll be some more creative press and commentary, but I will be watching and as excited as when the Roadster Spaceman went to Mars. Or when I saw the first booster landings.
Everyone fails, we are defined by how hard we try.
Musk was removed as CEO within four months of his company merging with Confinity, who had already developed and written an MVP for PayPal.
This is a bit of a stretch. After that point, Musk's "contribution" to PayPal appears to largely have been cashing dividend checks.
Not that he does in all cases. Not even that the X looks bad. But the Twitter bird was both iconic and cheerful, and there was nothing wrong with it. Kicking it to the curb is the action of a foolish fool.
You don't have to make change atomically. Eventual consistency is sufficient and very practical.
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2: (gone)https://kokoholt.com/
3: (gone)https://jp.linkedin.com/in/koko-watanabe-holt
4: (privated)https://www.instagram.com/kokoholt/
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It's like people say "google it", and google suddenly changing the name of their search.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XVideos
(See _A Wind in The Door_ or _A Swiftly Tilting Planet_)
Sounds plausible to me.
They are never going to change to the X logo.
People pay for rent and various bills, you can call their version of Uber, order food etc.
If Twitter is going to pull this off they should invest heavily in the DMing UX as messaging is the real interface for this stuff. Almost like a terminal with some extra UIs layered on top.
This is just basic old man 101: trying to regain the glory days of your youth.
the best meme I have seen so far, is musk has out Gavin Belson'ed, Gavin Belson.
I think "Relentless" isn't terrible, but "Amazon" is vastly better for international branding.
X is full of Xcrement
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The issue is when it becomes generic which is a difference concept.
This is an x-bird!
pretty much everyone I know on twitter is like "I don't feel like using it anymore." and only stays around due to the remainder of the network effect and the fundamental issue of transferring followers to another platform being hard.
and that it's a pretty bad branding doesn't help either, I don't want to eX my friends, imagine saying to your spouse you want to eX them etc.
and I mean people often act stupid but it has limits and if you first go around claiming you will buy twitter to protect free speech and then aX anything which tried to protect free speech in twitter from the inside and have way higher censorship numbers people might wonder if buying X products will aX them and their values and their health at some point. That he aXt anyone believing him to be a serious reliable person due to his public appearances probably won't help either.
It's funny because I was just explaining to my kids how we owe the internet definition of "spam" to Monty Python.
Europe did this [0] and I find that it's a very good idea to have control over communication (plus since it's open anyone can do what they want with the data)
[0] https://social.network.europa.eu/
NBA teams are about to start paying middle-of-the-road players $60M per year, hiring a full-time mod team to support an official mastodon instance should be a drop in the bucket for them.
Not saying that this would be better/worse for the public/players, but I certainly could see why the owners/companies would want to silo the players voice into platforms they themselves own.
In the Europe case it serves as a central official communication hub. Since many public officials around the world are using twitter kinda like this I think it would make sense.
It could be using anything else as a platform but Mastodon is kind of an all in one package that would be easier to work with and interoperate.
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It's talking about replacing all of the Twitter accounts of government agencies with accounts on a central mastodon instance for the government, that would serve the same "information broadcasting" purpose. I'm not talking about people having to create mastodon account or choose an instance or even use mastodon.
I think far more than .1% of people can read a public mastodon feed for information from their government
Make it as easy to spin up as slack or discord for an org and you’re golden.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mastodonte
The usefulness would be a feed of official information, like what is being posted on Twitter by these same agencies right now.
But if they use something like Mastodon, everyone is free to read this information publicly or comment on it or do anything really.
> #EU
> 5 people in the past 2 days
I see it's going viral.
Government regulation and call for facist authoritarianism == evil
Europeans do not have free speech and it is making it populace much poorer. Don't hold it up as a standard to aspire to.
X Corp - Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) - UAP Technology X Corp is one of the largest multinational conglomerates in the world. It is headquartered in the Western Hemisphere and was founded after the consolidated mega-corporate merger between ApostleCorp, The Allied Spacecraft Corporation (ASC), and Tyrell Corporation. It is currently the global leader in the retrieval and reverse-engineering of non-human intelligence technology (NHI).
Compare to our real-life version of X Corp's CEO, Linda Yaccarino:
Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.
(yesterday in what we used to call a Tweet, https://twitter.com/lindayacc/status/1683213895463215104)
She must have been the previoius CEO at MONDO.com! You can do ANYTHING at Mondo.com!
Dammit, thanks, it was ZOMBO!
* Primary logo in top left of web changed to X
* Favicon still old Twitter logo
* Search bar says "Search Twitter"
* Meta title still says Twitter
* Tweet terminology still in use
* Footer updated to © 2023 X Corp.
* Dialog for upgrading to Twitter Blue now has a blue X logo but copy refers to Twitter Blue
* Communities still called Twitter Communities
What's the plan here and why so inconsistent?
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The x.com domain just redirects to twitter.com, not the other way around.
I can't imagine continuing to care about the designs, consistency, feature quality, etc. since it would be a futile and impossible fight.
That kind of brand exposure is literally priceless. Throwing is away is absolutely bonkers... it's just next-level idiocy.
We might be witnessing one of the greatest branding mistakes of all time.
The footer is this way for month already. And secondary resources like developer.twitter.com will likely stay inconsistent for a long time (probably forever).
I'm still kinda surprised they actually changed the well known bird logo. I would be even more surprised if they actually try to fully replace the name Twitter.
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He owns X.com, which was supposed to be his “everything app”. Has that plan been scrapped or is this a phased launch?
If you haven't read The Founders by Jimmy Soni, I'd recommend it. Musk has had a fascination with "X" for a long long long time.
This is just his latest attempt to make a platform that does everything. It's what he wanted PayPal to be.
He's not going to sell Twitter as "X.com" because X is his grand plan.
It's riffing on the idea that Elon thinks "X" sounds cool but it actually just sounds like a porn site, that the valuation of Twitter would need to drop substantially for a porn site to be able to buy it (and that this rebrand is likely to further devalue Twitter), and that it would still be a terrible waste of money for Elon even if the fictional "plan" succeeded because he'd be selling at a substantial loss -- but in the context of the joke, it's implied that Elon wouldn't see it that way, he'd see it as a success.
It's meant to satirize Elon's plans for Twitter (and common defenses of Elon's mistakes that show up on HN) by implying that the downsides of "X" are so obvious that Elon would need to be aware of them and would need to be incorporating them into his "plan"; but even so he'd still be the type of person who would make a plan with obvious downsides (ie, selling his company off at a substantially lower price than he bought it for) and just not realize that those downsides exist. The joke frames itself as if it's going to be a defense of the rebrand, but then just goes on to describe an outcome that would be terrible for Elon anyway.
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The actual non-joke reality is likely pretty much exactly what you say -- Elon has owned "x.com" for ages and has always wanted to name something "x.com" and he has a grand vision of an everything "brand" that probably mostly just seems cool to him and that he's convinced would seem cool to everyone else as well. But he's unable to see that to everyone else it just looks like he's rebranding into a porn site.
He's convinced himself that this is a master plan that could lead to his Everything App dominating the Internet. But to everyone else outside of his bubble, the downsides are obvious and the plan just looks silly.
And thanks for the book recommendation, I'll add it to my list :)
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[0]: This is not a criticism of HN, I am myself much more prone to missing jokes than the average person and I regularly rely on context clues to figure out if someone online is joking -- and those context clues are usually missing from HN. So very much no shame to anyone for not catching a joke, I get the confusion and I also regularly miss the exact same jokes.
He could have sold x.com for a huge amount or built his own OnlyFans.
Also keep in mind the opportunities to regain advertiser trust by pivoting the content focus; many advertisers may prefer having their products shown next to pornography instead of nazis.