That was a fun read. I fired up a Valheim server for my kids (and me, let's be honest) and it censored part of the word "Basement" in my server name. :)
Everything about this rebranding has been baffling to me. First, the original brand was great and pretty much untarnished, and there was no split/merger of business happening that would encourage it. There doesn't seem to be a business purpose to rename it. Second, these hamfisted attempts to try to get the new (terrible) name to stick. It's just not going to work. The huge number of existing users will always think of it as Twitter. It will at best become The Service Formerly Known As Twitter. It just feels like in software when you get a new Product Manager on the project who just wants to superficially "leave his mark" on the product in some way and then move on. Except this PM paid billions to do it.
Apparently Elon has been trying to push the "X" brand on things throughout his career, but always had someone stop him until he had complete control of things.
Seems Musk always had a desire to use "X" from his pre-Paypal days. He made a boastful post about buying Twitter, didn't actually want to follow through but was forced to do it by the courts.
My take is that Musk then sorta went "f-it, I had to buy Twitter. I might as well try and make it into X."
>Everything about this rebranding has been baffling to me. First, the original brand was great and pretty much untarnished
I always thought the rebrand was a complete shame, if only for the reason that "tweet", meaning "to make a posting on the Twitter online message service : to post a tweet" is in the dictionary!
> Everything about this rebranding has been baffling to me.
Everything about the purchase and the way the company has been run since Elon took the reigns has been baffling. The bizarre forced-push of the X brand is just the tip of the iceberg.
> Everything about the purchase and the way the company has been run since Elon took the reigns has been baffling. The bizarre forced-push of the X brand is just the tip of the iceberg.
I dunno, is it that baffling? It seems like he really loved using the product but didn't like the leadership, and he just wanted to own it so he could mess around and have fun following his own whims.
Once you get the idea that he doesn't actually care about financial success it all seems pretty reasonable. Like any hobby, for X/Twitter to be a "success" it just has to amuse him, and based on his usage of the platform it seems to be doing that.
The amounts of money he's losing are staggering to us but also meaningless to him. Our society has allowed him to accumulate so much wealth that nothing he could do "wrong" in a business sense would meaningfully impact his lifestyle.
He really likes X. He even named one of his kids that (well X Æ A-12, with the spaces). The A-12 is indeed a reference to the plane that came out of the oxcart project. Æ Musk pronounces "Ash" which is apparently an accepted name for the character, which was (among other things) used as a latinization of the futhorc rune[1] that means "ash tree"
They government let him name his kids that? I remember a story a long time ago about a couple that tried to name their kid
"Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116" which is about as meaningful as "X AE A-12", but was blocked by naming laws
Ironically, Æ is the most useful part of this child's name. Ash short for Ashley or Ashleigh is common for girls and boys in Britain. Wikipedia suggests the name is mostly for girls in the USA.
Nearly a year into the rebrand x.com still redirects to twitter.com, rather than vice versa, which you'd think would be the first thing they'd want to fix.
That's one of those situations that feels like: "Executive just hasn't noticed / lost attention span, and engineer is leaving a workaround for a bad call in place."
Because domain names are tied to security model, they're often the last thing you can fix.
So let's say, hypothetically, they build in a redirect from twitter to x-dot-com. Off the top of my head...
- All logins are now busted. Some percentage of users is lost forever because they can't remember their login credentials and instead of going through the recovery flow, they go use Bluesky.
- A huge amount of third-party integrations are busted because they aren't using client libraries that understand redirects
- A full code audit is necessary. Someone has hard-coded twitter.com into a critical system somewhere. Other people have referenced a variable, but it's the wrong variable. Still others are looking up the value in a database somewhere that doesn't have a search frontend anyone knows about. And some other database has a huge cache of absolute URLs it vends and everyone who built it got fired by Musk. This is probably the most predictable-cost step, but it's still a cost to be paid.
- A significant number of users are confused. The median of web user is profoundly ignorant of how the web works, and no matter how much you warn them and how much you prepare them, day-of-switch they will panic. Staff up your support team. Customers-lost-forever-two-point-oh.
- Every business integration needs to be updated. Google App Store, Apple App Store, Amazon Appstore... They all have bindings to twitter.com, and some part of their flow will panic and flag a security issue if they see it's turned into a redirect to elsewhere. That probably triggers a security audit of every version of the Twitter client (and those companies aren't particularly inspired to foot the bill on Musk's behalf, billionaire that he is...). Hell, Google indexes twitter.com via a dedicated side-pipe. Will that side-pipe handle a redirect?
(source: I've been in the side-seat for a merger-become-rebrand, and the number of things people expect to "just work" and don't is impressive).
I imagine that changing it would break a lot of things, otherwise they would've done it already. Copying a link to a tweet already makes it an x.com link too.
It's stupid and irrational because this wasn't a decision that was made based on reason - it was an emotional one. Elon is a bag-holder. He bought x.com in the dotcom boom and doesn't want to admit that the domain he paid a good chunk of money for is worthless - hence the (failed) attempt to make a brand out of it.
So far I really haven't seen anyone seriously call it just X. Most news orgs seem to resort to "X (formerly Twitter)" or similar. Some still call it Twitter, not even an acknowledgement that it's been renamed. At least Meta had the sense to just change their app splashscreens and such (e.g. Facebook by Meta). And it seems that Alphabet doesn't make any effort to make their presence known.
The thing that really bothers with me with this is why couldn't it just be "Twitter by X"? You want to make an "everything app", that's great Elon, let's call that X. Now what do we call all the mini apps inside the everything app? Oh, they're called "X", too? So you're using "X of X" to call a cab, and "X of X" to send a message, and these are different apps inside the mega app? How does this naming make sense?
Even X itself resorted to putting "Formerly Twitter" in its App Store and Play Store taglines after their daily installs fell off a cliff. Previously the tagline was just "Blaze your glory!" but nobody knows what that means.
> Most news orgs seem to resort to "X (formerly Twitter)" or similar.
I mean, if nothing else, "X did [something stupid]" just looks like someone forgot to fill in a template; no-one is going to publish an article with 'X', unqualified, in it.
Was thinking almost exactly this while reading a recent BBC article — their style guide appears to be that the company's name is "X, formerly Twitter,"
> Everything about this rebranding has been baffling to me. First, the original brand was great and pretty much untarnished, and there was no split/merger of business happening that would encourage it. There doesn't seem to be a business purpose to rename it.
First, fire 80% of developers. Then, make the remaining developers create an "everything app" (in addition to the workload they already have with the Service Formerly Known As Twitter app). Something, something. Profit ???
Exactly! Ownership is not in it for revenue. They'll say they don't care about revenue to everyone who asks. To be baffled, one has to ignore all of that.
There is strong nostalgia for aw-shucks persona of an inventor-turned-business-owner.
> It just feels like in software when you get a new Product Manager on the project who just wants to superficially "leave his mark" on the product in some way and then move on. Except this PM paid billions to do it.
True but there is no way it would be implemented in such a half-assed way at any other big company (including pre-Musk Twitter).
Stuff like this makes it obvious that the people who are still there no longer give a fuck, they just do what they are told with the minimum effort required to collect the paycheck.
Beyond the incredibly botched implementation, the actual _idea_ is very funny; the 1984 approach to rebranding. Twitter, the Unwebsite. Like, how the hell could he think this would actually work.
I don't understand the social structure inside a software company where this kind of thing can go from some intern's 3am idea to production, without passing many layers of gatekeepers, any one of which should have swiftly flagged this down. It's not that the string replacement was implemented wrongly (that too)—it's that they're touching, in any manner at all, one of the most obviously-sensitive UX things in their product. Without a commensurate amount of security review.
Like, in my imagination, within five minutes of anyone seeing this, a person with responsibility would have stepped in and said "No, you can't do this. And if you insist on doing this, here's five layers of audits and sign-offs that this needs to go through first, because the thing you're proposing is potentially really dangerous". Am I thinking it about it wrongly?
> Like, in my imagination, within five minutes of anyone seeing this, a person with responsibility would have stepped in and said "No, you can't do this. And if you insist on doing this, here's five layers of audits and sign-offs that this needs to go through first, because the thing you're proposing is potentially really dangerous". Am I thinking it about it wrongly?
Which part of "anyone who is not a Musk yes-man has already been fired or quit" are you having trouble with?
It's worth remembering, there are two kinds of yes-men:
1) the sycophant who loves authoritarian institutions; the "true believers"
and
2) the young, brilliant visa holder who was the talk of his parents' social circle in Hyderabad three years ago when he graduated and was able to get on board at a household-name NorCal tech company, but who is now being abused by the employer who sponsors the thing that lets him stay in the US.
You'll always have type one; some humans simply love following a dolt. The second type is a result of our laws, and laws can be changed to keep people like Elon from taking advantage of workers.
Go re-read all the comments here during the take over and layoff where people claimed it could not possibly take more then a handful of people to run such a simple site.
Don't take this as a defense of what is a harebrained idea; but this kind of replacement should be easy to do correctly. You know; in such a way where only real twitter.com links are changed to x.com.
Honestly it is only somewhat surprising to me that no one noticed the error ahead of time. On the one hand, this is the type of mistake I do see in reviews from time to time... usually in the form of a regex that is not anchored to the start of the string, or perhaps it uses a non escaped period which of course means "any character" in regex. On the other hand, it is revealing about the kinds of controls in place that it got through.
That's a good hypothesis with the non-escaped period! That someone wrote /twitter.com/ for the string substitution, which almost works, and then added a second one like /\w+.twitter.com/ for subdomains, which also seems to work, and would pass simple tests to check if it works or not. Matches everything it's supposed to; rejects most of the things it shouldn't.
Well, that is the specific outcome Elon wanted when he laid off three-quarters of the company. He very clearly stated that he didn't see the value of the "trust and safety" teams that would have been the ones to flag something like this down.
> I don't understand the social structure inside a software company where this kind of thing can go from some intern's 3am idea to production
This is what happens when you "cut the fat" and are left with an adversely-selected[1], skeleton crew of "hard core engineers." The site was never going to fail all at once, instead, it's a death by a thousand cuts and suboptimal engineering.
1. No disrespect to current Twitter engineers who can't leave easily, or believe in the mew mission. However those who survived layoffs but could leave have left.
Well, that’s because any org that has five layers of audits for this just has five layers of audits for everything and so rarely gets anything done. This is a clbuttic bug. It’s silly and damaging but easy to fix and move on with.
Not particularly different from Bluesky allowing one guy to own all of S3.
Well it starts with the bad idea probably coming from the top, Musk saying I'm tired of seeing twitter.com links change them all to look like x.com links, that plus his gutting of the company when he took over means there's less people around to be the person to say no you can't do this this way go back and start over (or not at all).
It's probably worse with Musk. His executive style seems to be, from his biography, ignore a thing for a while until he gets in a maniac phase and then over the shoulder manage a thing until it's done, regardless of time or context.
I can just take the scene of Musk being on a roof yelling at the crew to change how they install solar tiles late in the night and translate it to him berating a programmer in the office to make it look like x.com and not caring about the details.
This article was 5 hours old at the time I'm viewing it and the bug is supposedly already fixed per the article itself. So yea, seems like this was probably fixed within 5 minutes of anyone noticing.
Since most of my tweets where related to work, I moved from Twitter / X to LinkedIn. Twitter under Elon is a huge mess. The irony is that he kept complaining about spam and bots before. Since he took over, my new followers and many of the likes I received were from new only fans like users. Maybe it's by design and he wants to make it an only fans clone. But I'm out. I don't even bother reading my feed yet alone posting.
LinkedIn has its problems too. I would say it's the least bad among the two.
My biggest issue with LinkedIn is their horrible mobile web interface. I didn't trust their app. I know it's been years, but they burned anything resembling trust.
It's been a bizarre ride watching Twitter slowly unravel under the new leadership.
It'll have a long way to fall... the total userbase is still around the same order of magnitude as the population of the United States. But when I read stories of decisions like this, I can't help but think that it indicates the adults are no longer in the room, and a 300-million-plus userbase becomes a massive target surface if it's being run by a team that doesn't really grok the Internet...
It's certainly less weird in official contexts now though. The brand was OK but not really "scalable" without sounding like something right off Idiocracy in some contexts.
Readit News
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com_(bank)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/07/25/elon-musk-...
My take is that Musk then sorta went "f-it, I had to buy Twitter. I might as well try and make it into X."
I always thought the rebrand was a complete shame, if only for the reason that "tweet", meaning "to make a posting on the Twitter online message service : to post a tweet" is in the dictionary!
What a waste to throw that away.
Everything about the purchase and the way the company has been run since Elon took the reigns has been baffling. The bizarre forced-push of the X brand is just the tip of the iceberg.
I dunno, is it that baffling? It seems like he really loved using the product but didn't like the leadership, and he just wanted to own it so he could mess around and have fun following his own whims.
Once you get the idea that he doesn't actually care about financial success it all seems pretty reasonable. Like any hobby, for X/Twitter to be a "success" it just has to amuse him, and based on his usage of the platform it seems to be doing that.
The amounts of money he's losing are staggering to us but also meaningless to him. Our society has allowed him to accumulate so much wealth that nothing he could do "wrong" in a business sense would meaningfully impact his lifestyle.
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1: HN won't let me paste the rune, not sure if it's limited to BMP on purpose but you can see it on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansuz_(rune)
So let's say, hypothetically, they build in a redirect from twitter to x-dot-com. Off the top of my head...
- All logins are now busted. Some percentage of users is lost forever because they can't remember their login credentials and instead of going through the recovery flow, they go use Bluesky.
- A huge amount of third-party integrations are busted because they aren't using client libraries that understand redirects
- A full code audit is necessary. Someone has hard-coded twitter.com into a critical system somewhere. Other people have referenced a variable, but it's the wrong variable. Still others are looking up the value in a database somewhere that doesn't have a search frontend anyone knows about. And some other database has a huge cache of absolute URLs it vends and everyone who built it got fired by Musk. This is probably the most predictable-cost step, but it's still a cost to be paid.
- A significant number of users are confused. The median of web user is profoundly ignorant of how the web works, and no matter how much you warn them and how much you prepare them, day-of-switch they will panic. Staff up your support team. Customers-lost-forever-two-point-oh.
- Every business integration needs to be updated. Google App Store, Apple App Store, Amazon Appstore... They all have bindings to twitter.com, and some part of their flow will panic and flag a security issue if they see it's turned into a redirect to elsewhere. That probably triggers a security audit of every version of the Twitter client (and those companies aren't particularly inspired to foot the bill on Musk's behalf, billionaire that he is...). Hell, Google indexes twitter.com via a dedicated side-pipe. Will that side-pipe handle a redirect?
(source: I've been in the side-seat for a merger-become-rebrand, and the number of things people expect to "just work" and don't is impressive).
It's stupid and irrational because this wasn't a decision that was made based on reason - it was an emotional one. Elon is a bag-holder. He bought x.com in the dotcom boom and doesn't want to admit that the domain he paid a good chunk of money for is worthless - hence the (failed) attempt to make a brand out of it.
I mean, if nothing else, "X did [something stupid]" just looks like someone forgot to fill in a template; no-one is going to publish an article with 'X', unqualified, in it.
Was thinking almost exactly this while reading a recent BBC article — their style guide appears to be that the company's name is "X, formerly Twitter,"
Stated goal is to gradually transform it into an “everything app” — https://theconversation.com/elon-musk-aims-to-turn-twitter-i...
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There is strong nostalgia for aw-shucks persona of an inventor-turned-business-owner.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/16/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcri...
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/dealbook-summit-2023-el...
This is how it goes in all big companies :(
Stuff like this makes it obvious that the people who are still there no longer give a fuck, they just do what they are told with the minimum effort required to collect the paycheck.
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s/\btwitter\.com\b/x.com/ig
1. your version replaces at-twitter.com with at-x.com
2. your version replaces twitter.com.au with x.com.au
Like, in my imagination, within five minutes of anyone seeing this, a person with responsibility would have stepped in and said "No, you can't do this. And if you insist on doing this, here's five layers of audits and sign-offs that this needs to go through first, because the thing you're proposing is potentially really dangerous". Am I thinking it about it wrongly?
I cannot understand at all.
Which part of "anyone who is not a Musk yes-man has already been fired or quit" are you having trouble with?
1) the sycophant who loves authoritarian institutions; the "true believers"
and
2) the young, brilliant visa holder who was the talk of his parents' social circle in Hyderabad three years ago when he graduated and was able to get on board at a household-name NorCal tech company, but who is now being abused by the employer who sponsors the thing that lets him stay in the US.
You'll always have type one; some humans simply love following a dolt. The second type is a result of our laws, and laws can be changed to keep people like Elon from taking advantage of workers.
Honestly it is only somewhat surprising to me that no one noticed the error ahead of time. On the one hand, this is the type of mistake I do see in reviews from time to time... usually in the form of a regex that is not anchored to the start of the string, or perhaps it uses a non escaped period which of course means "any character" in regex. On the other hand, it is revealing about the kinds of controls in place that it got through.
nothing more dangerous than "oh, that's easy, let's push it straight to prod"
This is what happens when you "cut the fat" and are left with an adversely-selected[1], skeleton crew of "hard core engineers." The site was never going to fail all at once, instead, it's a death by a thousand cuts and suboptimal engineering.
1. No disrespect to current Twitter engineers who can't leave easily, or believe in the mew mission. However those who survived layoffs but could leave have left.
Not particularly different from Bluesky allowing one guy to own all of S3.
I can just take the scene of Musk being on a roof yelling at the crew to change how they install solar tiles late in the night and translate it to him berating a programmer in the office to make it look like x.com and not caring about the details.
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Given all the Twitter bugs and issues, it seems they have all been laid off.
There is none. Stop trying to understand - it's a fool's errand.
>a person with responsibility would have stepped in
There are none left. They were either laid off, or they left before that could happen.
>"No, you can't do this"
... is the last thing anyone says to Elon Musk before getting fired.
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I think you mean "Elon Musks random demand".
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LinkedIn has its problems too. I would say it's the least bad among the two.
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It'll have a long way to fall... the total userbase is still around the same order of magnitude as the population of the United States. But when I read stories of decisions like this, I can't help but think that it indicates the adults are no longer in the room, and a 300-million-plus userbase becomes a massive target surface if it's being run by a team that doesn't really grok the Internet...