They had such a huge amount of brand recognition and vocabulary associated with their site and Elon just decided to kill that
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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No one will convince me he isn't doing this on purpose to tank the brand.
He and his buddies were mad that they couldn't compete. So he made the offer in a manic moment, and then was forced to go through with it. Now that he's got it, he's going to destroy it, and use the loss to reduce his taxes from all his government contracts.
And he simultaneously gets to platform fascists and silence people calling out the powerful. Wins all around.
For a normal person, this looks like failing. I totally get that. But rich people can derive massive benefits from stuff that would ruin us, and every single thing Musk is doing benefits him in some way.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
This phrase doesn't really work if someone is trying to be malicious in the first place. I usually see it used when someone's intentions were good but they were just stupid about it. That's not really the case here
It's possible that Elon tried to do something malicious, and failed because of stupid choices. It's also true that the outcome also benefits him.
I will attribute it to malice regardless
That assumes all things are equal.
They rely on you repeating this adage to get away with this shit. It's too consistent. If he were actually stupid, he'd face negative consequences, which is something these folks very rarely have to do.
If you're rich enough you can just buy your way out of most consequences.
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That's assigning a level of intelligence to Elon that I'm not comfortable with. Plus I'm sure he and his buddies are getting some value out of killing Twitter, but certainly not 44 billion.
He does not have to do it himself. He has accountants and lawyers who can take his stupid decisions and turn them into money.
At a certain point the economies of scale of being a billionaire just keep you rich. What I've said is pretty standard tax bullshit that they grow up pulling.
just spitballing here, but what happens if accountants band together and tell him to do his own damn taxes? he's fucked then, isn't he? the real revolution of the future won't be fought in the streets, but in the accounting departments /s
I mean, you're kind of seeing this with Donald Trump's legal issues. He can't get anyone with real clout, so he's actually facing consequences in that arena now.
See, a total fuckwit would at least make 1 or 2 good calls by accident. Nobody rolls a 1 EVERY DAMN TIME.
Exactly. A broken clock is right twice a day. If "idiot" rich people can monetize their mistakes, consistently do so, and manage to do it almost as if by using the same playbook as each other...they're not idiots, it is on purpose, and they just want enough plausible deniability that they don't get strung up from a Michelin star restaurant.
I don't think he's just throwing out random ideas and they suck, he's clout chasing with the radical right wing. A long time ago he was the face of tesla and spacex, two very functional companies. Basically everyone thought he war brilliant, or competent at the very least. Then he started a downward spiral of negative publicity but the alt-right loving his bizarre antics, starting with calling the diver that rescued a bunch of kids a pedo all because his idea of a submersible in that tiny cave was patently retarded and he was upset nobody was praising his genius.
Skip ahead and here we are. Letting open racists, antisemites, and CSAM posters do whatever they want because it makes the libs mad. Sabotaging Ukrainian starlink because he gave it to them for the clout but realizes the right hates that we help Ukraine.
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It’s like Kleenex rebranding to V and then telling everyone to refer to them as tissues.
It’s absolutely batshit. Way to destroy a strong brand, and any brand recognition.
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- Something must be done! (true)
- This is something! (also true)
- Therefore, this must be done!
Literally cannot argue with that logic
This is not one of those cases. Nothing needed to be done.
Well I meant about Twitter hemorrhaging money and staff on a pretty-much-un-heard-of scale even for the tech industry since Musk took over. That was definitely a problem, and I 100% feel that something definitely needed to be done to right the ship.
Yes there was a problem, but destroying the identity and appeal of the app wasn't the solution.
Inviting all the Nazis back, and explicitly chasing away the advertisers and all the people who ran the servers and mailed the rent checks, wasn't the solution either...
THAT IS IF YOU'RE SOME SORT OF PUSSY
he’s not even able really kill it either. everyone i know still calls them tweets. even in the articles i read, the authors all say twitter or “X, formerly known as twitter”. it’s such a stupid branding decision that no one is buying into it
I thought they were called xcretes
“The internet personality Xcreted daily, his xcretes had been re excreted over 20 000 times”
*rexcreted
Thanks for keeping me up with the latest on Twitter and Elon Musk. I don't know how I even managed to live back when I went for months without thinking about either of these two.
The trumpp of the tech industry.
I was never more involved in US politics.
I don't care
Ok, as a compromise between a generic word and a specific name, I vote we call them Xcrement. (Verb: Xcrete) (Would nicely describe the average quality too)
Aye. I second.
The Twitter brand is so totally not the problem here.
Tweets are stupid as f. I can’t say it is wrong to kill the word tweet (barf) BUT the whole world knows wtf a tweet is.
Elon is going full on gen-x, this is generational battle royale to the max.
like, totally
It is absolutely hilarious that he is waging war against one of the most valuable parts of Twitter -- the brand
A "post" on x will always be known as an Xcrete (verb, I Xcrete on X), and past tense will be an Xcrement. (Noun, I read an Xcrement on X)
why would a noun have a past tense
Gretchen, stop trying to make X happen. It's never going to happen.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Users are starting to see pop-ups about new terms that go into effect on September 29th, and one adjustment is two instances of “retweet” (the only use of “tweet” in the current terms) to “repost,” essentially putting the final stamp in the death of the word tweet.
There are a bunch of other branding changes in the new terms, including a nearly wholesale removal of the word “Twitter” in favor of X. I say nearly wholesale because, hilariously, many of the URLs included in the terms still seemingly have to include the word “twitter,” like in this link to a developer-focused website: https://developer.x.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites.
There have been some hints that X wants to fully switch over to URLs starring X, but it seems Twitter will hang around in some capacity.
References to Periscope, Twitter’s live streaming app it shut down in 2021, have been removed as well.
Another change moves language about misusing Twitter’s services to a new section, and updates it in a pointed ban against scraping, something that X owner Elon Musk really doesn’t like.
X is also planning to put a new privacy policy into place on September 29th.
The original article contains 323 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 41%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Sounds better than Xeets
But we all know they’re Xcretions
....and Xvideos that cause so many disappointments on the internet
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Great job, Elon. He took one of the most distinctive things about Twitter, the fact that it had a unique verb for its posting type, and killed it. Way to destroy a brand.
There are a few other updates to the terms, too. One says that by using X, “to the extent permitted by law, you also waive the right to participate as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class action, collective action or representative action proceeding.”
[…]
X is also planning to put a new privacy policy into place on September 29th. That new policy says X will expand the volume of data it collects on users, including biometric data and employment history.
Good thing I'm not there, don't care, am not affected. Lonnie is the best business man evar.
I call them skeets like our lord and savior Lil Jon intended
Wondering what will Elmo choose to do: redirect all requests from twitter.com to x.com, or push a 404 on the twitter.com domain just to force all the websites that still embed tweets, er, posts to acknowledge the new URL.
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