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Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

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Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#311
post #10

You know, for all the talk about how twitter is going downhill and making stupid decisions, this is the only one so far that really, really, does seems stupid. Verification was bad and now it’s a joke, api rate limits have some possible argument etc - but why in the hell buy a household name just to change it? Why not build X from scratch?

It still has a boatload of users and is still the cultural town square of the tech world. To build X from scratch you'd have to convince people like Marc Andreessen, Paul Graham, a bunch of other VCs etc to move. Changing behaviour is very hard. You'd have to get people to install new apps, get use to new workflows etc and humans are creatures of habit so this is very hard.

> Changing behaviour is very hard. You'd have to get people to install new apps, get use to new workflows etc and humans are creatures of habit so this is very hard.

I think this is pretty optimistic thinking. "Oh no, I can't pick my way through a bunch of bigoted garbage to which the owner responds 'Concerning' or read Marc Andreesen being deeply weird or see 30,000 reply guys to Paul Graham hawking shitcoins, whatever will I do?" is, I think, probably okay at this point.

Having the thinkfluencey types before the spam and impersonation taps were turned on to full was probably valuable; now Twitter is getting the stink on it and that's hard to wash off.

Personally speaking, Bluesky picked up pretty much everybody I care to talk to and remaining on Twitter in a material capacity is a flag that I probably don't want to hear from you.

Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#312
post #85

I don’t really see what Musk is trying to accomplish. Everything he’s done to Twitter carries the foul stench of Death by Private Equity. No product improvements, but worse reliability, more spam, and a weird desperate-looking rebrand. This is what it looks like when inept MBAs try to squeeze some more life out of a dying platform. The strange thing here is that Musk’s acquisition was supposed to be the exact opposit…

I used to see news stories with tweets in it. I can’t recall many recently except for musks tweets. While the choices seem questionable Twitter is constantly in the news and getting talked about. If any publicity is good publicity Musk has certainly been able to continually be part of the news cycle.

Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#313

What does the path to success look like for "the everything app"? I can't picture it. So far it looks like they're acting like a FAANG in a "fake it til you make it" move to try to attract money. But not only do they not have the scale, Twitter is also losing its place as the reference app for live text updates.

An "everything app" is just an operating system. There is nothing to picture, we've been having them since the 1950s [1]. We could imagine some new way of operating over systems: for instance the Alan Kay original meaning of object-orientedness [2], or instead of a compiled binary to have some stable diffusion model + large language model which hallucinates the OS on the go [3]. But that's not what the quantifiably g…

Thank you for the read. The idea of an OS supplanted by an AI is fascinating.

> "everything must be controlled by me, not by you"

Right, the end goal I had in mind for "the everything app" is the control of the software (including communication), the data and the payment system by the same company.

Few companies have achieved that outside of China. I'm thinking, Apple, Google, Samsung in Korea maybe? And no one I know personally is fully tied to one ecosystem. My friends only use the individual services they need. Becoming WeChat will not happen.

Even the idea of Twitter growing into a Google size company seems completely unrealistic. Meta struggles with achieving this and right now they're more popular than Twitter.

Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#315
post #72
post #10

You know, for all the talk about how twitter is going downhill and making stupid decisions, this is the only one so far that really, really, does seems stupid. Verification was bad and now it’s a joke, api rate limits have some possible argument etc - but why in the hell buy a household name just to change it? Why not build X from scratch?

I don't know, putting 13 billion debt on Twitter and cutting ad revenue down to half seems pretty stupid too.

I hate to say this, but is there a good way to remove Musk’s ownership of the platform?

Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#316
post #85

I don’t really see what Musk is trying to accomplish. Everything he’s done to Twitter carries the foul stench of Death by Private Equity. No product improvements, but worse reliability, more spam, and a weird desperate-looking rebrand. This is what it looks like when inept MBAs try to squeeze some more life out of a dying platform. The strange thing here is that Musk’s acquisition was supposed to be the exact opposit…

It’s not a popular opinion on this site, and I’m probably going to be savagely downvoted, but whatever talent Musk had for business was eroded at least a decade ago by him surrounding himself with ego-stroking yes men. He drank his own cool aid.

I don't think he really had special talent for business, he had strong beliefs that happened to line up with what was profitable at the time. I don't think when he invested in Tesla or started SpaceX he was thinking about whether it made business sense - he just wanted to build futuristic technology, and he was one of the few people willing to spend a lot of money on a new company to actually make it happen.

That doesn't really mean he is a genius at business, just that he is really good at pitching his vision and getting people excited about it.

Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#317

He owns Twitter/X and he can name it anything he wants. I had not been using Twitter much before he bought it, and I use Mastodon a bit, but ironically I started using Twitter/X more after he bought it. There are a few things that give me hope for the future: Twitter/X strongly supporting free speech, and the presidential campaigns of Kennedy and Cornel West. I think the corporate-democrats and the corporate-republic…

You're just glad an anti-vax conspiracy theorist has a platform.

You're just glad that you never get downvoted or flagged because your name protects you.

Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#319
post #10

You know, for all the talk about how twitter is going downhill and making stupid decisions, this is the only one so far that really, really, does seems stupid. Verification was bad and now it’s a joke, api rate limits have some possible argument etc - but why in the hell buy a household name just to change it? Why not build X from scratch?

Could this all be part of Musk's plan, though? As Sun Tzu said, "when you are strong, appear weak". There's no denying that Musk is highly intelligent. If a play of his seems completely bone-headed, there's a good chance it's actually the opposite.

Was the full quote “when you are weak, appear strong, so cut off your arms if you want to intimidate people,” or something like that?

Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#320
post #164
post #85

I don’t really see what Musk is trying to accomplish. Everything he’s done to Twitter carries the foul stench of Death by Private Equity. No product improvements, but worse reliability, more spam, and a weird desperate-looking rebrand. This is what it looks like when inept MBAs try to squeeze some more life out of a dying platform. The strange thing here is that Musk’s acquisition was supposed to be the exact opposit…

He's rebranding. It seems apt since Twitter is becoming quite a different platform. The URL is still twitter.com, and it looks like they're haven't got rid of the Tweet button yet. That's a powerful marketing verb. But now the platform is X and you still tweet? Seems like a mismash of the old and new brand. Still in progress perhaps.

The URL is actually X.com moving forward, and tweets are to be called x's.
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