531–540 of 1001 posts
What a bizarre brand launch... * 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 in…
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.
In my opinion the healthiest approach is to not care. Life’s too short. Almost everything else is more important than some rich brain parasite’s midlife crisis dressed up as 5-d chess. The brain parasite feeds on attention whether positive or negative.
Fair. But I've already given up on news, politics, and pop culture. Billionaires playing 5D checkers was my last source of mindless entertainment!
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"…
Maybe he sold it to the holding company of the company formerly known as Twitter?
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"…
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 lend…
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.
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I'll defend him, he's done great work at SpaceX and Tesla, and I hope he can somehow accept that he's failed at Twitter/X and move back to doing great work at Tesla/SpaceX. I don't expect it to happen anytime soon, he's got too much money, but people can do great things and not necessarily have admirable character overall or only have admirable traits in certain contexts. Edit: I'm ejecting this thread, Musk discours…
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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.
I don't think this is the end game. 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.
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.