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Stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.
Going to be studied by generations as a case study in wiping out decades of brand value overnight.
Also, the logo was selected by a competition, which is absolutely the way to rebrand a multi-billion dollar company.
Fascinating, in a car crash sort of way.
> Going to be studied by generations as a case study in wiping out decades of brand value overnight.
What is there to study? It's just one childish rich dude with no adults in the room, case closed.
There could be a whole course on the fall of Twitter. Musk has also wiped out 50%+ of the company value, which for a company of that size is wild. There's also the psychological side to study. Like/dislike Musk, he's done great with Tesla. Whatever skill(s) he has there has not transferred to Twitter.
Where competition == latex:
$$\Huge
\mathbb{X}
$$
Or U+1D54F:
Reminds me of Yahoo! circa 2013, with the CEO deciding that of all the problems, the logo was the one to fix. Competition held, CEO's design won.
I think he is trying out the corporate version of Tr*mpism.
So-called "Informed" people will yell and frown, but are those the important ones And how serious is the yelling?
And is the attention he accumulates really what counts?
Brand value?
The Twitter brand is associated with being a toxic cesspool, harassment campaigns, pile-ons, doxxing, bad faith arguments, fake news and other things like that.
Yeah, it’s up there with HBO->Max in stupidity.
I’m fascinated by the idea that anyone would use Twitter/X as a super app - I don’t see how Musk thinks anyone would use a mediocre social app over the ubiquitous Apple/Google Pay.
I think he's come to peace with the fact that he paid $44 billion for an unprofitable messaging platform and he's not going to be turning it around. He's now giving up on the concept of short-form pub/sub text messaging and instead hoping he can just capture those millions of logins for a completely unrelated platform (i.e. some hazy crypto payment stuff). This is a web property that for whatever reason, he was never able to build himself.
There’s a good chance that Twitter is being destroyed intentionally; it has been a very useful tool for people organizing against the political- and billionaire-class. Egypt really hated its influence; Saudi’s aren’t too thrilled, etc. Powerful monied interests financed the buy-out.
But who decides when/if it is a failure?
If Musk is truly able to build a Western version of WeChat, i.e. his dream "everything app," it will be a roaring success.
And it won't matter what coastal journalists and trendy pop-culture explainers printed at the time.
x.com is not a bad domain tbh
Brand value doesn't exist. Services and products do.
Is it just me or is X a stupid name? It's hard to google it and there are so many other associations with it (like X-Files, Mr X, etc - just so much). Twitter is a huge brand and they just kill it off like that?
I'm not on the Musk hate train, but this feels like a stupid impulse decision to me
We know for a fact it was a stupid impulse decision, because when asked "how should we call tweets and retweets now" he replies "x's" and for retweets he said "this should be completely rethought". Yet to be rethought? You think about stuff like this BEFORE you change your brand, not after.
He's nuts. Maybe that's part of his success throwing himself into areas no one else dares, like EVs and self-landing rockets, but he's just a chaotic agent, he doesn't have instinct for what will work, he just has instinct for being random and confusing everyone with it.
>He also owns the X.com domain name, which now redirects to Twitter.
I get a GoDaddy parked domain page.
Edit: maybe some people aren't getting the parked page? It wasn't an attempt at a joke, that's what I see. Seems relevant given he's clearly pushing the idea. https://imgur.com/a/pi5B11K
$ whois x.com | grep '^Registrar URL'
Registrar URL: https://www.godaddy.comI'm far from a Elon bro, but I guess I've been fairly sympathetic to some of his more stupid decisions in recent years.
That said, I simply don't get this. I understand he has a grand vision for Twitter which he's keen to pursue, but either way this is just a dumb decision from a brand perspective. The reason people use Twitter over over similar sites is part because of the brand and part because of user base. Destroying one of those two pillars seemingly on a whim seems like a very bad move however you look at this.
My guess (and I acknowledge I'm being extremely charitable here) is that Elon will reverse this. I think sometimes he does this stuff because he knows it will get media attention and he likes to troll. But I guess we'll see. Even if this is just some elaborate joke for media attention it seems like a risky one – especially when Threads is doing so well and offers such a reasonable alternative to this chaos.
Also I thought he hired a CEO and was taking a step-back from Twitter? If anyone was going to decide to rename Twitter, surely it would be the new CEO?
With a 'logo' that's just a character ripped straight from a Monotype font: https://twitter.com/Fontendou/status/1683407528405901312
My immediate reaction was towering stupidity.
But on the other hand, what is there really to protect here? Twitter’s reputation is in the trash bin anyways. And the cutesy branding is going to end up out of step with the toxic conservative cesspool he is trying to create. So yeah, maybe a solid move? The dumpster is already on fire, so why not.
It's literally xorg and that logo looked old when it was released almost 40 years ago. This is honestly hilarious.
Musk.. the gift which keeps on giving.
I wonder if anyone thinks this is a good idea. It's at least theoretically possible but seems very unlikely.
A poorly chosen name that seems like a child’s idea of cool. Vaguely over-promising things which are unlikely to ever be built.
Musk is nothing if not consistent.
This reads like something on The Onion.
Social networks have a moat so strong that can you stand all kind of abuse apparently.
Reminds me of 2balkan4you reddit community which has a humour style too crude for the Western cultures and gets banned all the time but because the Balkan people banter with each other in that way and banning a community does nothing more than re-grouping under a new name. It's actually the same thing with all kind of networks of people and as long as the reasons to come together exists, people will go in great lengths to come together.
Maybe it's in the similar vein of "you can't kill an idea", so as long as the communication tech can capture the core needs of people who would like to network no downtime or logo change will break your product because you will have very motivated users. The worth of the product from monetary perspective can change though.
Could you anyone explain how the same person that founded SpaceX could be so bad at managing Twitter?
I mean, he is so bad that a child you'd have managed it better.
On the other side, SpaceX is a pretty well managed company, a market leader that manages to sell its services for 30% cheaper than its closest competitor.
(I'm not referring to Tesla, as it might just happen that Musk took over when the teams were already efficient and the roadmap well defined. Tesla's success might be pure Musk's luck)
the weirdest thing about x logo is that it barely has any "volume" of sorts. It's just three very thin lines (and two very tiny ones which I disregard) stylized as letter x.
I use twitter every day but don't really care about this rebranding. I see arguments why it's bad and those are really valid arguments but personally it doesn't concern me at all
Isn't that the Xorg logo?
Oh the Accessibility hawks at accounts like MathAbuse (https://twitter.com/MathAbuse) fighting Unicode 'fancy text' are gonna love this
Nostr is the only bird in town now. Ah yes there is an elephant in the room.
To everybody here saying this will kill Twitter: it won't.
- firing 75% of the employees didn't kill Twitter
- aggressive rate limits and requiring auth didn't kill Twitter
- a well funded competitor with 100 million signups in days didn't kill Twitter (and their engagement is down 70% in just 2 weeks)
And yet here we are on HN again prophesying doom because of a name change. A name change won't kill Twitter either. Their traffic is driven by network effect, not branding. The past year has been a case study in it.
Yet the brand page still shows the bird.
Elon (as well as the wider tech space) seems obsessed with the letter X. I find it to be even more of a cliche than "One" brandings.
What does “X” have to do with Twitter? X.com was supposed to be his “everything app”. Maybe Twitter will redirect to X.com down the line?
I write sci-fi so I like to wildly speculate, so here goes:
I think the point of having X be the everything app is that as we experience extreme amounts of crime because of the neglect of the authorities, and transition to the privatized everything, no default trust future where you get nothing for just being a human who isn't in prison, when you get cancelled you'll really get cancelled. You'll not only get all your social media accounts cancelled, but your bank accounts, the lease on the place you live, your ability to go to grocery stores, your ability to purchase gas, your ability to get a loan, your ability to use public transit, your internet connection, your ability to use public bathrooms, your ability to use dating apps, etc. will all be cancelled. X will provide all of these, and X will not cancel you.
This has precedent. China, during Zero Covid in 2022, would lock you out of absolutely everything if you didn't go stand in line half the day to get a Covid test every single day. I could imagine all the private providers of absolutely everything banding together to implement the same thing in a private system with the cheering of the populace since it's the only way to protect against criminals when you get a San Francisco style situation where the government gives up on enforcing most laws.
Seems fitting - Twitter is like X window system right now: not quite there yet, but surely heading towards being obsolete.
I just checked for you, it’s not April 1st.
Or we could just keep calling it Twitter forever just to enrage Elon that it'll never stick despite how much he wants it to, just so he gets a taste of what it feels like for other people that get stuck with their deadname?
It's an ugly, confusing, and nonsensical logo that harms Twitter as a brand.
Unless it's going to be the x.com micromessaging service, I don't see the point except massaging Herr Leader's ego.
a[href="/home"][aria-label="Twitter"] { display: none !important; }
For Stylus, Cascadea or whatever CSS writing extension you have installed. I did this months ago because the stupid doge was annoying me and forget I'd left it on, but it still works.
Why does anyone even care about it? Musk is just showing off the world his $44bn toy.
> "Tweets" will also be replaced, according to Twitter's owner Elon Musk, and posts will be called "x's".
Is this real life?
Elon Musk is either a genius or a fool. I don't understand business decisions at that scale nor am I not smart enough to know which one he is. Only time will tell.
But to me this seems tacky. The comments (on Twitter) that are positive about it, look like (possibly AI generated) bullshit hype comments with little to no content (see: NFT, web3, "AI" etc.)
The FB/Meta thing felt similar, but in hindsight also smarter, because they didn't change the name of the app.
But there is some (small) chance that they pull this off.
Twitter is the "microblogging app with a reputation for being a cesspool" that depends on prominent users. Maybe a re-branding and a shift (broadening) of scope is the right way to go? Maybe there's a chance that the new features make Twitter into something bigger that deserves its own name?
Linda Yaccarino sure has some nutty ideas about branding.
Facebook to be renamed Y.
Booooo!
I'm getting strong Putin Z vibes.
What's with the BBC's childish description of Elon Musk as "The billionaire"?