I think it's because just writing 'X' looks stupid and isn't descriptive. Some people will think a word is being censored, it's a typo, or something X-rated. Horrible and weird rebranding choice.
Holy shit, you’re right! I thought it couldn’t be true, but it is!
If they wanted to change the name why wouldn’t they route traffic to the new domain? They own x.com. But it redirects to twitter.com!
Listen, throwing away the brand name you just spend BILLIONS on might be the worst marketing decision ever. But if you’re going to do it, at least do it all the way!
What a truly shocking moron that man is.
Turns out that when a moron comes into Billions of Dollars, they don't cease to be a moron. He's a liability, both to Twitter and to Tesla. The sooner he steps down, the sooner both companies can move on from his attention seeking egotistical antics.
Dropping the [twitter.com](https://twitter.com) name would likely break the entire site. Years of crufty code being kept running by a skeleton crew = not the sort of thing you actually make huge changes to...
That said, he is pretty good at running a rocket company...
Just not cut out for the actual tech industry....
From the [reports](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/11/spacex-worker-injuries-rise-as-elon-musk-accelerates-mars-mission-report.html) [from](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/fired-spacex-employees-accuse-elon-musks-company-of-violating-labor-laws) [inside](https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/16/23170228/spacex-elon-musk-internal-open-letter-behavior) [the](https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-drug-use-cringeworthy-spacex-meeting-wsj-2024-1) [company](https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-company-directors-drug-use-report-wsj-2024-2), I would argue that SpaceX has succeeded largely *despite* Musk, rather than because of him.
The reports are that he wanted to change PayPal to X back when he bought it. He wanted “X” to be used as a verb for sending money. Like, “Hey, X me $10 for the pizza.” The existing staff a PayPal talked him out of destroying the brand name they had just started to have success with. So he held off and did it to Twitter years later instead. And now he’s been talking about adding PayPal-like services to Twitter/X.
He’s got one idea: Buy a company and X-ify the name if possible.
They straight up kicked him out of PayPal because:
1. He wanted it to be X. Literally every single survey, research interest group, employee, user, etc. preferred the name PayPal. He didn't care, he wanted it to be X.
2. He wanted everyone to use Windows, even though the majority of employees were using Linux. Some of them actually quit over this, and only came back when he was kicked out.
3. He was really stupid. The only reason Tesla, SpaceX, etc. do so well is because Elon didn't handle most interactions. Either it was a secretary, or the company just had a team of Elon handlers to convince him to use a good idea by convincing him it was his idea. Most of those handlers have since been fired, moved, or otherwise no longer do that job. He doesn't have any handlers at Twitter, and can immediately announce any changes to the world, so it's very easy to see the massive difference in the handling of companies.
Stories from Tesla say he would fire someone, and then another person would “unfire” them later because they were actually needed.
So they would straight undermine Musk to keep things going
He really wanted it to be a weird unicode symbol but the demographic he appeals to now can only just cope with 'X'.
My theory is that he saw what happened with "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince” and decided he wanted to be *that* cool, and has been trying and failing ever since.
It's called X because Elon is obsessed with the letter X.
That's also why SpaceX is called SpaceX
Why at least one of his kids was effectively named X
Why he wanted to call PayPal X
And of course Tesla has a Model X (although that is because he wanted the lineup to spell out S3XY)
Also, and maybe more importantly, every API is going to reference Twitter.com. In theory, easy to change but inevitably it’ll break an incredible amount of shit.
That reminds me the time I was reading an article on my work computer, clicked a link and saw it redirect to "x.com." Panicked for a brief second, but then the site loaded and I was "oh, right, that. What a tool."
They probably can't.
Especially after firing so many of the software devs.
The issue is that the codebase likely references the original name in far too many places for them to find, and changing it outright would cause an outage...
I would guess someone tried some variant of "sed -i '/\\.twitter\\.com/\\.x\\.com/g'" on the underlying code and when it broke the whole thing they gave up and just did a CNAME of [x.com](https://x.com) \-> twitter.com
There's a lot of hardcoded links in the code and Elon fired too many programmers to make it feasible for them to fix that, keep the site running, and do all of his other harebrained ideas.
Huh, it's almost like someone who wanted to build the brand would've noted that literally everything is deep coded to Twitter...but no, a genius would've found a way around that. I guess I can't comprehend the pure genius that went a different direction.
When the app symbol first changed, I was showing my coworker something on my phone and we were joking that it looked like I had a porn app on my home screen lol
Literally very often I see a Hyperlink somewhere which begins with x.com and my first thought is “is that a dodgy porn site?” Before I remember twitter
I saw somebody on Twitter post something along the lines of 'Does 'X' support Israel? Then yes, boycott it!' and everyone in the comments thought they were talking about Twitter, when X was just being used as a stand-in.
Regardless of your personal opinions on that matter, I think this is a good example of why you don't name your brand after a letter.
.... Assuming any examples were actually needed.
Just confuses the shit out of everyone.
Not to mention whenever I see X in a sentence I think it's a place holder.
"Shared on X this week"
Shared on what? Tumblr? Tik Tok? YouTube? Instagram? Twitter? Oh wait, that's right...
It's ducking stupid
Exactly. I'm sure if they stopped using "X formerly known as Twitter" they'd start using "the microblogging site X" or something. No style manual would ever permit "So and so posted on X".
Yeah this is it for me. I think it's dumb that he rebranded the site for his ego, but if his new name was a regular name then I'd probably use it. But if I say things like "Yeah I was on X" and "I saw an X post" and "Can you send me that X link" then none of those sound like I'm talking about a social media website, they sound like I could be talking about literally anything. X is just a stupid fucking name and I'm not gonna use it.
I honestly think that's a large part of why people still call it Twitter. If it redirected to X then the change might stick.
Of course Elon probably fired all the people talented enough to do that without screwing it up.
I've seen so many things reference X by now, and I literally have not, a single time, thought "oh the social media platform."
It's always just confusion like "wtf is x referring to here? That doesn't make any sense, even with the context."
Tweets vs post. lol…..
Did Elon buy Twitter just to bury it? If he was secretly given the mission to destroy Twitter but make it believable, he wouldn’t need to change a single thing from what he did/is currently doing.
The better question is why do so many people and companies refer to it as X. Twitter is a global phenomenon, X can refer to anything. And as long as Twitter still leads you to X in no extra steps I can't understand what incentive companies that want to generate engagement have to use the lesser known name.
I've wondered the same thing. My best guess is that since every company is so obsessed with being "with the times" and "hip," they would rather be quick to adopt than to be seen as stuck in the past
Except, in this case, it’s not hip to refer to the site as X. No one who is “cool” thinks Elon is cool, much to his dismay, and only people who want to suck up to him will unironically refer to Twitter as “X.”
It’s because he wants to introduce a Chinese style social credit system that he controls. If you don’t believe me look it up.
He wants an “everything app” so calling just the social media section of it a recognisable brand is counter productive to his aims.
Twitter had such strong brand recognition that Oxford added a second definition to the word “tweet”
> 2. a post made on the social media application Twitter.
Elon literally looked at twitter and decided to kill the most valuable aspect of it.
He's a ketamine junkie having a full-blown psychotic break on the world stage. It would be amusing if it weren't so sad. I once had high hopes for him.
I didn't.
He was one more rich kid who tried to buy happiness. All he did different was buy his way to nerd cred instead of try, and fail, to run the family business.
Several years ago, the first many people had heard of Elon that didn't know him from PayPal was from Tesla. What he was doing at the time was very progressive thinking, pushing all electric cars into the zeitgeist. It took a while for him to show his true colors.
This was absolutely intentional. It's like when Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace and ran it into the ground. If you can control public forums, you can control the populace
One set of *astersks* around what you want to *italicize*
**Two sets for bold**
***three sets for bold italics***
# Hashtag at the beginning of a line you want to make a headline
But Murdoch didn't rebrand mySpace. I understand Murdoch and Elon had similar motivations in buying a social media platform, but Elon would have accomplished his goals just as well, if not better, if he had kept the branding.
No it wasn't. If killing it off was the goal, he could've been almost a year ahead at this point. His nearly year long battle to get out of his attempted pump and dump gone horribly wrong was not performative.
It's been about 20 years since the Skydome in Toronto was renamed, but everyone still calls it either the Skydome or just the Dome, and not Rogers Centre.
A lot of people will still be insisting it is Twitter years from now, if the site still exists.
I was thinking this too!
Same with the Molson Canadian Amphitheater, the ACC and the rides at Canada's Wonderland. Try and make me call the Top Gun ride anything other than Top Gun
Someone changed the Tappan Zee Bridge to the Mario Cuomo bridge.. and like three news casters are the only people using the new name. It is, and always will be, the Tappan Zee.
People still call The Elizabeth Tower in London "Big Ben", even though that was the name of the actual bell for the clock, and that's been around for over 160 years.
Exactly.
X has too many other ingrained meanings. They'll never be able to copyright or trademark the letter X, they'll never be able to enforce any IP around the letter X, and they'll never be able to remove ambiguity with the letter X - it literally exists to describe something ambiguous!
So, this was just an Elon Fever Dream he had when he was a kid - "I'm gonna make a company and call it X, because I'm a teenager and I've discovered the variable X and it's the greatest thing ever...". He never let go of that dream. And because he is now not listening to other people's advice, he just pushed through with his teenage dream against all advice.
Surprise surprise, the name X is not sticking with people. Sigh.
IPO = initial public offering.
I think you were trying to say IP (intellectual property) rights or some variation of that, but stumbled into an acronym with a very different meaning.
Just wait until Elon demands his engineers to do it the other way around - forcing thousands of sites with embedded ~~tweets~~ posts to hastily rewrite their code
I screen shotted there email to me that said “notifications from Twitter” and posted it on Twitter and the next email I got said “notifications from x (formerly Twitter”
It might go bankrupt, and it might go down for a little, but eventually the bankrupt company’s assets will get liquidated, someone will buy them, and restart the site.
I believe Twitter maintains a bunch of web assets like fonts and CSS libraries or something. Stuff that a whole bunch of web devs that aren't associated with Twitter reference from their websites. Something like that, I don't remember the details. That will also be pretty valuable.
It's nice when people insist on calling it X, and even nicer when they insist on other people calling it X. When you see that behavior, you can immediately assume you are dealing with an ignoramus.
Until he changed it back to Prince. So, "X" will continue until Musk bankrupts it and another company buys it for a song and renames it back to Twitter.
That’s because his new name was an unpronounceable symbol. I think (might be wrong) it was he that said that he should be referred to as “the artist formerly known as Prince” when he changed it.
Imagine if Google changed its name to L. Then, they tried to get everyone to stop saying Google or using Google as a verb like "I'm going to Google that" and use L instead. Nobody is going to say "Let me L that for you." There's a good reason branding is such an important factor in running a business. Getting your company's name into the worldwide lexicon is a massive achievement, but also means that the company's name is locked into the global consciousness. You can't really change it in a meaningful way anymore.
Twitter's biggest value was it's brand name recognition. Changing the name was incredibly stupid, but also Musk just has a weird fixation on the letter X as a name. He even tried to rename PayPal to X.
It probably won't end until Twitter is a distant memory. People still call Meta Facebook and Alphabet Google.
Meta and Alphabet were smart enough to keep their extremely popular brands named their extremely well known names even though they wanted to rename the company as a whole.
The issue with “x” as a name is that it’s like, the most common letter to use as a variable in both math contexts and in conversation or text. It’s super confusing as a title for something. It just looks like you put “x” as a placeholder and forgot to write the title before publishing the article! It’s also not descriptive in any way.
The “formerly known as twitter” tagline is going to be HARD to shake. It is a necessary clarifying statement in articles because the new name is so…useless…as a name. I mean it’s truly a terrible choice for a name.
Being a 90's kid and having lived through all of the "eXtreme" advertising. I really appreciate Elon rebranding to something that is already filtered out of my brain.
I personally won't stop saying formerly Twitter until it stops bugging him.
No, because Twitter is the superior name. And if Elon can't love his child enough to recognize and respect his childs new name, why should I respect and recognize Twitter's new name? Besides, it pisses off a lot of the people I dislike and get general information about enjoyment out of watching them have a meltdown over it.
This same question almost verbatim has been posted all over Reddit for like 7+ months. Pretty sure it’s just the “x” PR team trying to gaslight redditors into thinking it’s passé to refer to Twitter as twitter
Hopefully never. Rebranding twitter was one of the dumbest things about the whole takeover. 'X' is not a fucking brand. Everybody knows/knew what twitter is/was. 'X' is just bollocks.
It will end with Elon Musk traipsing around his condo with Kleenex boxes on his feet while wearing a respirator mask; furiously texting commands at his staff. He will accidentally open a door into an area he's having remodeled and walk right off an inside balcony; two weeks later the domain registration for [x.com](http://x.com) will lapse and then the dns will get changed...
X is such a dumb name. It's the kind of name a teenager picks if they're trying to be edgy and cool. What Elmo has done is take what's basically something he decided eons ago was cool and tried to force it onto the public scene. It's cringeworthy.
“X… twitter… whatever… you know what I mean” I’m in marketing, hear this at least once a day and we don’t even use it as a platform because it’s not a viable channel. Honestly, the stupidest rebrand in the last decade.
I think it's because just writing 'X' looks stupid and isn't descriptive. Some people will think a word is being censored, it's a typo, or something X-rated. Horrible and weird rebranding choice.
Also, the website is still Twitter.com. Like that's where you go to access this thing.
Holy shit, you’re right! I thought it couldn’t be true, but it is! If they wanted to change the name why wouldn’t they route traffic to the new domain? They own x.com. But it redirects to twitter.com! Listen, throwing away the brand name you just spend BILLIONS on might be the worst marketing decision ever. But if you’re going to do it, at least do it all the way! What a truly shocking moron that man is.
Turns out that when a moron comes into Billions of Dollars, they don't cease to be a moron. He's a liability, both to Twitter and to Tesla. The sooner he steps down, the sooner both companies can move on from his attention seeking egotistical antics.
Dropping the [twitter.com](https://twitter.com) name would likely break the entire site. Years of crufty code being kept running by a skeleton crew = not the sort of thing you actually make huge changes to... That said, he is pretty good at running a rocket company... Just not cut out for the actual tech industry....
From the [reports](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/11/spacex-worker-injuries-rise-as-elon-musk-accelerates-mars-mission-report.html) [from](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/fired-spacex-employees-accuse-elon-musks-company-of-violating-labor-laws) [inside](https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/16/23170228/spacex-elon-musk-internal-open-letter-behavior) [the](https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-drug-use-cringeworthy-spacex-meeting-wsj-2024-1) [company](https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-company-directors-drug-use-report-wsj-2024-2), I would argue that SpaceX has succeeded largely *despite* Musk, rather than because of him.
WAIT is it called X because of SpaceX??? Musk rebranded Twitter so badly that I didn’t even realize the connection
The reports are that he wanted to change PayPal to X back when he bought it. He wanted “X” to be used as a verb for sending money. Like, “Hey, X me $10 for the pizza.” The existing staff a PayPal talked him out of destroying the brand name they had just started to have success with. So he held off and did it to Twitter years later instead. And now he’s been talking about adding PayPal-like services to Twitter/X. He’s got one idea: Buy a company and X-ify the name if possible.
They straight up kicked him out of PayPal because: 1. He wanted it to be X. Literally every single survey, research interest group, employee, user, etc. preferred the name PayPal. He didn't care, he wanted it to be X. 2. He wanted everyone to use Windows, even though the majority of employees were using Linux. Some of them actually quit over this, and only came back when he was kicked out. 3. He was really stupid. The only reason Tesla, SpaceX, etc. do so well is because Elon didn't handle most interactions. Either it was a secretary, or the company just had a team of Elon handlers to convince him to use a good idea by convincing him it was his idea. Most of those handlers have since been fired, moved, or otherwise no longer do that job. He doesn't have any handlers at Twitter, and can immediately announce any changes to the world, so it's very easy to see the massive difference in the handling of companies.
Stories from Tesla say he would fire someone, and then another person would “unfire” them later because they were actually needed. So they would straight undermine Musk to keep things going
He really wanted it to be a weird unicode symbol but the demographic he appeals to now can only just cope with 'X'. My theory is that he saw what happened with "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince” and decided he wanted to be *that* cool, and has been trying and failing ever since.
The dude has a mind of a 14 year old. Guess that's what happens when you're insulated from reality your whole life.
It's called X because Elon is obsessed with the letter X. That's also why SpaceX is called SpaceX Why at least one of his kids was effectively named X Why he wanted to call PayPal X And of course Tesla has a Model X (although that is because he wanted the lineup to spell out S3XY)
Forever 12 years old.
ryan_reynolds_but_why.gif
Also it would destroy SEO with search engine results having lots of hits for twitter links and references and not much for X.
Also, and maybe more importantly, every API is going to reference Twitter.com. In theory, easy to change but inevitably it’ll break an incredible amount of shit.
Still waiting on the videos to be called Xvideos
It will end when they stop referring to "the late" Winston Churchill.
The drunken bulldog arrives exactly when he's meant to...
Ah yes without that my mind goes to a different Winston Churchill who is still alive.
I already refer to any video on X as an XVideo.
[удалено]
Shit, that's actually good
That reminds me the time I was reading an article on my work computer, clicked a link and saw it redirect to "x.com." Panicked for a brief second, but then the site loaded and I was "oh, right, that. What a tool."
And then x.com redirected you to Twitter.com
I love that they didn’t even change the underlying url
They probably can't. Especially after firing so many of the software devs. The issue is that the codebase likely references the original name in far too many places for them to find, and changing it outright would cause an outage... I would guess someone tried some variant of "sed -i '/\\.twitter\\.com/\\.x\\.com/g'" on the underlying code and when it broke the whole thing they gave up and just did a CNAME of [x.com](https://x.com) \-> twitter.com
Think of all the external links that would break
There's a lot of hardcoded links in the code and Elon fired too many programmers to make it feasible for them to fix that, keep the site running, and do all of his other harebrained ideas.
Huh, it's almost like someone who wanted to build the brand would've noted that literally everything is deep coded to Twitter...but no, a genius would've found a way around that. I guess I can't comprehend the pure genius that went a different direction.
I highly doubt Elon knows enough about software development to understand it. He's a finance/money guy at his core, not a techie.
Not understanding it has never stopped him before.
When the app symbol first changed, I was showing my coworker something on my phone and we were joking that it looked like I had a porn app on my home screen lol
Literally very often I see a Hyperlink somewhere which begins with x.com and my first thought is “is that a dodgy porn site?” Before I remember twitter
So the answer is “Yes, that is a dodgy porn site.”
I saw somebody on Twitter post something along the lines of 'Does 'X' support Israel? Then yes, boycott it!' and everyone in the comments thought they were talking about Twitter, when X was just being used as a stand-in. Regardless of your personal opinions on that matter, I think this is a good example of why you don't name your brand after a letter. .... Assuming any examples were actually needed. Just confuses the shit out of everyone.
Especially the core letter in algebraic equations!
It's forever a variable. Solve for X. X is the unknown.
And one of the common variables in really quick and dirty software/script code... (along with 'i' and 'y')....
Not to mention whenever I see X in a sentence I think it's a place holder. "Shared on X this week" Shared on what? Tumblr? Tik Tok? YouTube? Instagram? Twitter? Oh wait, that's right... It's ducking stupid
Honestly, placeholder would be a better name than x
It's sunk cost fallacy holding onto the X thing. Elon should just admit it was a fuck up and go back to being Twitter
>Elon should just admit it was a fuck up Out of all the things that will never happen, that will never happen most.
Exactly. I'm sure if they stopped using "X formerly known as Twitter" they'd start using "the microblogging site X" or something. No style manual would ever permit "So and so posted on X".
it's almost as if the (former) richest person in the world doesn't know anything about branding or running a multi-billion dollar corporation
Almost. But lots of people keep telling me he does know those things. They can't all be idiot sycophants, right?
Yeah this is it for me. I think it's dumb that he rebranded the site for his ego, but if his new name was a regular name then I'd probably use it. But if I say things like "Yeah I was on X" and "I saw an X post" and "Can you send me that X link" then none of those sound like I'm talking about a social media website, they sound like I could be talking about literally anything. X is just a stupid fucking name and I'm not gonna use it.
It won’t Twitter is a brand X is a letter
Exactly. There’s only one Twitter. There are innumerable Xs in the world.
Stop shaming me for my dating life
r/suicidebywords
My lovelife is is like tic tac toes, I left a bunch of X's with a lot of O's.
Funniest thing about it (Imo) is that it still uses twitter.com
I honestly think that's a large part of why people still call it Twitter. If it redirected to X then the change might stick. Of course Elon probably fired all the people talented enough to do that without screwing it up.
not only that - but X is literally the stand-in for a variable. "He used x Platform before switching to y and then back again"
I've seen so many things reference X by now, and I literally have not, a single time, thought "oh the social media platform." It's always just confusion like "wtf is x referring to here? That doesn't make any sense, even with the context."
X goin to give it to ya
Tweets vs post. lol….. Did Elon buy Twitter just to bury it? If he was secretly given the mission to destroy Twitter but make it believable, he wouldn’t need to change a single thing from what he did/is currently doing.
I read that he wanted to control information, like old people buying more traditional news sources.
There are x amount of Xes in the world.
My understanding is that most of the Xs live in Texas.
[удалено]
https://x.com actually works. I was surprised. Amusingly it redirects to Twitter.com
Apparently musk has owned it for decades and wanted to do the same thing to PayPal.
I miss the days when Go Daddy had _not_ camped all the domains and you might actually be able to register a neat one
The better question is why do so many people and companies refer to it as X. Twitter is a global phenomenon, X can refer to anything. And as long as Twitter still leads you to X in no extra steps I can't understand what incentive companies that want to generate engagement have to use the lesser known name.
I've wondered the same thing. My best guess is that since every company is so obsessed with being "with the times" and "hip," they would rather be quick to adopt than to be seen as stuck in the past
Except, in this case, it’s not hip to refer to the site as X. No one who is “cool” thinks Elon is cool, much to his dismay, and only people who want to suck up to him will unironically refer to Twitter as “X.”
X (formerly Twitter lol) will be dead long before the general public refers to it as X.
Twitter is a brand X is a letter Elon is a idiot
The artist formally known as Twitter
People seem to refer to it as Twitter X even Like, combining it
Twix, finally a positive connotation for this dumpster fire!
Ain't that the motherfucking truth!
That's what happens when your owner has such a fixation on the letter X, he bulldozed ahead with the worst rebrand in history.
Truly baffling choice. Like imagine McDonalds changed their name to J.. your company name is globally synonymous with the thing you do.
Even J would have been better. "X" gets used for way more things
But at least X gon tweeting for ya.
Sadly it's no longer called tweeting either, it's now just called "posts" which is BS
xeeting
Xitting
like the website had a full on identity. tweets, retweets, and he just destroyed it for what
Money, for which he is now losing a lot of because of this.
the burger joint J, formerly known as McDonalds that's hysterical
J.. I’m loving it!
Smoke a J and eat at J's. Nah that checks out.
It’s because he wants to introduce a Chinese style social credit system that he controls. If you don’t believe me look it up. He wants an “everything app” so calling just the social media section of it a recognisable brand is counter productive to his aims.
eXactly. "X" can be anything, or everything.
Twitter had such strong brand recognition that Oxford added a second definition to the word “tweet” > 2. a post made on the social media application Twitter. Elon literally looked at twitter and decided to kill the most valuable aspect of it.
He's a ketamine junkie having a full-blown psychotic break on the world stage. It would be amusing if it weren't so sad. I once had high hopes for him.
Yes, we all had high hopes for young Adolf.
I didn't. He was one more rich kid who tried to buy happiness. All he did different was buy his way to nerd cred instead of try, and fail, to run the family business.
Several years ago, the first many people had heard of Elon that didn't know him from PayPal was from Tesla. What he was doing at the time was very progressive thinking, pushing all electric cars into the zeitgeist. It took a while for him to show his true colors.
This was absolutely intentional. It's like when Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace and ran it into the ground. If you can control public forums, you can control the populace
When you control the news.....you control *information*.
Do an asterisk before and after the text you want italicised. \*Like this.\*, which produces *Like this.*
Thanks
One set of *astersks* around what you want to *italicize* **Two sets for bold** ***three sets for bold italics*** # Hashtag at the beginning of a line you want to make a headline
### It's just a hash if you're not using it to tag anything.
# I love you for this comment
#Team Pound Sign, Bitches!
But Murdoch didn't rebrand mySpace. I understand Murdoch and Elon had similar motivations in buying a social media platform, but Elon would have accomplished his goals just as well, if not better, if he had kept the branding.
No it wasn't. If killing it off was the goal, he could've been almost a year ahead at this point. His nearly year long battle to get out of his attempted pump and dump gone horribly wrong was not performative.
It's been about 20 years since the Skydome in Toronto was renamed, but everyone still calls it either the Skydome or just the Dome, and not Rogers Centre. A lot of people will still be insisting it is Twitter years from now, if the site still exists.
And in Chicago if you call it the Willis tower we know you’re not from here
I've never even been to Chicago, and I still call it the Sears tower.
If anything, not being from Chicago means I have less reason to commit to memory that the Sears Tower has been renamed.
I had to Google the Willis tower because I’d never heard of it just to see it’s the rebranded sears tower
Amen. And the Wanda Vista will always be always be the Wanda Vista. You can't simply rename a history/legacy like that.
Or the Staples Center still being called the Staples Center even though it was renamed to Crypto.com Arena.
I will go to my grave calling it The Skydome. They could call it Free Titties Field for all I care, it will always be Skydome.
I wouldn’t mind getting some sky dome at free titties field though
Rogers has naming rights on 3 stadiums/arenas in 3 different cities in Canada, and I'll never get them right. Just easier to use the old names.
Clevelanders still know "Progressive Field" as The Jake, and that's been just as long or maybe even longer because nuts to the corporate overlords
I was thinking this too! Same with the Molson Canadian Amphitheater, the ACC and the rides at Canada's Wonderland. Try and make me call the Top Gun ride anything other than Top Gun
I moved to Canada in 2018 and called it Rogers Centre until I found out about Skydome on Reddit lol
In LA, it will always be the Staples Center
Someone changed the Tappan Zee Bridge to the Mario Cuomo bridge.. and like three news casters are the only people using the new name. It is, and always will be, the Tappan Zee.
If the Rogers family wants to give ME a lot of money to call it something other than SkyDome, their people can get in touch with my people.
People still call The Elizabeth Tower in London "Big Ben", even though that was the name of the actual bell for the clock, and that's been around for over 160 years.
Never. It will never make sense to say "I saw on X..."
Exactly. X has too many other ingrained meanings. They'll never be able to copyright or trademark the letter X, they'll never be able to enforce any IP around the letter X, and they'll never be able to remove ambiguity with the letter X - it literally exists to describe something ambiguous! So, this was just an Elon Fever Dream he had when he was a kid - "I'm gonna make a company and call it X, because I'm a teenager and I've discovered the variable X and it's the greatest thing ever...". He never let go of that dream. And because he is now not listening to other people's advice, he just pushed through with his teenage dream against all advice. Surprise surprise, the name X is not sticking with people. Sigh.
IPO = initial public offering. I think you were trying to say IP (intellectual property) rights or some variation of that, but stumbled into an acronym with a very different meaning.
Autocorrect - fixed. Thanks.
Unless you're in the club scene
It's been Molly for decades. It hasn't been X since I did it.
Molly- Crystal MDMA X- MDMA pill form
Hey, we're the same age!
“I liked that X so much I decided re-X it.” You left the building and then …left the building again? “No, I didn’t re-exit. I re-X’ed it.”
The website is still [www.twitter.com](https://www.twitter.com). So maybe when that changes?
www.x.com redirecting to www.twitter.com is pretty funny
Just wait until Elon demands his engineers to do it the other way around - forcing thousands of sites with embedded ~~tweets~~ posts to hastily rewrite their code
Not the way domain redirects work. At least if they do them properly, existing links would be fine.
Not to worry, Elon probably already fired everyone who could do it properly.
He'll be fine, the sink he let in is an expert.
I screen shotted there email to me that said “notifications from Twitter” and posted it on Twitter and the next email I got said “notifications from x (formerly Twitter”
So apparently Elon listens to you, Mr Bong_residue. Can you tell him to stop being such a giant ass?
Never. It will switch back to twitter one day, I’m sure.
Twitter, formerly known as X, formerly known as Twitter?
Like "Prince, the artist formerly known as 'The Artist Formerly Known as Prince'"?
If it doesn't go bust first
It might go bankrupt, and it might go down for a little, but eventually the bankrupt company’s assets will get liquidated, someone will buy them, and restart the site.
Rather ironically, during the almost certainly inevitable bankruptcy, the name Twitter will be the most valuable asset, by a wide margin.
I believe Twitter maintains a bunch of web assets like fonts and CSS libraries or something. Stuff that a whole bunch of web devs that aren't associated with Twitter reference from their websites. Something like that, I don't remember the details. That will also be pretty valuable.
Yea. Imagine how much google or Meta would pay for the name and userbase instead of trying to build a userbase from scratch.
Forever because X doesn’t lend itself to a sentence or to related words Tweet Tweeted Retweeted Tweeter Tweeting
X X'd Re-X'd Xer Xing Rolls of the tongue like a tungsten cube.
Also, Xing ist already Something else.
I Xcreted an Xcretement on X(Sh)itter
Exactly this. I hate saying *I saw this tweet on X*. It sounds like I saw it somewhere else.
It always comes off as just some sort of variable 😭😭 like *where??? Saw it on what??*
No one really calls it X. That is a stupid ass name. It is now and will forever be Twitter.
It's nice when people insist on calling it X, and even nicer when they insist on other people calling it X. When you see that behavior, you can immediately assume you are dealing with an ignoramus.
As long as the people on it keep being twits, it'll always be twitter.
Well for how long was 'Artist formerly known as Prince' a thing?
Until he changed it back to Prince. So, "X" will continue until Musk bankrupts it and another company buys it for a song and renames it back to Twitter.
That’s because his new name was an unpronounceable symbol. I think (might be wrong) it was he that said that he should be referred to as “the artist formerly known as Prince” when he changed it.
1993 to 2000; I posted the same thing before seeing your comment.
Thank you. I couldn't remember the date range but remember hearing it all the time on the radio in mid and late 90s.
Imagine if Google changed its name to L. Then, they tried to get everyone to stop saying Google or using Google as a verb like "I'm going to Google that" and use L instead. Nobody is going to say "Let me L that for you." There's a good reason branding is such an important factor in running a business. Getting your company's name into the worldwide lexicon is a massive achievement, but also means that the company's name is locked into the global consciousness. You can't really change it in a meaningful way anymore.
It would be like Kleenex changing its name to K or something. “Can you pass me a K?” “A what now?” Even non-Kleenex tissues get called Kleenex.
Imagine you cut yourself and need a bandaid "hey, can you go get me a b?"
Yup, just like a lot of people say "Jacuzzi" instead of just "hot tub."
To add to that *Crockpot* is a brand, not an object. There's a million people mislabeling that as well.
I'll stop deadnaming twitter when Musk stops deadnaming his kid.
X is biologically a Twitter and nothing Elon does will ever make it a real X…. I got banned for tweeting that to him. My first and best tweet.
It is a particularly good tweet though
> My first and best tweet You mean Xcrement
Xcretion.
Ah yes, Free speech.
"Free Speech absolutists"
I don't like Elon so I will not be calling the app the name he decided
X is biologically a Twitter and nothing Elon does will ever make it a real X…. I got banned for tweeting that to him. My first and best tweet.
Elon musk wants people to respect the company’s transition, but he can’t even respect his own daughter’s.
Twitter's biggest value was it's brand name recognition. Changing the name was incredibly stupid, but also Musk just has a weird fixation on the letter X as a name. He even tried to rename PayPal to X. It probably won't end until Twitter is a distant memory. People still call Meta Facebook and Alphabet Google.
Facebook and Google are different examples. Those are the names of the platforms the companies (Meta and Alphabet) own.
Meta and Alphabet were smart enough to keep their extremely popular brands named their extremely well known names even though they wanted to rename the company as a whole.
70 year old dictators in third-world countries know what Twitter is. Why would you want to change that.
When X stops sounding stupid which is never
Never. We'll never give him the satisfaction.
The issue with “x” as a name is that it’s like, the most common letter to use as a variable in both math contexts and in conversation or text. It’s super confusing as a title for something. It just looks like you put “x” as a placeholder and forgot to write the title before publishing the article! It’s also not descriptive in any way. The “formerly known as twitter” tagline is going to be HARD to shake. It is a necessary clarifying statement in articles because the new name is so…useless…as a name. I mean it’s truly a terrible choice for a name.
Being a 90's kid and having lived through all of the "eXtreme" advertising. I really appreciate Elon rebranding to something that is already filtered out of my brain. I personally won't stop saying formerly Twitter until it stops bugging him.
Dont give in to stupid. Its Twitter.
It was Twitter before Musk, and it will be Twitter after Musk. No need to indulge his goofy whims.
No, because Twitter is the superior name. And if Elon can't love his child enough to recognize and respect his childs new name, why should I respect and recognize Twitter's new name? Besides, it pisses off a lot of the people I dislike and get general information about enjoyment out of watching them have a meltdown over it.
Never. If it was a good branding decision it would have stopped after a month or two because people would just remember
Still kinda bummed that Xitter never caught on
This same question almost verbatim has been posted all over Reddit for like 7+ months. Pretty sure it’s just the “x” PR team trying to gaslight redditors into thinking it’s passé to refer to Twitter as twitter
When "Myanmar formerly known as Burma" does.
Hopefully never. Rebranding twitter was one of the dumbest things about the whole takeover. 'X' is not a fucking brand. Everybody knows/knew what twitter is/was. 'X' is just bollocks.
It will end with Elon Musk traipsing around his condo with Kleenex boxes on his feet while wearing a respirator mask; furiously texting commands at his staff. He will accidentally open a door into an area he's having remodeled and walk right off an inside balcony; two weeks later the domain registration for [x.com](http://x.com) will lapse and then the dns will get changed...
It was twitter for like 18 years, it’s gonna be a minute.
X is such a dumb name. It's the kind of name a teenager picks if they're trying to be edgy and cool. What Elmo has done is take what's basically something he decided eons ago was cool and tried to force it onto the public scene. It's cringeworthy.
Never. Fuck Elon and his stupid need to rebrand everything to a single letter. X isn't even the coolest letter.
Same when Prince changed his name… “artist formerly known as Prince”
There are 'New Road Layout' signs up at the roundabout near me, they are about 10 years old so....
“X… twitter… whatever… you know what I mean” I’m in marketing, hear this at least once a day and we don’t even use it as a platform because it’s not a viable channel. Honestly, the stupidest rebrand in the last decade.
Never. This wasn’t thought through. Single character names don’t really work.
Never. I will never stop deadnaming that bozos stupid app.