cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14106579

On Monday, it appears X attempted to encourage users to cease referring to it as Twitter and instead adopt the name X. Some users began noticing that posts viewed via X for iOS were changing any references of “Twitter.com” to “X.com” automatically.

If a user typed in “Twitter.com,” they would see “Twitter.com” as they typed it before hitting “Post.” But, after submitting, the platform would show “X.com” in its place on the X for iOS app, without the user’s permission, for everyone viewing the post.

And shortly after this revelation, it became clear that there was another big issue: X was changing anything ending in “Twitter.com” to “X.com.”

  • LGOrcStreetSamurai [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    I don’t even use Twitter, but I find it so enraging that no regular person could so publicly fail at their job and face no repercussion. I know that rich people have a totally different set of rules and playing a totally different game, but goddamn dude. I don’t know how geeks, dorks, hacker-types, and techno-wizards, can continue to think that these MEGACORP leaders are anything but fuckin’ losers. “BIG TECH” and even mid-sized tech companies are full of this sort of stupidity at the top. From a labor standpoint it really sucks that individuals or teams will get the heat for this not the management level for sort of thing.

    • invalidusernamelol [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      I’ll bet that a lot of the devs that managed backend tooling are gone now and their scripts just won’t work with “x.com” as the domain name.

      The fact that they’re essentially overwriting url hyperlinks instead of swapping domains shows that there’s some sort of major bitrot happening behind the curtain.

  • emizeko [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    it will always be twitter and I will continue to mock anyone who tries to call it “x” by feigning ignorance and asking if they’re talking about some porn site

  • Rom [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    I’m by no means an expert at website things, but wouldn’t it be way simpler to take any request to twitter.com and just redirect it to x.com? Pretty sure websites do this all the time, like if you type chapo.chat into the address bar it loads hexbear.net instead.

    Actually they literally already do this in the opposite direction. x.com goes to twitter.com. So someone types twitter.com in a tweet, twitter filters it to x.com, then when you click on it it loads twitter.com. Great job Elon, 10/10 no notes.

    • invalidusernamelol [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      This is a branding move. He wants the name “x.com” to show up more.

      The rewritten url still hyperlinks to “twitter.com” and “x.com” still redirects to “twitter.com

      They didn’t want to change domain names because that’s a nightmare for backend tooling. I’ll bet there’s over a decade of internal tools that check for “twitter.com” in some response or something.

      • Rom [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        Damn that sucks, hope he didn’t fire all of his experienced engineers who could have gone through the backend and made those changes.

  • Angel [any]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    We don’t need to multiply

    We don’t need to multiply

    We don’t need to multiply

    We don’t need to multiply

    • JayTwo [any]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      The concern is that scammers can create fake phishy versions of sites that end in “__x.com” as ___twitter.com to trick Twitter users into divulging passwords or other sensitive info. Because to the Twitter user it’ll look like the genuine site that ends with __x.com on the Twitter app but it won’t actually be.

      Some examples of sites already made to prevent scammers from using them are:
      Netflitwitter, Ametwitter, Fedetwitter, and Roblotwitter, dot com, which falsely showed as Netflix, Amex, FedEx, and Roblox, dot com.
      Though I think they (xitter programmers) already manually added exceptions for the examples that trended which stopped that from happening, for those specific examples.

    • booty [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      The problem is that you can make websites that end in twitter. An example used in the article is someone makes a site called “netflitwitter.com” and posts a link to it on twitter. Twitter will now display it as “netflix.com” and if you click it it sends you to “netflitwitter.com

      Twitter is now a phishing paradise, in other words.