Such a business genius to just completely trash well known name branding that most companies would kill to have. Twitter was a household name, the bird instantly recognizable with the brand, and “tweet” and “retweet” as common words.
Such a brilliant display of Vision™ by Musk.
not only that, heaps of cultures associate birds with rumours and news (a little bird told me that …). I was genius marketing and top tier branding
And here we are, more than a year later, and any time anyone actually calls it by its new name, it’s always followed by (previously Twitter). Hilarious. Because the new name is fucking nonsense
and also it had the bonus that being commonly used in language still posed no risk of genericizing the trademark.
people say kleenex to mean tissue, xerox to mean photocopy (xerox famously put out ads telling people not to use their trademark name in generic context)…
… but never twitter to mean any social network or even microblogging. or tweet to mean a post on facebook or even mastodon. tweet is almost always used to mean a post on twitter specifically.
so it was not only universally recognized and thoroughly integrated in language, but also specific enough to be safe for the trademark. an absolute dream for any brand.
and what did the genius do? throw it away for a single letter that’s used to mean unknown or generic (great brand strategy btw), but only when it’s not used to mean porn.
seriously, since I’m a graphic designer and interested in these things i’ve seen some bad rebrandings before but this has to be the absolute worst.
he did it on purpose, it was literally an attack on progressives.
what? how?
It was the single platform where scientists and the politically active could interact, safe from regressives via twitters moderation policy. Essentially, a place where verified experts could share opinions to a receptive audience.
By taking over, the verifiablitiy went, the voices of the uninformed were weighted the same as the informed, and whatever (mostly left-leaning) communities existed there became fragmented as the twitter experience went down as the UX became more hostile and ad-ridden.
The progressives are recovering, and finding their communities again, but mostly via bluesky/mastodon
you give him way too much credit. he’s a fucking moron and he didn’t even buy twitter on purpose. he thought could back out of it just like he backs out of everything he says but was forced to go through with one of the worst purchases in history.
also the rebranding is not to ruin twitter but to pivot to the everything app he’s been trying to make for a long time. the name X is also something he always liked because he’s a child. he tried to name PayPal X too, and also named one of his children X. none of what he does is 5d chess. he’s just a loser idiot who has been failing up for too long.
Collectively we keep forgetting this and it’s so important. This isn’t 5D fascist chess, this is a guy who got so high on approval from the masses on Twitter he lost his fucking mind. Everything he does these days is for approval from people. The crowd he has decided are the cool kids, who laugh at his shit jokes, are fascists. I don’t even think he’s a fascist, I think he’s an irresponsible egotist with no stable sense of self-worth who deep down knows he’s a fraud.
Yeah, that’s trump all right
he’s not some idiot being propped up by rich backers for the purpose of political disunity: he is that rich backer that props up others.
Do not mistake public theater for incompetence.
he has demonstrated incompetence so many fucking times it’s incredible that you are even saying this. he is most definitely an idiot.
I mean, the ends are the same whether he was an independent actor or a puppet. Now Saudi Arabian is the second-largest owner of Twitter and it is destroyed as the mechanism it once was for progressive protest against governments.
Elon may be a moron but Saudi Arabia pitched in with direct goals. Imo the fact that any company can be partially owned by a dictatorship and receive constitutional protections is a tentacle of the Citizens United ruling.
I hate the muskrat as much as most people, but killing twitter was pretty cool.
Or use Mastodon. Either way…
Or bluesky.
Doesn’t support Activity Pub
Bridge is easy. And its got an algorithm while being FOSS.
Like you can follow mastodon accounts from bluesky and vice versa. (using bridgy)
Big plus for me is that mastodon is AGPL. Does bluesky have third party servers yet?
Does elon still own the twitter trademark?
Couldnt we just make a new site and call it twitter and make it the same as twitter used to be?
It would really piss on his ego.
If he’s actually serious he should also sell the domain so someone could host a mastodon instance on it
It would still have to be some sort of social media site but I think so, yeah. The point of trademarks is to make sure you don’t confuse consumers. In theory you could make a restaurant called Twitter and be fine.
trademarks have to be protected and used. Its likely you could reasonably win a trademark battle with him since he’s rebranded
It was always shit. Musk made it shittier. But as always, stop giving it oxygen.
What’s butterfly icon? Did Xitter get a new one?
That’s Bluesky. It’s supposed to be a federated social media, but right now there’s only one kind of software for it and you can’t yet self-host it (although you can self-host your data). The open-source protocol, known as AT, was created by Twitter back in the day, and Jack Dorsey and a bunch of staff were able to rescue it when Musk took over.
AT does not federate with ActivityPub, but users of either protocol can appear on the other using Bridgy; and some Friendica instances have basic support for AT. The equivalent of “fediverse” is “ATmosphere” (with the first two letters capitalised).
Since it became public (as opposed to invite-only), Dorsey left the platform and went back to Nostr (yet another microblogging platform, this time built around blockchain :-P).
It’s actually quite a nice place, in my opinion, with a vibe similar to a combination of Twitter and Tumblr.
Sorry for going into this much detail. I just really like explaining things.
EDIT: Turns out, the word being thrown around in place of “tweet” was also slang for cum. I have removed it, as this was probably originally a joke.
So do you guys not know what skeet means or…
I’m dying, we really out here trying to convince people to leave Twitter for a site that uses the word “reskeet”
I’ve just looked it up on UrbDict, and I think that might have been a joke that I just didn’t understand. I guess we just use “post” and “repost”.
What’s wrong with a little skeet shooting?
I’ve just looked it up on UrbDict, and I think that might have been a joke that I just didn’t understand. I guess we just use “post” and “repost”.
What’s wrong with a little skeet shooting?
Ah, fuck.
Well, thanks for letting me know. Believe it or not, it’s not the first time this sort of thing has happened.
I mean you’re not wrong. I’ve seen multiple articles stating that a blue sky version of tweet is a skeet. It’s why I’ve written the entire platform off.
I’ll skeet skeet mother fucker
I’ll reskeet god damn!
I’ve just looked it up on UrbDict, and I think that might have been a joke that I just didn’t understand. I guess we just use “post” and “repost”.
Thank you for taking into so much detail. I feel pretty well informed now.
It’s Bluesky, Jack Dorsey’s Twitter 2.0 platform. The problem is, it makes all of the same mistakes Twitter did. So, it’s just earlier in it it’s absolute-shit-show lifecycle — not actually different.
Why am I not surprised?
Armin, i mean seymour skinner
That was a good ride
Go away, there’s no Armin Tamzarian and there never was!
Shoulda called it “Flutter”.
Since flutter is a comparatively popular* mobile framework it probably wasn’t a good way to make a name for yourself.
*(I personally hate it and think it’s going to die without Google backing it but at the time of writing it’s pretty commonly discussed as an option for cross platform mobile dev)
Aw crap. Welp… RIP flutter.
If it’s backed by Google is probably going to die.
You’re not wrong. IIRC they already planned to stop or layoff their Dart developer in favour of Golang (also a language by Google)
They laid off python, dart and flutter teams
They laid off their flutter, dart and python teams.
Flutter is cooked.
It’s open source like Dart, so it can live on but it will almost certainly wither away.
That would be cool, but Bluesky was still using a photo of literal blue sky as its icon until recently.
twatter, i says
I’ve yet to try Bluesky, and Twitter wasn’t exactly the beacon of human decency or anything, but I feel like Bluesky in its current state is less of a refuge for actual human communication, and more just brands trying to find a less toxic platform to endlessly-positively-organically-brandvertise on.
Mastodon can feel a lot more slow, but also as a person it feels a lot less like whispering into the void.
As a person trying to market though, I suppose I’d probably make a Bluesky account… or…begrudgingly…a Xitter account…ughhhh…
That’s funny because I use it and I have yet to see a brand on there. It’s just mostly pleasant people talking.
But there’s so many furries
Yeah, we kinda make the internet go
Best deal with it 😎🐺
They keep the internet running, they can stay.
The internet would go down in a day without gay furry hackers
Why is that a problem?
I’ve never used Xhitter
The best example of a terrible “rebranding”, but thank God, the platform is going down
