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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.
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.
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.
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'm just saying, true idiots rarely remain rich. Chances are he knows exactly what he's doing by openly talking about his horrific beliefs and empowering those who share the same values as him.
nah. there's no meritocracy. wealthy people don't remain so because they're smart. they do because the system favors them and most of the time they're immoral so they'll do everything to hold on to their wealth. that's it.
If he truly spoke his mind, told his followers what he really thinks of them, he would lose his base, his credibility, and people wouldn't bank on him so far.
But he speaks his mind only to some small extent which empowers his base, builds his credibility by dehumanizing their collective enemies, and so people with those shared values bank on him.
I don't think an idiot would act like that. I think an idiot would ruin their fans on both sides of the political spectrum. This is just a man visibly picking a (horrific) side.
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.
I hate the muskrat as much as most people, but killing twitter was pretty cool.
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