It’s rare for corporate brands to become so intertwined with everyday conversation that they become verbs. It’s rarer still for the owner of such a brand to announce plans to intentionally destroy it.
An estimated $4 to $20 billion in value, what is he thinking?
Everything is tweets now, on all platforms; hear me out.
It might sound lazy, and I certainly have no loyalty to the Twitter brand, but if Musk isn't going to defend it we have the opportunity to dilute and generalize the term (like zipper or band-aid). We can kill it dead AND reclaim it.
It's a good word! Short, sweet, has familiarity, and is honestly pretty descriptive for the simple bird-like chatter of the discourse. Everything else proposed sounds dumb as hell, not to mention you're doing the marketing for them. Don't sell their brands - suffocate them!
As someone who prefers threaded interaction, it’s gonna be hard to stop calling them posts. Maybe that’s what my grandkids will think is old fashioned about me.
“They’s been posts since BBS and they’ll stay posts!”
The original post was at least half joking in tone, but in seriousness, I think there's an argument to be made that "posts" applies to topical threads. Threads that originate with a piece of content like a link or self post and that all following discussion is at least tangentially related. I'd call them posts here on Lemmy for that.
Tweets, however, often originate out of thin air, be it someone's head or ass. When someone says, "Kanye West 'tweeted' <INSERT OPINION HERE>" you've already determined about how seriously you're going to take it.
I remember when twitter first came out and people were talking about "tweets" and it sounded just as stupid as xing sounds today. But the word has made it into mainstream lexicon and been normalized. Just like "googling" something just means to search. Tweet will mean to message something. I think part of the reason he is abandoning twitter is because it is becoming increasingly hard to legally fight other people using the terms for his platform for other platforms. For instance Mastadon is using "toot" which started from "twoot" which started from tweet.
I also still think he is an idiot for abandoning a brand name that is literally in every house and on every storefront. Even if they cant defend the vocabulary to abandon it all is the dumbest business decision I've ever heard of.
p.s. for xing I like "kissing" since XOXO is hugs and kisses with the X being the kiss. Considering how homophobic Elon is having his platform being a bunch of people kissing would just be to perfect!
You make an interesting point, but I'm most comfortable calling them posts. Because that's what they are. The term "post" applies to any and all blogging services, regardless of their branding.