I don’t use it, but i’ll forever call it Twitter.

  • JasonDJ
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    59
    ·
    4 months ago

    Maybe he should buy Alphabet and rename their search engine.

    Ooh or he could buy out Kleenex and rename that.

    What the fuck would make someone throw out the name Twitter? It wasn’t a bad name. It wasn’t like…Phillip Morris or something.

    • pyre@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      48
      ·
      4 months ago

      “wasn’t a bad name” is the understatement of the year. it was one of the most successful brand names ever. normal people with functioning brains would kill to have a brand that’s so ingrained in the language, especially without the threat of genericizing the trademark.

      xerox didn’t want people to use xerox as a generic verb to mean photocopy, or kleenex the same for a generic tissue.

      but Twitter was never used to mean another social media site, and tweeting never means posting on Facebook or Tumblr or whatever. a tweet is specifically a post on Twitter. that’s the perfect brand.

      • rekorse@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        4 months ago

        Is this just a really bad business deal followed by absurdly poor leadership, but very visible?

        Did Elon make it obvious he had a completely different vision for twitter when he talked about buying it?

        • pyre@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          4 months ago

          no, but he was always chasing that “everything app”, some Chinese apps are like that and are probably insanely profitable so of course he wanted to do it himself for the US.

          after he was forced to buy Twitter for a ridiculously high price reserved only for the most idiotic and/or insane of all people, he probably “thought” (a generous metaphor i use to describe the activity inside his cromagnon skull) that he might as well just do that with Twitter and hope it eventually makes enough money to make up for the worst high profile business decision in recent memory. that’s why he’s pushed for more functionalities like making Twitter a video platform, and doing meetups or whatever they’re called.

          he wanted “x” to be a thing since before he was really known all that much by the public, and probably felt appropriate with the direction change for Twitter because he still “thought” it would be cool to have something called X because he lives in the past and has the sensibilities of a child who’s desperate to look cool.

          so here we are, take the world’s best known brand name and replace it with a single letter that is widely used to mean unknown. fucking idiot.

          • rekorse@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            4 months ago

            Not even unknown, in my area x almost always refers to porn. So yeah he destroyed the brand for a name that at worst offends a large group of people .

    • fox2263@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      23
      ·
      4 months ago

      He’s been wanting to have an “everything” company named X for years, since before PayPal I think. So he jumped at the chance to ruin twitter of course and rebuild it from the top down

    • radicalautonomy@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      edit-2
      4 months ago

      Maybe he should buy Alphabet and rename their search engine.

      He’d probably do it because of his hatred for “aLphABeT PeOpLE!” like his own kid. That fucking prick. If he were on fire, I’d piss on him, but not at the base of the flames.

    • Zink@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      4 months ago

      I think all he managed to do, other than torching a legendary amount of money, was to create a bunch of easy content for some lazy college students in marketing 101. The ones who don’t want to dig to find something more interesting and nuanced.