Twitter C/D

i think I shall delete my official twitter account, this is stupid. I'll keep my older shitposting one.

I don't understand. Are you talking about your X account?

I wondering why my xs aren't getting much eXgagement, nor are people re-xing them. Maybe I need to sign up for x Blue.

More like ex-account, right?

mr musk sir please let me do online banking on the same website where people tell me to kill myself for my opinions on the band big thief thank you sir

— Dan Ozzi (@danozzi) July 24, 2023

https://www.musicmagpie.co.uk/store/spree/products/2950925/product/mus000456731.jpg

American History X joke just too easy

Per a Bluesky post from someone there outside HQ here in SF: "twitter sign change isn’t going well. Building management called cops"

lol

"You're here to change the sign to an X? Likely story, buddy."

why would the cops care?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6cOLJkQlTc

Mods, please change the name of this thread to "X". Thank you.

Since Elon is not paying rent, maybe they are trying to throw him out

I hate this app so much. This rebrand is awful. If you need to reach me, you can find me here engaging in content and regularly posting

— Amy Gaeta (@GaetaAmy) July 24, 2023

nailed it

why would the cops care?

The sign itself is located right on the corner of the building next to a crosswalk, thus:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Twitter%27s_San_Francisco_Headquarters.jpg

What they're doing is taking the lettering off rather than the whole deal, but among other things they were doing they forgot to block off the area right below it where people are walking and, you know, not expecting a big metal letter to come crashing on their head. More here:

https://sfstandard.com/2023/07/24/twitter-sign-being-removed-downtown-san-francisco-office-x/

An even more bizarre note via Bluesky: "An officer told me twitter’s security team wasn’t notified"

Okay when your own city's public utilities commission roasts you

Twitter rebranding to X is like when wipes rebranded to "flushable" wipes.

— SF Water Power Sewer (@MySFPUC) July 24, 2023

I’m a little baffled by the outrage, since Musk is overtly, transparently trying to tank the company. Shutting it down abruptly would create a unifying event which could drive users to another site, but this erosion and fuckery is Balkanising the community and dissipating any chance of a rebuild. The mystery is why, and my current guess is its utility as an unregulated news source.

That makes sense but those people will just move to another site and when it gains critical momentum will become the de facto site for unregulated, real time news updates.

He wanted to change Paypal's name to X a long time again. He's not trying to tank it. It's just his playground.

xp but the slow, messy death has avoided that because the user base are now scattered across BlueSky, Mastodon, Threads etc. and will not regroup. The systematic violation of the Twitter model means nobody will ever have the same naive belief in checkmarks etc. again, he’s salted the ground after burning the crops.

This was seen in Chicago and a lot of people joked it was a dig at Musk:

https://preview.redd.it/pevxsgdthtdb1.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=e95fe616326a303791b78d0c090dcfbdd4f49940

(It was actually for Fragile X Syndrome Awareness Day, so consider me newly aware!)

Wait hold on

It appears Instagram and FB owner Meta holds the trademark for "X" as it relates to "online social networking services... social networking services in the fields of entertainment, gaming and application development..." https://t.co/vb2r67ZOzb

— Alex Weprin (@alexweprin) July 24, 2023

That further link is legit BTW!

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch

Found this fascinating old article about trademarking a letter:

https://www.fastcompany.com/3042515/wtf-inside-the-wild-weird-world-of-trademarking-the-alphabet

One graf:

Single letters are among the most popular trademarks registered in the United States. Each letter of the alphabet has, at a minimum, hundreds of trademarks. There are, for example, over 2,000 trademarks of the letter S, making it the most popular. There are 1,102 Vs, 1,100 Es, and 1,816 As. Pity the lonely Y, with only 229. For comparison, other common words have far fewer marks: “me” has 97, “cat” has 72, and “extreme” has only 42.

reminds me of a moment a few years ago when somebody tried to patent curry powder, because why not

If Google is Alphabet, don't they own all the letters?

https://i.imgur.com/UFNCjqs.png

I’m a little baffled by the outrage, since Musk is overtly, transparently trying to tank the company.

― assert (matttkkkk), Monday, July 24, 2023 4:47 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

nah hes just very bad at running the company

When incompetence becomes indistinguishable from sabotage.

truly an alltime business fail

its too bad hes gonna have to roll back the name change due to ip issues its such a perfect development

or maybe he refuses to roll it back and it becomes and even bigger snafu

he should play it hardcore is my suggestion

xp You really don't think he has systematically, serially dismantled everything of value about the site? Verification, deplatforming of hate speech, egalitarianism, reach for advertisers, the ability to create one's own community, celebrity and authority direct access ... ? And now burning the brand which has all-but become a category verb in everyday speech, replacing it with something meaningless and impossible to search (as in, "president biden x" will not bring up the was-Twitter account). Firing 90% of the staff, shutting down the media office, not paying rent, violating city codes for employees to sleep in the building, implementing every decision at a speed guaranteed to derail the train?
There's dumb and there's deliberate. Like Zuckerberg, Musk is willing and able to offer the public "clownable moments" so they feel superior, while he gets on with doing the things he set out to do with almost no scrutiny beyond "lol Elon fail".

i can certainly understand why someone would think hes killing twitter on purpose, and i do think he hates a lot about twitter and is on some level subconsciously trying to destroy it, but if you examine all the moves hes made on an individual level its pretty clear he thinks theyre good and will work

and obvs he has a lot of ego wrapped up in it which is a big part of why hes fucking up so bad

yea I think it's less he's playing 3-D chess intentionally trying to kill it and more that all the various stories you read about him being completely incompentent are true

xp You really don't think he has systematically, serially dismantled everything of value about the site? Verification, deplatforming of hate speech, egalitarianism, reach for advertisers, the ability to create one's own community, celebrity and authority direct access ... ? And now burning the brand which has all-but become a category verb in everyday speech, replacing it with something meaningless and impossible to search (as in, "president biden x" will not bring up the was-Twitter account). Firing 90% of the staff, shutting down the media office, not paying rent, violating city codes for employees to sleep in the building, implementing every decision at a speed guaranteed to derail the train?
There's dumb and there's deliberate. Like Zuckerberg, Musk is willing and able to offer the public "clownable moments" so they feel superior, while he gets on with doing the things he set out to do with almost no scrutiny beyond "lol Elon fail".

― assert (matttkkkk), Monday, July 24, 2023 10:28 PM

When you group all these actions together, it does look deliberate. But in real time, every single boneheaded move was goaded on by his prominent members of his fanclub. No one's more desperate to be liked by people he approves of than Elon (Trump used to be the same way, but now he only craves ultimate power). The man is far too impulsive and childish to stick to a plan, and considering how directionless his experiment with Twitter has gone so far, I doubt there will ever be one.

theres some stuff where hes trying to take his experience selling things and apply it to a business that sells ads, just very arrogant refusing to learn and so forth, hes clearly kinda lost his marbles

He’s throwing darts blind hoping to make Twxttxr not a boondoggle.

one thing about people is we refuse to acknowledge when weve got a good thing going and instead keep looking for a good thing

also worth mentioning that he very publicly made it clear that he did not want to buy Twitter like two weeks after he put in the offer

Which proves he’s good at business

its true that the biggest mistake was offering to buy the company in the first place

sometimes you stay up all night and get a little weird and you make a $44 bil 420 joke

weve all been there

im honestly having a genuinely negative reaction to the x logo i dont like it i miss the bird