Twitter C/D

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

(its live on the web btw but not the app)

the bird was actually a good logo, there was nothing wrong with it that i could see

it was a nice bird it didnt deserve this

Others have pointed this out, but this renaming is stepping on the exact same rake that got him ousted by PayPal. Wrote about this in my book pic.twitter.com/4yn2KffsHl

— Max Chafkin (@chafkin) July 24, 2023

The bird was a good logo and was also emblematic of a company that however imperfectly thought a lot about design — not just how the site looked, but how smoothly it functioned. I personally hated the whole "tweet" thing at the start, just too fkn cute, but I was won over by how easy it was to use and find interesting people saying interesting things. Musk obviously doesn't care about any of that, the X is a negative logo, crossing out the old one in the crudest way possible.

I don't think there's any great plan driving any of it, I think he really thought running a social media company was going to be easy and he's been flustered by how often he's just splashing around cluelessly. But also I do think he came in with a lot of contempt for the site and the company and the people it had variously empowered. So via whatever path, I think he did instinctively want to disempower a lot of those people (scientists, feminists, LGBTQ, the woke mob) — which he would be doing regardless of how well his overall management scheme was going.

hey look, Belgian/French bank Dexia

https://www.french.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Dexia-Credit-Local.jpg

https://www.french.org/banks/dexia-credit-local/

i don't know why but this X thing has annoyed me more than most of this lackwit's recent fuckery

The bird was called Larry. Have some respect everyone and call him by his name.

it's pretty incredible that he's doing this - throwing away the one advantage twitter has over rivals, eg its incumbency and brand recognition - at the exact moment his competitors have launched their own versions

I mean even Google and Facebook kept thier names when they changed their umbrella corps. (though I do wonder if zuck did want to change FB to be called meta at some point and got shot down by his board?)

We can focus on Musk wanting to pull out two weeks after the offer but let's not forget how the previous owners were desperate to get out of running it.

Long term this app was fucked by the fact that posting doesn't make money. Just that instead of collapsing and the lights being switched off one day it's just happening in an extremely annoying way for a lot of ppl (not me I am happily using it still)

The X at the top but the button on my phone still has the bird. The tweet button has still that light blue/white combination of the old logo.

Very funny how nothing being done well is our future.

I'm not sure it's more complicated than "he used the site a lot, and he thought that gave him insight into how it worked" - almost any web developer will have horror stories in that vein. Sometimes the old tales hold the wisdom - this is the car that Homer built.

We can focus on Musk wanting to pull out two weeks after the offer but let's not forget how the previous owners were desperate to get out of running it.

If Twitter fails it's 100% Musk's fault basically. It was never going to be a fountain of cash but it would have limped along.

xp - I don't buy this "it was too much of a good offer not to take". A lot of Silicon Valley philosophy is incoherent but there seems to me to be a 'we have higher goals here' than just money.

Don't think they were ever going to repay the investment in it.

i mean it was too much of a good offer to turn down from the pov of their legally binding fiduciary duty to the shareholders, and it was an even better offer once tech stocks started tanking

SV doesn’t have higher goals, any of the lofty shit that these chicklehead asshats say is absolute bullshit covering for their robber baron dreams.

lag00n is right, twitter was not a founder-controlled company at the time musk made the offer, they were a public company and their board had fiduciary duties to their shareholders - they had to take the offer or they would have been sued by their own shareholders

xp i think?

One p.o.v. on this, is that this is just another iteration of the spectacular tech flameout at the level of the WeWork guy, anything involving AOL/Time-Warner, Carly Fiorina at HP, all of Yahoo. The whole "the plan can never fail, it can only be failed" doctrine that powers these cults. I was around for multiple dotcom incinerations so something like the first several seasons of Silicon Valley are a documentary. Eventually they'll just acting that way.

Ok. Reckon they could've gotten out of it if they wanted to.

Re: higher goals. To me that's marketing but a lot of those ppl are strange.

prediction calling it X won’t catch on and everyone will just keep calling it twitter and in a couple weeks musk will block or algorithmically suppress tweets containing the word “twitter”

i mean maybe, but the question is why would they want to get out of it? jack wasn't ceo anymore, the board only cares about maximizing value for shareholders, the business was getting worse... xp