Twitter C/D

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

The new logo makes this site feel like a bum strip club in Providence, Rhode Island.

— ༘ (@beefytopdog) July 25, 2023

It‘s a new subgenre of posting already.

gonna be honest this new widget design looks like an app for a membership only human trafficking gentlemen’s club headquartered in Budapest pic.twitter.com/HNND7QGYTn

— Qanon Latifah (@ch1w33th3d0g) July 23, 2023

lol

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

― Alba, Tuesday, July 25, 2023 bookmarkflaglink

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

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, July 25, 2023

Two excellent posts!

Had never heard of "Larry" before.

xpost

It is patently clear that Musk is incompetent. He has also become socialized in the right wing echo chamber where they are still desperately clinging to the notion that the public actually has a silent majority of fervent Nazi sympathizers, they just need a coherent outlet for a new 21st century tech-friendly fascism. He probably does legitimately believe there’s a solid customer base for this nonsense — and frankly the way Reddit has captured so much of random online culture as it is literally taken over by the alt-right indicates there may be something to that.

However it’s also possible that some of these notions are being fed to Musk by more clear-thinking members of the 88 club, or yes even by those with some actual experience at destroying open and democratic media. It really does seem like a concerted effort to take down good faith public discourse, whether that’s wisdom Musk accidentally received from the detritus of decades of attacks on the ‘liberal media’, or whether it’s more directly targeted, is a conundrum. I will say Musk like Trump seems to me an almost ideal mark for psychological manipulation, if some agents of anti-democratic interests were so inclined.

they should go back to the original logo

https://logo.com/image-cdn/images/kts928pd/production/5c1ecc6182f13c7c81092956161eca68c3fcab3e-3840x2160.png?w=1080&q=72

Piklr

just setting up my x the everything app

It is patently clear that Musk is incompetent. He has also become socialized in the right wing echo chamber where they are still desperately clinging to the notion that the public actually has a silent majority of fervent Nazi sympathizers, they just need a coherent outlet for a new 21st century tech-friendly fascism. He probably does legitimately believe there’s a solid customer base for this nonsense — and frankly the way Reddit has captured so much of random online culture as it is literally taken over by the alt-right indicates there may be something to that.

However it’s also possible that some of these notions are being fed to Musk by more clear-thinking members of the 88 club, or yes even by those with some actual experience at destroying open and democratic media. It really does seem like a concerted effort to take down good faith public discourse, whether that’s wisdom Musk accidentally received from the detritus of decades of attacks on the ‘liberal media’, or whether it’s more directly targeted, is a conundrum. I will say Musk like Trump seems to me an almost ideal mark for psychological manipulation, if some agents of anti-democratic interests were so inclined.

pretty booming post - worth remembering that the general public doesn't have to be rah-rah nazis for nazis to win, they just need to be easily led.

There were many other designs and even other names, with Twitter beating out alternatives like "twitch" and "smssy"! Two of the runner-up designs had the tagline "an Odeo thing" directly under the name, but the final design didn't include any association with the parent company.

From: https://logo.com/blog/twitter-logo

Smssy ftw

we couldve had smssy

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f4/SassymagCover.jpg

Cute Bot Alert!

understanding the daddy love-hate vibe *flips sassy open to that article*

https://archive.org/details/sassy-4-92/page/60/mode/2up

tweets should now be called "kisses" and retweets should be "hugs"
xoxoxoxo

likes should be called tugs

Now I want a smssy logo t-shirt

imagining an alternate world where twitter is bought by gen x icon jane pratt and turned into sasser

It is patently clear that Musk is incompetent. He has also become socialized in the right wing echo chamber where they are still desperately clinging to the notion that the public actually has a silent majority of fervent Nazi sympathizers, they just need a coherent outlet for a new 21st century tech-friendly fascism. He probably does legitimately believe there’s a solid customer base for this nonsense — and frankly the way Reddit has captured so much of random online culture as it is literally taken over by the alt-right indicates there may be something to that.

However it’s also possible that some of these notions are being fed to Musk by more clear-thinking members of the 88 club, or yes even by those with some actual experience at destroying open and democratic media. It really does seem like a concerted effort to take down good faith public discourse, whether that’s wisdom Musk accidentally received from the detritus of decades of attacks on the ‘liberal media’, or whether it’s more directly targeted, is a conundrum. I will say Musk like Trump seems to me an almost ideal mark for psychological manipulation, if some agents of anti-democratic interests were so inclined.

I agree with a lot in this post, but I truly want the idea that social media sites are "a town square" or a place for "public discourse" to die. These companies, all of them, are privately owned, operated for profit, and virtual, and aren't designed to serve the public, but the coffers of large corporations. I'm tired of this small rhetorical flourish continuing unabated as conventional wisdom when it is demonstrably false.

Twitter is a town square where only 10% of the town actually shows up, and even then, half of *that* is just snake oil salesmen and the rubes the frequent them

tbf that's how town square things work, too

Sometimes you get a Church of the Sub-Genius guy