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(reposting because new thread)
Is Twitter finally dead yet?
Usually, I'd be the last person to ask such a provocative question. I used to be one of the people who rolled their eyes or otherwise ignored sensationalized media stories surrounding Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter, stories which have plagued the news cycle for the better part of almost a year now. It felt like you couldn't go a day or two without an article on the most mundane of things that were only remarkable because of Musk, like him going to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
But I have to - reluctantly - admit, maybe all the media's negative hype had a point.
The latest decision Musk has made is to rebrand Twitter to "X". The URL X.com will automatically redirect Twitter. Twitter is changing its logo from the iconic blue bird into a white "X". Apparently a tweet should now just be called an "X".
The obvious question is: Why? Musk's answer seems to be that he wants to change Twitter into some sort of "super-app" where one can do everything on it, similar to the WeChat app in China. This only raises further questions, like why people couldn't just use other apps, or why it had to be done in this why, or why they couldn't even just go the Meta approach where the company is renamed X (in fact, it's already been "X Corp." for a while) but Twitter gets to still be named Twitter and keep the blue bird logo.
The one thing that everyone in the Musk-Twitter discourse seems to agree on is that Twitter has significant value in its brand. Now, it might not even have that. Who really wants to talk about "'X'-ing on X" when it's far more idiosyncratic to say "tweeting on Twitter", which people have done for the better part of the decade?
But to answer my own question: No, I think it's the wrong approach to look at each change as potentially an outright Twitter-killer. I think the bigger picture should be looked at, and that in the long run, the demise of Twitter will be a death by a thousand paper cuts, where each change isn't quite so negative to kill it entirely, but it keeps Twitter on a downwards and downwards trend. And there's already been several paper cuts - fleeing advertisers, ratelimits, restricted guest browsing, etc.
The weird hate boner some people in the media have more musk makes me doubt a lot of what I hear. I mean, people want him to fail sooo bad. Just look at all the articles talking about how big threads is going to be... Or remember the victory lap everyone did when a window broke on a tesla truck (after getting hit with a baseball bat)? Or compare the articles talking about musk with the articles talking about meta... There's an obvious bias here.
Twitter was bloated. A bunch of people were fired and they're now attacking a notoriously bad code base (a least according to hackernews comments); Things are going to get rough for a while :marseyshrug:
Better yet it was beaten with a big sledgehammer. Then later they were able to shot put throw metal weights to crack windows.
The sledgehammer was not applied to the window.
Yes, but the big sledgehammer deforming the door is what caused the window to later break.
So, fun fact, I have it through the grapevine that the actual reason was they were WHALING on the damn thing the night before the demo, and that weakened it enough that the next substantial hit - the demo - was enough to break it. Of course I have no way of personally confirming any of that but I trust the person who told me.
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