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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27691 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Happy Birthday Elon Twitter

We're almost at the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over Twitter X. How have your predictions fared? I'll answer below.

I've been pretty checked out as far as the day-to-day happenings are concerned, and I don't know how the site looks for someone who has an account, but the thing I'm most curious about as an occasional clicker of links to Twitter is when (if at all) they're going to fully commit to the X branding and start getting "twitter" out of their urls. When will twitter.com redirect me to x.com, rather than vice-versa?

The rebrand only started being rolled out this summer, so we're really only a few months into it. I understand they're probably hesitant to break a whole internet's worth of twitter.com urls and embed systems, but you have to rip the band-aid off at some point, right? If it's not going to be Twitter anymore, at some point it has to not be Twitter anymore.

I didn't weigh in in the original thread, but I'll count myself as having been slightly surprised that the site didn't suffer more critical functionality loss after the possibly-overzealous initial mass layoffs. Some people I was paying attention to on the matter last year were really emphasizing how many critical roles they thought were being naively cast aside as unnecessary. I haven't had a Twitter account in years so I can't speak on the user experience during the transition, but presumably the lights are still on and the site still works, so I guess I'll give that W to Elon. An impression I had was that there were some significant number of people who were let go in the initial wave who ended up having their position offered back to them. There are plenty of people in my information sphere who seem happy to get a dunk in on Musk whenever they can, though, so that might not have been an honest and nuanced appraisal of the situation.

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