A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
The value of his purchase of all that billions was essentially:
The userbase
The branding
The software and the people that built it
Now that got rid of all three... Wasn't it 100x cheaper to just buy parler? Or just hire a single developer on Fiverr and start a defederated mastodon server
Either he's a raving idiot or someone was paying him to destroy Twitter. Or both.
No one is paying him. He is just a dumbass with money.
I doubt anyone could pay the man enough to blow 40 billion to tank a website. The moment you break something, the users will find a replacement and go there. This purchase was 100% ego. It changed no minds about Elon. His fanboys will still call this genius, and those who already knew he was a manchild are not suddenly thinking this was a mature, well-thought-out plan.
We seem to forget this whole "Imma buy Twitter" was, in part, because Twitter refused to disable the account of the kid that was tracking his jet
Who is still tracking his jet on mastodon and threads. I love it.
the kid that was tracking his jet
The kid that was reposting public flight tracking data of his jet. He's so fucking petty.
If the goal was just to shut down twitter that could have been accomplished day 1. My theory is he really didn't think he'd be stuck paying the high price he offered and now his goal is to file for bankruptcy after tanking the company, and to do it he has to look like hes trying to make it work.
Alternatively. He really is this big an idiot. It would be in line with the moron making an offer twitter couldn't refuse and then being surprised when they accepted
45 Billion bought a lot of eyeballs to watch him flame out over the canyon.
Appropriate name for a social media platform that the internet has broken up with.
Man, I love Block the Rich. No more musky spam. My internet smells so much cleaner now.
So why are you commenting on a news article about Elon Musk? Already missing the smell?
Yes, exactly! I have no idea what you said, it's blurred out!
it was funny, but i didn't know about the extension
Well it only has 1 user according to the Mozilla store, so no surprise that no one had heard of it.
I think it's new, I've only seen people sharing it recently (in the past week). That count is likely outdated.
It’s even more hideous than I was expecting. How is that even possible
Ah yes, the edgiest of letters. That fits pretty well, actually.
I thought it was some dumb clickbait, but it's just dumb Elon
Yeah, I'm having trouble seeing this as real news.
In a world . . . in which one man spends 45 Billion dollars to destroy a global communications juggernaut in the most assinine, ridiculous ways ever . . . It's . . . The Rebrandening!
I mean, if he bought Coca-Cola and replaced sugar with vinegar, it'd be news, right?
I remember visiting X.com in 2000 or so. Was a bank type website, which PayPal bought up. That’s probably how he got control of the domain. (ETA: more accurate answer below!)
But also, looks like the X11 logo
X.com was the online bank that Musk co-founded and that some time after it merged with Confinity Inc. changed its name to PayPal (PayPal was a product of Confinity).
If I recall correctly, he had the x.com domain and tried to rebrand PayPal to X. The board went, "are you a fucking idiot?" and replace him with Peter Thiel.
He's been trying to call stuff "X" since he was an edgy teenager. He just never had the good sense to grow out of it, and he fell ass backward into enough money that we all get to watch him go all "Star Wars kid" over and over again in public.
The X11 logo is much nicer.
Well, with all the porn on twitter, it may be an appropriate name.
There are already jokes in brand names like from French :
Official "X" account Msi France
This is such a half-ass job at rebranding. They only changed the logos on their front page. All the wording, logos and icons are still the previous ones on their About the Company page, Brand Toolkit, Help Center, Developer Platform, Business and Advertising etc etc.
I mean, isnt everything musk does half assed?
The domain x.com with no context sounds suspicious, yet it's just ~~Twitter~~ X.
That’s why they went with PayPal instead of x.com for the payment business. It’s funny that he takes that name out of the closet again.
It's better. He specifically went out and PAID to buy the domain back from Paypal because he was so sure he'd need it again.
Everything he’s done with Twitter is great. It was time someone brought it down a couple dozen notches. Here’s hoping someone will do the same to Meta next.
I'm on Twitter for a long time now and nothing really changed. No one left. People that lean left are bitching about the platform but continue to tweet. Previously, the same was done by right leaning people.
Twitter has lost over 10% of its users and engagement/monthly active users is down, Musk even admits they’ve lost users. Traffic is also going down with the API change/requirement to be on Twitter proper, as well as limiting the number of tweets one can see.
Considering how much a Twitter is bots, that means the number of actual people who left is actually much higher. So yeah, something did change lol just because you haven’t noticed it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
Edit: I’m not sure why you are talking about left and right users tbh. Seems like you’re kind of shoehorning a “both sides“ comment since no one is talking politics here.
Yeah nah, pretty much everybody of importance left the platform quite some time ago actually. Twitter truly has turned to shit too. All you see in your feed is the same extreme-right propaganda we've seen for 4+ years since the pandemic. It's just that now it's boosted by Elon's fuckery. Also, there's a reason why they're begging us to come back.
They created their own little echo chamber and now they have nobody to argue with. That's what happen when a far-right social media is created usually. They realize they aren't the powerhouse they thought they were and all of a sudden it's just "uh, where is everybody?!?!?"
If you want my opinion, it's 1000% deserved and they can suck my dick, I ain't coming back just to hear "VACCINE BAD ORANGE MAN GOD PLS JOIN US WE CAN KILL EVERYBODY THAT LOOKS LIKE A JEW!"
Noooooooo thank you
Well you're not on Twitter now, are you. Neither is anyone else. Also they're not tweeting anymore, they're . . . xing? And per the article that was the last email from the twitter.com domain (supposedly) so . . what, is it x.com now?
The guy's, like, a 5-D chess jenius.
Over 50% of its advertisers left. That means most of the brands are not interested in the kind of people left in the toxic wasteland called X.
The biggest wtf in this is that tweeting, a term that's been ingrained into modern lexicon, is becoming irrelevant. That's like the greatest advertisement you can have for your platform.
Also they're not tweeting anymore, they're . . .
Spewing xcrement
I wonder what Xorg Foundation thinks of him using their logo.
[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
The domain x.com, which Musk bought ages ago, also redirects to twitter
The x.com domain was originally purchased by PayPal for over $8m back when Elon was still at the company. No one knows how much PayPal asked Elon for it back in 2017 when he bought it from them, but it was rumoured to be an eight digit figure.
My brain autocorrects x.com to x-com every time. And I just couldn't get into that game.
Everyone who called Firefish stupid needs to come see this and reconsider.
If they're no longer using the twitter brand, maybe someone else can use it.
With that I expect reddit to rebrand itself to "W" not too late after.
For Wumbo?
The title of the post is incorrect. It should be: "Elon Musk rebrands Twitter as the X11 Window System".