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X.com (2000)

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This idea of "why doesn't the west have a WeChat-like app" (which X is supposed to be eventually) is so shallow that I have trouble believing there is any corporate support behind it besides Elon. As he's seemingly pushing his successful space & EV business under this parent brand, it would be a strange hill to die on.

I don’t understand how Twitter and the X idea overlap. Elon just wants to use the existing user base to seamlessly switch to the new app. If that’s the only reason he is bulldozing Twitter into X, feels like a bad idea. With his celebrity (though severely diminished) he can pull in a lot of interest to X as a new company. That would have automatically added a few billion in value for him. Instead trying to morph Twitter into X reduces Twitter’s value and doesn’t net anything positive at all. I don’t get this madness

It's the same thing as Nostr, wanting to tie payments to identities.

That’s it. KYC with a head start of a 220M user base. 5% of that is a massive force in fintech.

Lights are one but no one is home.

It’s a bit pointless trying to reverse engineer some sense out of the whims of some people who think very highly of themselves.

I think it's because he was financially successful with PayPal and he wants to duplicate that success, so he's always been trying to break back into the money flows and this was too juicy of an idea to merge the two.

As Tom Nicholas (the British YouTuber) pointed out, a chat app that's used by the vast majority of the population (like WeChat in China, or perhaps in some countries WhatsApp) can add a payments method and be successful, but Twitter has only ever been a niche. An influential niche, popular with journalists and celebrities, but a niche nonetheless. A chat app first needs the massive audience, and to be a normal way to send private messages to people you know in real life, before it can become a successful payments app.

WhatsApp could perhaps do it, but most of the countries where WhatsApp is popular already have decent payments infrastructure.

> Twitter has only ever been a niche. An influential niche, popular with journalists and celebrities, but a niche nonetheless.

This is the key. Elon has been in this niche and can't see it from the outside, from the viewpoint of the Regular People who only hear about Twitter on the news but never actually go to the site.

Same with journalists and "journalists" who create "news" about some two follower default profile picture account with a hot-take on Twitter, pretending that it's the view of some larger crowd just because it was said on Twitter.

Twitter lacks what IRC had decades ago and Discord/Telegram have, a way to moderate who can see your message within a group. Currently it's just shouting to the void (with hashtags).

> Twitter lacks what IRC had decades ago and Discord/Telegram have, a way to moderate who can see your message within a group.

It has that, Circles.

Except they announced they were going to remove it recently but… haven't. I think they may actually be unable to remove things and have just told him it's gone.

I always thought circles were for some kind of voice chat real time podcast thing?

And people could just join them at-will without any moderation.

But I'm not a heavy twitter user in the least :)

That's Spaces.

Circles were a near-exact lift of the same-named feature from Google Plus. You could (can still?) set up ring privilege layers of your followers or specific subgroupings and send tweets only visible to those in that group.

I think his idea is that Twitter as a pure diffusion platform is dead and/or insufficient, as shown by the competition meta is going to bring in the market with Threads.

His vision is that the west needs/wants a mega app - WeChat like - where you can communicate privately or publicly; interact with people / communities / companies and pay / exchange money. Do not forget that his wealth initially came from changing the way people pay online, he's got a thing for that kind of market.

To create that mega app; you can either start from scratch (hard) or flip an existing product. Ideally such a product would need to have a massive audience (network effect) and at least part of the feature your mega app needs.

Amongst the available platforms; TikTok was too big/expensive and targeted at minors. Meta and all their properties is too expensive. Twitter was the next on this list that was kinda aligned. It was loosing money (so not "too" expensive even if he arguably overpaid it); got a ton of (adult) customers; and communication already provided.

Engineering wise; twitter was known in SV as a place to "vest and rest". So he immediately put a stop to it and made the team leaner. As the saying go: "If you want to go fast; go alone. If you want to go far; go together". It looks like Musk wants to go fast right now. He seems to believe that there is hundreds (if not thousands) of billions of valuation waiting for the first company that would become the western world WeChat.

If he is right; then the 44 billions he paid for Twitter were just a way to kickstart the project; just like he did by turning Tesla from a so-so company to a global leader (depending on the metric you look like). Using his fame definitely would have drawn interest to X.com; but that alone isn't enough. Google itself failed multiple time to launch social networks despite their fame (Google +; Google Wave; ...). But if tomorrow he launches a "Send money to" feature in twitter, he will already have far more user in 24h) than everything he could have hoped for had he done it otherwise. And that might be worth those 44B.

Or he just fails miserably to deliver on the vision; he also had his failures (the boring company being an obvious one).

Absolutely nothing he did, starting a year before he bought Twitter to now, makes me believe that anything you said here. He has completely ruined the reputation, lost good will among engineers across the world, proclaimed himself to be a terrible boss, shown that he has no idea what he is doing, all this without even going to the extreme fringe he seemed to have moved.

> Do not forget that his wealth initially came from changing the way people pay online, he's got a thing for that kind of market.

His wealth came from PayPal investors paying him to go away, not because he was actually good at it.

WeChat exists because that's easier for China to regulate. There's no particular demand for an everything payment app; there's already Facebook and Venmo.

But if that was your goal, why not simply role Twitter into the X app shell? Why destroy the brand?

If he wanted to make all these sweeping changes then why did he alienate his staff?

Can you imagine all the time and money that was put into staffing Twitter? There is value to an organization and its unwritten human network upon which it operates. Then it was just blown away over night to appease some beanie wearing mouth breathers on the platform

Firing all those people is undoubtedly risky; Twitter’s unpaid office rent is an example of a consequence of that.

But the assessment was that there were way too many people to solve the task of running Twitter. And Twitter is still running.

It sure wasn't running last week when it didn't load half the time I tried it.

(Some of that time it was trying to serve me intranet pages.)

There might be some outages, but still, Twitter as an entity is operating just fine, if Elon's claims are correct time spent on twitter is at record highs, and similarweb doesn't show any real decrease in visitors: https://www.similarweb.com/website/twitter.com/#traffic

Reddit, Twitter, Facebook all had outages in the beginning all the time, it's not a deal breaker for heavily network effect products.

So really, yes, getting rid of some staff has caused outages, but it's also sped up development of new features, and not really affected usage.

What new features? Rate-limiting? $8 blue check amplification? Advertiser haemorrhage?

Less shadow-banning based on personal views?

You would call "less shadowing banning" a _new Feature_?

Like if I make a wrench and one year I make 50% less of them I wouldn't say I developed a new feature. If I created a slightly different wrench I might call it a new feature but just doing more or less of something I already have isn't _new_.

So to circle back, what new features has twitter developed?

That's called working the refs. You just complain something's happening nonstop whether or not it actually is, and eventually the admins give you treats to shut you up. (Popular right-wing account "catturd2" constantly complains about this even though Elon put him on the special list that shows him in everyone's for you feed, along with dril and the menswear guy.)

In this case it is still happening because that's mostly bugs, and they definitely aren't fixing the bugs. Also, because some of the signal comes from how many people have blocked you, and personally repellent right-wingers get frequently blocked!

Edit button, separating for you and following, blue checks, 140+ character tweets, unlimited video, algorithm adjustments, live video streaming on the way.

At least be intellectually honest. Please. I know you hate Elon, but at least consider the actual facts. (This is more change than twitter did for 15 years before Elon)

> separating for you and following

Are you counting the fact that those are now different UI tabs as a new "feature"? Twitter always had the ability to switch between chronological feed of just accounts you followed, and an algo-curated feed of those tweets + other tweets you may have interest in, sorted by interest rank - that's exactly what "for you" is now.

> blue checks

Really not sure what you're claiming here. Verification was already a thing, as was Twitter Blue (editing & long form tweets for paid accounts) - the only "feature" elmo introduced is ambiguity about what that check represents - is it someone who has spent the last 15 years on twitter as a notable public presence with a verifiable identity? or some rando with $8 on a prepaid credit card? Who knows, now.

> unlimited video

to count this as a feature the video player has to actually work reliably. it does not, by any metric. endless buffer, glitching, skipping with no way to reload lost chunks. the 10s videos were an annoying limitation but they just worked.

> This is more change than twitter did for 15 years before Elon

Circles. Spaces. Communities. Community Notes. Co-tweets. Alt text tagging as a first-class citizen of image posting. User tipping options. NFT profile pics. These are all features released in the last 5 years of twitter before elmo took over.

If we're talking about intellectual honesty let's apply it evenly.

Edit button and video streaming are not new. Editing was a Twitter Blue feature.

Remember when he said they'd turn fleets (Snapchat) back on months ago and didn't?

Also, the spam filter just suspended my account for no reason again.

Nobody is asking for a "Wechat" in the west. It's not something I've ever seen anyone craving for.

And no need to spend 44,000,000,000$ on twitter if all you want is to destroy the brand and replace it with a letter brand that's ungoogleable. But hey... what do I know.

> Nobody is asking for a "Wechat" in the west. It's not something I've ever seen anyone craving for.

I mean, I agree this is Elon's dream. But so is SpaceX and Tesla which he did quite well on.

Also - you're quote reminds of the oft cited henry ford quote:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

True true and yet... People do want faster horses. The model T had 20hp. Try to get a Ford nowadays with less than 10x that ;)

Isn't it what people crave?

Google didn't start adding the ability to do flights in the search engine because nobody was using that. People love one stop shopping.

The only reason I'd ever use anything like that would be to send money to a person (not a business) in a non-SEPA country. And for that, I'd use PayPal. What's the business case for this X? How does it improve anything?

There's plenty of ways to do that today already including ubiquitous SWIFT transfers almost any bank supports. Plus several startups and tech companies who offer similar services. One doesn't need twitter for that (nor crypto currencies, which was yesterday's 'money transfer to foreign lands' big promise)

I don't shop on twitter. Why would I shop on twitter?

Honestly I can't follow the example at all. What does banking (one thing billionaire genius Musk wants to do on twitter) have to do with sending 140 character text posts? I don't see any kind of connection there at all.

Meanwhile Flight Search is a type of Search. The name kind of gives it away.

Well how much do you use Twitter in general?

It better to think of WeChat like an iPhone as opposed to Twitter. So rather than opening up the Amazon App you can navigate to JD's store on WeChat. Obviously if you don't use WeChat / Twitter then them gaining a app store-lite feature isn't useful to you but cross-selling is a successful practice.

I'm sure JCPenny / etc would love if you could buy on Twitter though. Replace ad fees with just a simple %-age cut of the sale.

It used to be single-letter TLDs couldn't be registered. Here is a look into the current status I did a bit ago: https://github.com/ryjones/single-letter-tlds

It's actually more accurate to say that it used to be that single-letter TLDs could be registered, however

> Only three of the 26 possible single-letter domains have ever been registered under the .com domain, all before 1992. The other 23 single-letter .com domain names were registered January 1, 1992 by Jon Postel, with the intention to avoid a single company commercially controlling a letter of the alphabet.

and

> On December 1, 1993, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) explicitly reserved the remaining single-letter and single-digit domain names. The few domains that were already assigned were grandfathered in and continued to exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom...

Thank you for the clarification!

https://xn--vm8a.com/ (https://xn--vm8a.com/) which is not the twitter X.com can be bought for 9,000,000 USD This will be interesting if someone will buy it.

EDIT:

HN automatically converts to puny code that's good. The letter X in that other domain looks like this: https://www.compart.com/de/unicode/U+A4EB

You can copy and paste it and add .com and see that it is the same as the puny code URL mentioned above.

Went to USD $91,000,000 now.

Yep, just posted this because of the price increase, will be funny to see if someone will be buying it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36846309

I just gotta say this... Musk's kid (X) is going to have a horrible bullied childhood through no fault of his own. Good job, Elon... Well played...

I have a feeling he's not going to study at your typical neighborhood school

When your parents are this powerful, the children are unlikely to be bullied.

This is an interesting case of ignoring Twitter's second biggest market - Twitter Japan can't be called X Japan because that's already the name of the most famous rock band in the country.

I get this is related to the whole Twitter -> X -> Twitter thing, but what is the discussion here?

This is Elon Musk's website. As far as I can tell ownership was transferred to PayPal and then Elon bought it back reasonably soon after that.

What's the point of this if it just redirects to twitter.com??

One can only wonder how much this domain is worth today.

One can only speculate as there are only two other single-letter .com's (q.com and z.com) and there won't be others [1] . Wiki article says "GMO Internet, Inc. purchased Z.com for nearly $6.8 million from Nissan, who previously used it for the Nissan Z series cars." [2] For comparison, asking price for b.org or r.org are $500k but .org's typically command less than .com's.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom... [2] https://www.thedomains.com/2014/11/21/z-com-sold-for-6-8-mil...

It has to be worth a lot less than that today. The number of young people who visit websites ever in any given week is dropping. Reddit's usage among young people shot up after mobile apps were developed for it, not before. Domains just don't matter as much anymore.

I suspect the real thing that'll hurt its price is people are realizing websites can end in stuff besides `.com`.

i.e. MrBeast (~XX M views) had a recent video sponsored by the `.store` registry.

As I mentioned in another comment [0], a domain which looks like X.com but is a Unicode X https://xn--vm8a.com/ can be bought for 9,000,000 USD and I'd think that the real X.com is worth much more, as it doesn't get converted to puny code [1].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36844079 [1]: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode

The design nostalgia is real. When websites still borrowed their design motif from bulletin board systems. <3

I recently finished reading "The PayPal Wars". The book recounts an interesting episode regarding PayPal's history where Elon Musk pursued his vision of rebranding PayPal as X.com. Despite his efforts, the initiative was not successful, ultimately leading to his resignation from the CEO position. It remains to be seen whether history has the tendency to repeat these kinds of events.

> ultimately leading to his resignation from the CEO position.

You sure about that? Pretty much everywhere else - it’s written and said - he was FIRED!

CEOs never get fired. They always decide to spend more time with their family and resign.

I think referring to a CEO's termination as 'resignation' is a somewhat diplomatic way of implying that they were actually dismissed from their position.

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