Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by cbovis | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

cbovis

What a bizarre brand launch...

* Primary logo in top left of web changed to X

* Favicon still old Twitter logo

* Search bar says "Search Twitter"

* Meta title still says Twitter

* Tweet terminology still in use

* Dialog for upgrading to Twitter Blue now has a blue X logo but copy refers to Twitter Blue

* Communities still called Twitter Communities

What's the plan here and why so inconsistent?

View on HN

There is no plan. You're seeing management by whim.

It's a calming thought, that once you have too much power, there is no one left to question you and stuff like that is the result. Fortunately there are no actual lifes of people involved here, opposing to some similar political situation of the past.

This feels like a lot of decisions of Musk w.r.t. Twitter have been, impulsive and hastily implemented.

I get the impression this 'rebrand' was announced with short notice and they probably have a skeleton marking/design staff after firing everyone else.

The x.com domain just redirects to twitter.com, not the other way around.

The codebase in few minutes:

  def print_localized_string(str):

    str = str.replace('Twitter', 'X')

    print(str)

Bizarre yet totally on-brand for Musk. I’ll bet the people responsible for the rebranding work had next to no notice this was happening. It must be an absolutely miserable existence to need to follow your boss on Twitter to get a jump on his unhinged ideas.

If I worked there I can only imagine stopping caring and just enjoying the ride and having fun.

I can't imagine continuing to care about the designs, consistency, feature quality, etc. since it would be a futile and impossible fight.

* There are millions upon millions of Twitter-branded social media icons on the web. Almost every notable website has one.

That kind of brand exposure is literally priceless. Throwing is away is absolutely bonkers... it's just next-level idiocy.

We might be witnessing one of the greatest branding mistakes of all time.

Remember when Facebook was a product of Facebook and not a product of Meta? I don’t know what road this is going in, but maybe the plan is for the product to be called Twitter, and keep the company distinct from it.

The footer is this way for month already. And secondary resources like developer.twitter.com will likely stay inconsistent for a long time (probably forever).

I'm still kinda surprised they actually changed the well known bird logo. I would be even more surprised if they actually try to fully replace the name Twitter.

I agree, its messy. But in a week, it'll all be X, and we won't care. However, I do strongly feel this is a big mistake and will act as a jarring moment for a lot of people who will not want a 'new' thing. This may be the move that spikes the platform as the relevance of X becomes less and less because now it's history is disjoint from twitter and it's relevance to current events over the last 20 years.

And the domain is still Twitter.com.

He owns X.com, which was supposed to be his “everything app”. Has that plan been scrapped or is this a phased launch?

From what’s been rumoured about the Twitter code base those changes will need to be made across a dozen repos.

* go to web address the only text on the screen is "log in to twitter"

The team have no idea as the folks who knew how to affect the change was fired.

Chaos monkey working on every weekend

Reply on news.ycombinator.com