Show HN: Browser extension replacing the X with the original Twitter logo | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Browser extension replacing the X with the original Twitter logo

github.com

62 pointsmarvinblum62 comments

I’m starting to think Musks acquisition is a piece of performance art akin to the KLF burning a million quid.

It would honestly be better for Musk if it was. The man is clearly not stupid but he’s been drinking his own Kool-aid for far too long.

What supports your opinion that Musk is “clearly not stupid”?

Primarily that he's the second richest man in the world. Don't get me wrong, I don't think he's self-made, I don't think he did it all on his own, yadda yadda. But a stupid person would not be where he is in life.

I'm genuinely convinced Nathan Fielder's "friendship" with Musk is just one very big long-game TV show he's working on.

Seriously, why does everyone put "good faith" at the bottom of the list of possibilities?

Because his capricious dictums that seem to be born from a disdain of the user base and generally unstable demeanor?

Cognitive dissonance

KLF are situationists. Musk is an anti-situationist union-breaker. Both are playing at something that's not just nihilism

I feel like I’m in the minority but I honestly couldn’t care less about the logo, the name or if Twitter will still exist for another 10 or 20 years. Nothing lasts in life. With or without Musk Twitter would have died of some reason or another eventually. It’s only a stupid app, it’s not important. If someone feels it’s very important to them then they have a problem in life which is not Musk. I didn’t even sign up to Mastodon, Bluesky or Threads. Twitter is interesting at times but I won’t cry if it’s gone.

"We shouldn't care" does not necessarily follow from "nothing lasts". The loss of various impermanent things have caused me (and most people) a great deal of sadness.

A jackass with far more money and power than respect for it or anything else is tearing down a place where I have had a great number of memorable, fun, or significant interactions. There are important people in my life who very likely would not be if not for Twitter, including my spouse. Through Twitter I have helped connect people in ways that made significant changes to their lives. So yes, I'm sad, I'm frustrated, I'm annoyed, I'm angry, and I don't think it's irrational to feel those ways. I'm also annoyed at people acting superior because they're lucky enough to not be affected.

As a normal person I couldn't agree more, but look at it from a business or indiehacker point of view. If you use Twitter to share your work and connect with potential customers, it's a bit of a loss. It would be similar to creators or streamers if someone were to buy YouTube or Twitch and potentially ruin it.

I still call the Willis Tower the Sears Tower. And Sears is definitely dead.

> or if Twitter will still exist for another 10 or 20 years

Years? You are being generous here. I would rephrase that to 10 to 20 months at the rate he's destroying everything.

If I was Zuckerberg, I'd rename Threads into Twitter tomorrow. Get the Twitter brand deregistered because of inactivity now that Musk officially abandoned it, then immediately register it for himself. Sue Musk for the domain right after acquiring the name.

Surely going to cost a fortune in lawyers, but who cares?

That very much would not work. Twitter is still called Twitter all over it's site, the trademark has clearly not been abandoned. All that does is destroy Threads

Then wait until Musk's minions have removed every occurrence. They will act quickly, because Musk fires them if he finds Twitter anywhere on X's site in a week or so.

The thing is: Zuckerberg just has to act faster than the collective global audience can forget about the verb "tweeting". That will be easy, because such terms are very sticky once they enter the common vocabulary.

Musk won't give up the Twitter trademark however. They just won't use it.

Just not using a trademark is not possible. You must use and actively defend it in order to keep it. An unused trademark can be reported for deletion by competitors.

Otherwise anyone with money could just trademark billions of auto-generated names and wait for someone to start a business, then selling them a name.

> Otherwise anyone with money could just trademark billions of auto-generated names and wait for someone to start a business, then selling them a name.

Welcome to the dotcom bubble. You're describing literally what's going on with the domain parking industry.

A domain is not a trademark. If you own a trademark, you can sue the holder of the corresponding domain to get it. The domain grabbing business works not by trademark grabbing, but by offering the domain a little cheaper (and quicker) than the price of the lawsuit necessary to get it after trademark registration. And of course by grabbing non-trademarkable generic domains, especially in the dot com era.

I mean essentially not using it. Just keep some placeholder going.

Realistically it's not complicated or difficult.

Nice, but I wonder why. It's like putting lipstick on a pig. It wants to be ugly. Let it be ugly.

I think it would be a fun crowdology experiment to see the user base counter the board itself.

But... why? You can't force some entity to call itself differently than it calls itself. Sure, you can refer to it as Twitter, we all will. But it's like pissing in the wind to constantly seek to patch and revert its branding.

Plus likely they'll revert it when the investors and creditors out Elon, because he's clearly not well and driving it into the ground.

What if we just don't acknowledge the new name and refer to everything by Twitter or Tweet?

that kind of things, and promoting the bird logo 2x more

making blog article about the new redesign being amazing while showing previous branding

spamming musk with archives of twitter pre-acquisition

Eh, Twitter is much worse now for sure, but depending on the folks you follow, there's still some solid up-to-date news/takes/insights there. In general, it's not great though.

What I'd really like to read is some analysis of whatever makes people care enough to make that...I saw the 𝕏 and literally thought "well, that's an interesting symbol, Elon probably did that, whatever" and went on with my day..

The domain is probably going to move to x.com soon. But at least this fixes the godawful favicon he chose that sticks out like a sore thumb on my bookmarks bar.

It's cached in your browser. The homepage shows https://abs.twimg.com/favicons/twitter.3.ico (the new one) but plenty of pages on the domain still display the old one.

This takes me back when Yahoo! started to add their logo to Flickr’s a year or so after the acquisition. I think someone made a Firefox extension I downloaded. It’s amazing how attached we all can get to certain logos.

The Google Authenticator logo change annoyed me. It is a practicality thing. The icon is how I identify it.

Encode the image and and you could do this with CSS as a userstyle.

Most of the work is done for you though, the "old" logo is still all over the site. Click "X Corp. > About the company" and you're greeted with a giant bird, and Twitter is what’s happening...". It's clear there wasn't a plan to roll out the rebrand.

The Brand Toolkit page isn't just still up - it's untouched: https://about.twitter.com/en/who-we-are/brand-toolkit

Can add the JS to an Arc Boost as well, I think.

What's the point of this? Twitter (in the sense of being the service that everyone is used to) is dead or nearly so anyway.

I see it as counter performance art. It's silly, fun, and useless, because installing random extensions for petty motives is increasing your attack surface unnecesarily. It's almost as if it wasn't made to be used, but as a statement.

Hey! I put a lot of work into this );

I'm sorry! I won't install it, but I promise to do my best to imagine myself using it while Elon impotently shakes his fist.

I think post-Elon Twitter has been surprisingly good. It's a lot less spammy and there seems to be much less e-drama rubbernecking than before. Feels like most of the people I talk to are regular humans who occasionally go outside and touch grass.

These are not things I would say about pre-Elon twitter.

Is there one to replace its CEO?

You need to migrate from X to Wayland. https://wayland.social/@compositor/110768798303454842

Boom boom!

I don't have time to fix all of his mistakes.

He already stepped down. The new CEO has been working for a few weeks now. Apparently she's well liked internally.

Musk isn't the CEO. I doubt this is the CEO's decision.

Wow...a logo as a close icon.Musk is really smart...sometimes

It's a "double struck" X, as in "I want to close this so hard I clicked it twice"

Can't you replace it with a b**?

Why? Why do you care so much?

“so much” is a relative term, surely. This would be about ten minutes work for someone familiar with web extensions.

It took 11 minutes because it's my first ever plugin.

It may come as a surprise but some people have literally nothing better to do than to hate musk to an obsessive level.

The people who just blindly hate Musk for the sake of hating Musk left Twitter months ago. I don't think there are very many of them, percentage-wise.

Pretty sure that's not true. You have to understand the people on Twitter all the time aren't really normal functioning people...

> Pretty sure that's not true. You have to understand the people on Twitter all the time aren't really normal functioning people...

You can tell that by the behavior of the one of them who bought it. ;)

When I said percentage-wise, I really meant percentage of Musk critics, not the percentage of twitter users. I have no idea what the demographic of twitter users actually looks like.

But I do often see people claiming that others who are upset by various things Musk has done as being motivated by "hating Musk" when it's pretty clear they're motivated by being angry at something Musk has done rather than some blind hate.

Is the X that offensive? Really seems more like an obsession with Elon to create this

This is Hacker News, we're supposed to judge stuff on its cleverness or its value more than its motive or whether it solves some pressing need.

Well it is a horribly stupid logo. But I guess that's the point...

This is a strange way for a person to cope with a change in brand positioning. It's like cloud-to-butt if cloud-to-butt were unfunny.

edit: also, shouldn't it just be a tampermonkey script?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com