Changing its name tanked X's downloads in App Store and Play Store
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
It continues to amaze me how poor branding decisions get made when you could have easily predicted this.
I'm reminded of how poorly named the Go programming language is. So many people refer to it as "golang" since "go" is too common of a word.
If I name something I want people to search for, I'll definitely go with something more unique.
iTunes I can search for. Music I can’t.
Search for "x videos funny cats" and ask how on earth that is going to be sustainable for their brand.
Then there's Apple TV (the app--just shown as TV in many places), Apple TV (the set top device), AppleTV+ (the subscription service)...with the Apple icon swapped out in some places adding to the confusion.
Also there is almost always a heavey focus on visual elements vs content and other strategy as for most people that's the fun stuff.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/seven-band-names-that-wo...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rDcKIAXGRA Paul Cezanne (the father of cubism) for a pixelated blast of 80's pop
"Tonight, at The Pit: 'Everyone Gets Laid'."
A friend was booked to DJ there and apparently it was not sold out, it was barely attended at all, to my complete lack of surprise :D
The first search results for [go], [rust], and [ruby] all return links about the programming languages. And most people can figure it out from the context.
Also, this problem is much more prevalent when you are searching for more than just the language name.
"X" might be an OK name 16 years from now, the problem is that it already has a pretty good name called "Twitter".
I'm very confused by this description?
What exactly is "trans ideology"? And how do you "buy into it"?
I consider myself a centrist on most things. And I don't really understand that statement.
Either you think that people who want to dress, act, and be treated differently than their birth sex should be allowed to do so. Or you think that people should be forced to act and be treated as based on societal gender expectations.
I don't see what "ideology" there is here?
It goes much further than 'societal gender expectations' and accepting or denying that people should be able to dress and act how they want.
> At the extreme, there is the belief that 'identifying' as a women makes you a women, and that you don't even need surgery or hormones to qualify.
This is about how you talk to people mostly. Nobody on the left believes that a man who wants to be a women is automatically biologically a women — that would be absurd, which is why the right likes to show it that way. What they believe in is that when a man decides to take the hard, life-changing decision to become a women the bare minimum decent thing is to respect that and call them "she" or "her".
I said two things:
1. If a man does hormone therapy they are biologically transitioning towards a woman, this is e.g. why they can give breast milk. In biology a sex isn't always as clear cut as many believe and there exists ample scientific research on the topic, so this isn't the topic of our discussion.
2. With the biology out of the way, what remains is the question of the gender — the social, societal and mental role of what it means to "be" a woman. And obviously like with any role people can have different ideas of what it includes and what it excludes. What the left does is simply to say: "Fuck those social constructs, they don't help us, if someone wants to be a woman they are a woman", while the more conservative type might have very specific (bit in the face of history: arbitrary) ideas on what a "true" woman looks like, behaves like, is like.
The conservative definition of the gender roles we have a net-negative effect in our society. And that goes for men as well. So many "real" men, that immitate what they think "makes a man" — because of fear that they are not they fail their loved ones and they fail themselves. They confuse acting strong with being strong, while the strong (=harder to do) thing would be to confront your own weaknesses.
So if trans-ideology simply means not taking those roles seriously I am on board. If it means something else I am all ears.
I do find it strange to call it an "ideology", but I guess if you want to say that.
It still seems to me it's just debating the idea that people who want to dress, act, and be treated differently than their birth sex should be allowed to do so or not.
I guess you can say that's an ideology, because it's an ideal societal reality that is being advocated for, to allow for this behavior and socially accept it.
But I don't see what you find goes beyond this?
Problem: Someone would prefer to be treated like society treats woman, including being referred too as one.
Debate: Should we allow this or not
Pro-trans stance: We should allow it.
Anti-trans stance: We should not allow it.
Do you mean that you do not believe that anyone has a brain chemistry that makes them feel like either they have the wrong gendered body or like they're not totally quite woman or man?
Or do you just mean that you don't trust everyone who pretends as such, and think there are some that are just opportunist about it?
Second, a grammatical gotcha is far from a proof. Our language is not a perfect representation of reality.
That's the point. Your conceptualization of gender doesn't actually make sense to the true reality of gender expression.
You have this idea that gender "should" be some way. You were told this, and raised to believe that. But if you're observant of the real world, you see that there exists many people for whom this doesn't make sense.
You can see there are people that have the traits of one and the sex of another. You can see that there exist many more relevant characteristics than just genitals. The structure, size and connections of the brain, the hormonal balance, the organs, the bone structure, the chromosomes, etc. All these things exists in so many more combinations than two distinct clearly delineated sets.
And so, like we did in the past with believing the earth was the center of the universe, or not knowing what caused diseases before we learned about germs, or why thunder would strike. We're forced to re-evaluate our understanding of reality, and update our mental models with one that can fit all we observe and better predict reality.
In the past, ideology has actually worked to repress and hide this reality. Forcing people that don't comform to pretend otherwise.
And yet here we are, thousands of years into human history, and still there exists many people that don't fit the model. They existed throughout history, there's accounts of it in writing from many prior civilizations.
Which takes me back to what I said previously. You can continue to want to repress them. Or you can just accept a model where there is a spectrum of gender, with most people fitting nicely one side or the other, but also many that are somewhere in between.
And that means, if they want to act or be treated one way or another, you can be okay with that. Or you can think that we should force them otherwise.
Says who? You can be left wing without accepting trans ideology, and you can be right wing without becoming a nutjob. And nobody is forcing you to align with either the left or the right anyway.
What party? It's very strange that the democratic party exists in two states within America - the boogeyman democratic party on Fox News, and the actual democratic party that votes in congress. What trans "agenda" is the democratic party actually pushing?
This boogeyman democratic party seems to only exist so that conservatives can hide behind the label of "centrist". In this alternative universe, AOC is the president instead of a Representative (she's not even a Senator!).
That being said, people "become" trans just like one "becomes" left handed: You discover it one day and go: "Oh shit, I am trans/left handed". There is nothing you can do about it. Sure you can hide it from society to avoid scaring them, but that is very unhealthy for you.
There was a long time when kids had to hide their left handedness because it was seen as "abnormal" by the right handed majority. And then when it became medically irrefutable that it is natural and that forcing right handedness on left handed people can have serious medical and paychological sideffects left handedness became normalized. Suddenly there was a "rise" in left handed people (in fact however the left handed people existed all the time, they were just hiding it). The number of left handed people then stagneted around it's natural occurance rate of roughly 12%.
The whole trans discourse is a discussion about a very similar phenomenom. People are gay, trans, asexual, left handed and there is nothing they can do about it, as they have been born with that trait. Now the flipside of that is that you can't get gay/trans/asexual/left handed by being "exposed" to it. Either you are already trans and hide it from yourself so well that it probably alreasy takes a psychological toll or (much more likely) you are not.
That being said, what is the "trans ideology of the left"? I can't speak for the US, but a few thoughts:
1. to speak of "the left" is... interesting. Last time I checked they all had different views on the same topic. So whom do you mean, or are we speaking about the left as the right paints it?
2. At least the left people I know don't do anything more than say: "If you are born trans, that is okay, we accept you." I guess if you agree with the scientific consesus that being trans is not something you learn, but something you are, then this should be a acceptable view to you too.
3. Because most trans people are not treated well by the society around them, the left often demonstratively gives trans people special exclusive spaces or helps them in ways they pobably wouldn't help a straight white guy from an upper-middle class background. As any political solution this can either solve real problems or be pie in the sky, but hey they are trying to help.
Do we actually know that yet though? Handedness seems to be genetic, but for the rest we really don't know the causes.
> "If you are born trans, that is okay, we accept you." ... this should be a acceptable view to you too.
Why? It shouldn't matter if it's innate, a development 'disorder', a choice, or a result of trauma or social contagion. We can just accept people anyway.
Yeah we know that (for various definitions of "know", but the evidence suggests biological factors have the most impact). There could be more research on that topic (and there would have been if the Nazis didn't burn down the first research institute that researched that field). This is a good starting point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_gender_incongruenc...
> Why? It shouldn't matter if it's innate, a development 'disorder', a choice, or a result of trauma or social contagion. We can just accept people anyway.
Then we agree. And I am not sure "The" left wouldn't agree with the both of us as well. Most leftists I know are also pretty accepting of similar conditions (e.g. mental health acceptance, etc).
Reminds me of how many names does Postgres have (at least five: pg, psql, pgsql, postgres, postgresql). LMAO the SEO is such chaos.
I came to Postgres just before the GIS range filters were added and chipped in on the backend as a project (very old now) needed a DB with GIS capabilities.
Also the Postgres wiki explicitly mentions it as one of the official names (on mobile so too lazy to link).
But Go is easily confused without additional terms to disambiguate.
They don't. And forum, mail search doesn't work well.
Or how you can't even buy an express horse-and-buggy package delivery from Wells Fargo.
Moving out of markets (because you lost your competitive edge, because your star players have died/retired/became goat farmers, because the margins have gone to zero, because some other market is much more profitable) is completely different from actively and preventably screwing up a market you're in.
(And in HP's case, it's a branding decision that, frankly, is reasonable for them to go either way with.)
"The company had built a reputation for taking safety seriously, and its stagecoaches carried gold, silver, and other valuables from one location to the next. To safeguard such shipments, Wells Fargo shipped gold and other treasure in sturdy wooden boxes carried in the front boot of a stagecoach or secured inside the stagecoach in an iron safe."
https://www.wellsfargohistory.com/outwitting-outlaws/
So, basically banking. Securing, and moving money as a service.
You're focusing on implemention details which are irrelevant. Every company changed what machines or processes they use under the hood after the industrial revolution and computerization.
From their own history [1], they weren't a general package service, but mainly delivered/transferred money. They still do this as one of their core services. Even internationally at a much larger scope than they used to. [2]
This is not the same as not being able to buy an IBM PC or HP oscilloscope.
[1] https://www.wellsfargo.com/about/corporate/history/ [2] https://www.wellsfargo.com/international-remittances/
Wells Fargo still does that, just in a different way. Same with Western Union.
"The company had built a reputation for taking safety seriously, and its stagecoaches carried gold, silver, and other valuables from one location to the next. To safeguard such shipments, Wells Fargo shipped gold and other treasure in sturdy wooden boxes carried in the front boot of a stagecoach or secured inside the stagecoach in an iron safe."
https://www.wellsfargohistory.com/outwitting-outlaws/
They both kept their billion dollar names.
Ahem how about Chef config management with most its tools named after poor cooking analogies.
Cookbook, recipe, kitchen, knife, etc etc.
So that's why, even if your X app shows up in a search for the term "Twitter", if your app doesn't bear the officially-trademarked blue birdie icon, then everyone's going to squint and scoff at it, or not even notice it.
Awhile ago I was playing mobile games with a friend, and she has iPhone while I have Android. So part of the challenge was finding a cross-platform game. And many of them didn't have verified publishers or anything, so the best way to ensure that we both downloaded the same app was to show her the icon so that she could hunt for the same image in the App Store.
Icons are also becoming the default way of identifying apps on your system, too. While Android 11 still has text captions for icons on the Home screen, I find them superfluous. In fact, I've taken to creating folders and labeling them with several emoji, and no Latin text at all. I've also done this to my Bookmarks Bar: saves a lot of screen space!
And the X app is verified on both stores as "X Corp", which doesn't exactly build confidence.
If that's the case, Musk is doing brilliantly - plenty of scope for plausible deniability while succeeding at his goal.
I'm not aware of any Sanders followers thinking the actual votes were altered. The voters (in places that had primaries and not caucuses) really did vote for Hillary. The controversy was that the DNC wasn't properly neutral and that this affected the results. Whether the DNC being neutral would have actually resulted in Sanders winning, I don't think anyone can know, though it's probably doubtful. He certainly had a better message than "vote for me because I'm a woman and it's my turn!", and lacked all the baggage that Hillary came with, and had far more charisma (which the DNC infamously doesn't understand the value of), but considering the Republican voters were happy to vote for a guy who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy, I don't think we can assume the best about the voters of any party.
After she won the nomination. What you think was proven is not substantially different from what the My Pillow CEO thinks was proven.
> that this affected the results.
How? https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
> He certainly had a better message than "vote for me because I'm a woman and it's my turn!"
As did every single candidate. The only people I saw use that justification were the Sanders supporting conspiracy-theorists.
No, not just like at all. The allegations against the DNC by Sanders supporters are orders of magnitude smaller in scale. There's nothing unrealistic or delusional about "Members of the DNC colluded against outsider" or "Members of the DNC all acted independently against outsider for the sake of their own interests".
Also the difference in evidence and reaction is huge.
There is a world of difference between those not being unrealistic and "The DNC rigged the nomination so Sanders wouldn't win."
You could say both sides agree with this, but with opposite interpretations.
Your honour, I didn’t mean to hold up that liquor store. It was merely incompetence. I was just trying to act on my legal obligation to my shareholders.
Honestly this feels like one of those situations where you just gotta ask what good is “fuck you” money if you don’t use it to tell people “fuck you”
He was forced to buy something that he only momentarily wanted to buy. And out of spite he just drives it into the ground.
Nothing else connects these dots in any way that aligns with his other successes, unless there’s some whole other part of this constellation I haven’t seen yet.
There is always a search for “a plan” when things like this happen, but it’s just a bunch of butterfly wings and monkeys typing on keyboards.
I don't exactly believe Musk is a patsy, but I could see the purpose served if it decreases organization in the medium term...particularly 2024
It would be hard for a new system to scale properly and uptake to go
Threads may work, but I'd guess it has plenty of polishing to go
A. Luck. As we all know, there's a certain amount of luck involved in building a business. So "he got lucky, repeatedly, and then didn't" kinda works as an explanation.
B. as I understand it, he didn't found SpaceX or Tesla, but bought them and forced everyone to pretend he founded them.
C. Again, as I understand it, the management at the other businesses spend a lot of time managing Elon's ego, and this has been missing at X/Twitter.
I think this story will be discussed at length in future MBA classes. Interesting to see it happen in real time.
You can't rule out mental illness.
Obviously he really does want it to be an everything app. Musk is very transparent about his ambitions and feelings. He's not someone to bear holding a secret, he'd want to share it so he could get the validation from telling people about his plans and his followers will act like he's already succeeded.
Well, that's one way to resolve the cognitive dissonance arising from witnessing a "genius" consistently exhibiting non-genius behavior.
The reason why he keeps doing all these comically dumb things is exactly because people like you think he's cooking something. He has no one around him questioning the decisions he's making, so they keep getting worse, because that's literally what happens to every human in history who goes unchallenged for too long.
Just FYI (from wikipedia).
I'd like to see any evidence that any other contributions of his were actually positive.
I agree that Musk looks like an ass with Twitter but it's a heck of a coincidence that both Tesla and SpaceX were successful doing things nobody thought was possible.
Having spent some time in corporate america, it's a pretty low bar for execs in technical fields. Maybe he just had to be reasonably bright and focused on the mission instead of internal politics.
I could make the same argument for me. It's a heck of a coincidence the place where I work had no product or revenue or customers before they hired me and a few years later suddenly we have 5 products, huge contracts, and are one of the most hot brand names in our AI niche.
But is my contribution interchangeable with any rando or am I a 10x engineer? Was my contribution even net positive or did others on my team carry my dead weight to the finish line?
I'm a huge space nerd and Musk seems to understand future trends and how to get in early regardless of how it looks from the outside. So a bit of savvy investor mixed in with passionate about product in ways you don't expect from a money man.
Plus his opinions just coincide with a lot of my opinions when i hear his interviews. The X stuff seems like something I can't see yet coz i'm not a social media guy and avoid it in general. I've actually started using twitter more as a consequence of the rebrand coz I want to see if it's going anywhere.
As for the "dark patterns" i think it's just a recession/AI content theft hitting and it was gonna happen anyways, everyone was just holding their breath hoping they weren't the first in line.
It's his vanity project since he couldn't do it with PayPal since everyone disagreed and kicked him out.
He wants to show them ( Thiel) he was right all along. It's not a big chess move, it's childish ego all the way.
I understand why he likes Trump, even while Elon is way smarter ( not wiser though )
Threads is obviously going to rank high, because the vast majority of Instagram users haven't used it yet - they're going to download it now, and so it's at No. 2. Looking at how badly the platform seems to have tanked from launch, I'm not keeping my hopes up on it being a competitor to X in any meaningful way.
Kinda like metaverse stuff at Meta but instead of being a separate thing from the successful base product just rebrand the base product so people expect it to be more.
It sorta makes sense but could also be some kinda ego move idk anymore.
Iam14 and this is funny: blaze, like getting high.
I need to rewatch citizen kane sometime soon.
Lots of replies from real people having interesting conversations.
I’m no fan of Elmo running the company, but I’m glad that Twitter is more fun for me now than it has been in 7 years.
However, I don’t find Twitter any more compelling than before, still way too much noise for what little signal you get.
The best Twitter was around 2009, when the timeline was linear, retweets were effortful, and you didn’t have to use the God-forsaken official client.
As I've said earlier - the groupthink on HN is at astoundingly high levels nowadays. First everyone said subscriptions are the way to go. Seriously - this was unanimous. And absolutely everyone on HN would complain about their linear timeline being taken away.
Now that Elon has bought the company, he's introduced a (good) subscription based product (while simultaneously keeping free access), and he's reintroduced the linear timeline. And HN can't seem to stop whining.
Honestly considering leaving this site - I can't seem to find any genuine debates any more. Not that it has anything to do with HN - what do I know, this perception of HN of mine might just be me seeing the platform through heavy bias. But the perception is there.
Of course, if your bar for quality is "more shitposting, chaos and racism" then I can see how you might think Twitter has improved. I don't consider any of that interesting, though.
You describe people who reject your radical woke leftist beliefs (let's not beat around the bush here) as "intellectually and emotionally adolescent" and lacking "basic human decency". Pot calling the kettle black.