X adds “Formerly Twitter” to App Store listing as app plunges in the charts | Hacker News Reader

X adds “Formerly Twitter” to App Store listing as app plunges in the charts

mashable.com

25 pointsilamont15 comments

This is a great example of a big head directly leading to strategically poor decision making.

I theorize that Musk could not envision a world where Twitter users are unaware of the branding change to X... but most people don't follow these Silicon Valley soap operas. Of course they are going to miss Twitter when it changes to a black X. I would be very suspicious myself, especially with the dozens of scam apps surrounding it in search results.

I wonder how many of those "Twitter app search namesquatters" got a bump in traffic.

I wonder if his obsession with the blue checks and confidence that they had too many followers to want to abandon the site made him overlook the fact that those followers are constantly churning. And what kept that engine going other than recognition of the established Twitter brand?

Who's getting on the app store looking for X, past the initial rush of people looking to virtue signal allegiance to his performative political incorrectness?

Most importantly, there's an established lingo that Twitter invented. All the competitors are doing everything they can to come up with something as catchy as a "tweet." It's funny how clumsy Truth Social's version of "tweeting" sounds. Truthing. Mmkay...

Now the best they can do at "X, formerly known as Twitter" is "Xcreet," which rhymes with tweet, may be technically more accurate, but is far less sellable to the advertisers.

X has always meant has-been, as in: X-president Trump. Or at best, it's a temporary placeholder waiting for something better. That would probably be Bluesky.

This was not well thought out. His previous company told him as much already. He got squeezed out at least in part because of it.

Bighead would never have made such a mistake.

Let's hope Musk will succeed in killing Twitter. I mean, "X".

It's effect on the social and political climate in the West has been disastrous.

If he starts charging a small monthly fee like he's talking about doing, you may effectively get your wish.

I saw someone had a 10 year account anniversary announcement on their feed, and it said something about them having been an X user for 10 years. Of course, they've only been an X user for a bit less than one year. They were a Twitter user for 9 of those years. It's not that easy to rewrite history, even if you're Elon Musk.

To me, this has been the least graceful, and least sensible rebranding in the history of tech.

It doesn't help that X usually means "has been." A lot of people on Mastodon (and probably elsewhere) are quite proud of saying they are X users, meaning they no longer use that site because of what it has turned into.

I think this situation calls for a compromise in the form of a portmanteau, one which both preserves the link from the old to the new site as well as describing the direction of the change: Xitter ( using the pronunciation of letter X to mean 'sh,' as some languages do)

I prefer Xcreet, which starts with X and rhymes with tweet.

I don't mind Xitter, since that's where a lot of people post from. But in English, X pretty much never sounds like sh, so it's a bit of a leap. I guess some Spanish words that start with X sound like sh. In Chinese, X is used for a sound that is almost an Sh sound. It's really not very common, I think.

You have to wonder slightly if the app plunging in the charts because people don’t want it anymore or is it because the charts see it as a totally different app?

If they changed the appid, I could see it messing with the statistics on the backend.

I’d be very surprised if they changed the appid; existing users would stop getting updates.

And to be clear, they didn’t. I took the cue of the twitter logo changing to an X to finally delete the thing; updates worked.

Even before this you could still search for "Twitter" on android play store and it would be the first result.

Elon might be the worst product manager of all-time.

One unforced error after another

For a smart guy Musk sure can be dumb.

I came here to post something along the same lines.

Specifically branding, right? So much of Musk's success comes from branding himself as genius entrepreneur. I didn't expect him to screw up branding so badly.

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