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Comment by bamazizi | Hacker News Reader

I can't stand the X name! Twitter was more than a name/product. What's the catch phrase for "tweet this" or "someone tweeted me that" in X? "X this" or "someone X'd me that"? so awkward!

*edit: came to comment on employee handling fiasco but got distracted with the name

*Second edit: Wrote "twit" instead of "tweet". Out of sight, out of mind I guess!

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Just keep saying Twitter. The name change will inevitably be reverted when it's sold in a few years.

It will go down in history as "X, formerly known as Twitter."

See also:

The artist formerly known as Prince and Pluto, the heavenly body formerly known as a planet.

> The artist formerly known as Prince

Who of course, went back to using the name Prince once his contract dispute was over, which meant he could be the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince.

I’d say it’s likely that it’ll go down in history as Twitter; traditionally really bad rebrands are reversed, and swiftly forgotten. For instance, did you know that the UK Royal Mail was called Consignia for about a year in the noughties?

I was aware that x.com was Elon's 1999 banking startup that merged into Paypal.

I thought he somehow still owned it and held onto it, but didn't know about this further tidbit of history:

> In July 2017, PayPal sold the domain X.com back to Musk.[17] In July 2023, X.com was repurposed to redirect to Twitter, following Musk's establishment of X Corp. to manage Twitter assets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com_(bank)

Additionally, the thought is that a profitable Twitter needs to be not-just-Twitter.

Hence the branding break to allow for TBD functionality to be added on, a la Chinese do-everything apps.

I still call Facebook Facebook.

But not "The Facebook"

So does Facebook.

So does Meta.

So does The Meta.

You think the name is so important, yet after a decade you wrote twit and twitted... When it's actually tweet and tweeted. Shows you how subjective it all is that after a decade at the top of mind people can still get it wrong.

If lots of people regularly make fun of your branding, then you have won the branding game. Your brand awareness cannot be higher, and you have joined the hallowed company of Micro$oft, Mickey D’s, Tarzhay, Whole Paycheck, and WhyCombinator.

I think there are still way more people forgetfully or even unknowingly calling it Twitter than there are people making fun of the name 'X'.

I still type 'twitter.com' in my browser multiple times a day. If I mention a tweet to someone, I'll say I saw it on Twitter. I have to make an effort to call it X and I don't feel like putting in the effort.

That’s what I meant. Twits, twats, and all of that stuff is part of the language now. X is so stupid you can’t make fun of it, really. Comparing Elon’s X obsession to thirteen year old boys is not funny because it’s self-evident. None of our X jokes will stick because they’re less surprising than reality.

ohh you're right, my bad!! That goes to show how easy it is to ruin things like this.

I love that some news outlets are still writing “X (ex-Twitter)” to this day.

I don't like it either. It also seems arrogant to me – something about squatting on an entire letter and trying to rebrand it for your company.

I like to resort to the portmanteau xeet for those occasions, I see it as my own little futile act of rebellion against the branding upgrade.

Funny how it sounds like -shit- mentally, hahaha

I was trying to find an SVG icon for 𝕏 today. Good luck finding a search box that will accept a one-character search term.

Can’t you just embed the Unicode character in a <text> element of an SVG?

I'm pretty sure you can. I was trying to find a set of icons that were all in exactly the same style and the paths were all the same size etc to save me having to hack the SVG manually! :)

everyone I know still say twitter, tweets and tweeting.

The name X is more appropriate, because pretty soon the company will soon be dead enough to have cartoon Xes for eyes.

X will be AXed indeed

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