Twitter's pivot to x.com is a gift to phishers | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's pivot to x.com is a gift to phishers

krebsonsecurity.com

370 pointstodsacerdoti385 comments

So, Twitter did a clbuttic mistake in 2024 and went live without testing this, presumably?

For those unaware: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Clbuttic-Mistake-

That was a fun read. I fired up a Valheim server for my kids (and me, let's be honest) and it censored part of the word "Basement" in my server name. :)

Clbuttic is even the (Collins) dictionary-defined nomenclature for this effect: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/clbu...

reminds me of teh cloud-to-butt chrome extension https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus/...

Clbuttic -> Cl-ass-ic -> Cl-butt-ic

I mean I recently saw an Airbnb ad with something like pREMOVED instead of pagoda, so I guess it happens to everyone

I was wondering what kind of rude word an 'agoda' is. Turns out it's a competing website to airbnb. How incredibly petty.

Is this like the Scunthorpe Problem?

Everything about this rebranding has been baffling to me. First, the original brand was great and pretty much untarnished, and there was no split/merger of business happening that would encourage it. There doesn't seem to be a business purpose to rename it. Second, these hamfisted attempts to try to get the new (terrible) name to stick. It's just not going to work. The huge number of existing users will always think of it as Twitter. It will at best become The Service Formerly Known As Twitter. It just feels like in software when you get a new Product Manager on the project who just wants to superficially "leave his mark" on the product in some way and then move on. Except this PM paid billions to do it.

Apparently Elon has been trying to push the "X" brand on things throughout his career, but always had someone stop him until he had complete control of things.

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

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/07/25/elon-musk-...

Is there a company he owns where "X" is not a thing? There's X the social network, Tesla Model X, SpaceX.

Don't forget he also named one of his kids X (the Æ A-12 part is their middle name so it's just X for short).

There's also xAI, which I think is technically another distinct company rather than part of X/Twitter.

The guy's a kook. He's like Michael Jackson: a very rich guy, with complete control over who he meets. Unsurprisingly, the people he does meet all tell him what they think he wants to hear. I mean, who's going to tell him something he doesn't want to hear, and then see their name smeared all over Twitter by the richest man in the world?

I expected Twitter to crash and burn as soon as he took over; I was wrong. I guess it's like Truth Social - if you're fabulously wealthy, you can run a social media site that's a complete train-wreck, without it ruining you.

/me never had a Twitter account. Nor Faceache.

Because Tesla has been significantly underperforming the rest of the S&P 500, Elon is not the world's richest person anymore. He's in like 4th place or something.

Well Michael Jackson is also one of the most talented musicians and entertainers of the last 100yrs. His wealth is the least impressive or defining thing about him.

I do get the point you're trying to make though. Just thought that emphasis was a little off.

Just like with Elon, you have to consider that extreme outcomes are the result of extreme people or people that were forged in extreme circumstances (which is certainly true of Michael Jackson).

I feel both Musk and Jackson could have greatly benefited from a few more people telling them "you idiot, that's fucking mental". In general being in a position where this doesn't happen is not good for your sense of reality (very rich, very famous, a lot of political power, or something else).

In that sense Michael Jackson having sleepovers in his bed with 12-year olds[1] and Musk's x.com rename are very similar.

[1]: taking the most generous interpretation; no comment on whether he was a nonce or not.

Also Michael Jackson’s having an amateur anesthesiologist putting him under every night with a wide variety of easily lethal sedatives, and Musk’s use of ketamine and mushrooms and stimulants and whatever else he’s on this week.

> I feel both Musk and Jackson could have greatly benefited from a few more people telling them "you idiot, that's fucking mental".

I agree with you but imagine if Elon had listened when people said the same thing about starting an electric car company, a reusable rocket company or a brain-interface company.

Or if Michael Jackson had listened to all the people that told him the sounds on his album were too crazy and fused too many genres together.

Ultimately it's a fine line between genius and crazy. You have to acknowledge that often where genius resides, so does crazy.

I mean look at Steve Jobs, clearly incredible talent - but also harbored some unconventional beliefs about medicine which many say ultimately led to his premature death.

Even Achilles had his heel.

Most smart/innovative people don't pull off this kind of weird behaviour. Lots of not-so-smart people do the exact same shitty behaviour. It's just a bullshit excuse for bullshit behaviour.

And those weren't widely held views either so it's not even accurate.

I'm not excusing the shitty behavior or saying the behavior isn't shitty.

The world would be such a simple place if it really was as simple as "shitty behavior = shitty person". It'd certainly make my life easier if this were the case.

But the world is so much more complicated and difficult to comprehend than that. Often the most interesting stuff happens in the gray areas where you have to wrestle with multitudes. We all contain multitudes ourselves.

Not fair to Michael Jackson. He had talent and defined multiple cross cultural trends/memes (not memes as in internet memes).

He was deeply troubled, but he still had a huge, lasting impact

Are you suggesting that Musk is not having huge lasting impact? Perhaps his name won't be as sticky as Michael Jackson, but some of his companies are definitely changing society, partly thanks to him.

Musk likes to take credit for things he at most participated in. Electric cars where already gaining traction by the time Tesla got their production in order, so if he had an impact there, its only in marketing a product you could only buy from other companies. The charger network maybe? But wasn't most of that heavily subsidized?

SpaceX's success is massively overstated, every time it's brought up. Their rockets are still not stable and if you actually tally up all the money they've received from the state, it'd be way more expensive - even adjusted to inflation - then the space shuttle launches from the nineties.

What other impact are you thinking of? The hyper loop? The solar rooftop's? His vaporware robots? The boring company? Everything turned out to be pure hype with hilariously overstated success. Or maybe the autopilot which is still only usable by people that enjoy gambling with pedestrian lives?

Musk’s true talent is hype, fundraising, and getting buy-in from a crowd of people who Want To Believe. He does an incredible job of this, attracting capital investment on absurdly favorable terms.

(Delivery on his wild promises, well, sometimes the true believers he hires make that happen, sometimes not.)

> Musk’s true talent is hype, fundraising, and getting buy-in from a crowd of people who Want To Believe.

I wonder how long this lasts, though? The more we see of him, the less smart/magical he seems other than to devotees. I feel like his getting in the limelight has pulled the curtain back quite a bit.

Exactly. Musk makes a passable "hype man" that would do great on a sales pitch. But it's the same story as every sales team where he promises so much that isn't feasible to deliver on the timelines he promises.

>Electric cars where already gaining traction by the time Tesla got their production in order, so if he had an impact there, its only in marketing a product you could only buy from other companies

I'm as cynical about Tesla as anyone, as my comment history will show. I think they played fast and loose with financial data when celebrity and anything tech put you above the rules. If he had the enemies he has now, I don't think they would have made it.

But...Elon Musk is a force. I was skeptical of him in, maybe, 2016, but the guy has managed to continue to do stuff no one else seems capable of, even in the face of haters. There's no way pre-Elon Tesla does what he did, I don't believe it for a second.

Even Twitter; yes he fired too many people and it's a bit of a fiasco (and hard to kill, apparently). But the fact that he's using it to explicitly push an agenda is wild. There's no one else like him.

And yet you fail to name something.

What tomoyoirl said is correct. Musk's talent is mainly in raising hype which results in incredible funding. he's definitely the most successful person at that since Steve Jobs.

Everyone that ever worked in large enterprise knew that Twitter would be fine after the mass terminations. The only thing you lose at that point is the ability to maneuver, the platform will be mostly automated and barring incompetence or malice, things will just keep chugging along with a skeleton crew.

> Electric cars where already gaining traction by the time Tesla got their production in order, so if he had an impact there, its only in marketing a product you could only buy from other companies. The charger network maybe? But wasn't most of that heavily subsidized?

Given how shit even current EVs are compared to the early Model S, you are totally wrong. It was always at most a side project for ALL the existing OEMs as we now know. They have have had chance after chance after chance to prove the thesis that "if they cared, they could produce a Tesla killer overnight". None of the OEMs have produced anything that is competitive with Tesla in all metrics (price, range, features etc.) all of them compromise in one or more areas.

The only real serious competitors are the Chinese. There is a reason when teardown analysis reports are offered on all the EVs, the Chinese care about one company and one company only: Tesla. Everyone else is just a follower and the Chinese are not even bothering to waste their time looking at them. You even see it in their actions. Tesla is the only "legacy western" company without a JV partner in China. China can happily dump all the other losers any time they want. They can't afford to lose Tesla so they have accommodated them.

>SpaceX's success is massively overstated, every time it's brought up. Their rockets are still not stable and if you actually tally up all the money they've received from the state, it'd be way more expensive - even adjusted to inflation - then the space shuttle launches from the nineties.

Are you for real? In 2021 they launched ~380 Metric tons of mass to orbit while the rest of the world combined launched about 400 metric tons. In 2022? They were double what the rest of the world did and finally in 2023, they were 80% of all the mass to orbit launched. When I mean rest of world that includes: Rest of the US industry + Europe + India + China + Japan + Russia + everyone else. If you look at the other launch providers in the US they get far more subsidies and have delivered not even a fraction of what SpaceX has provided.

Can you think of many industries where a single company is doing 80% of worldwide effort? And they are on track to increase that by 50% this year (a metric they will likely achieve given their track record).

In the last couple years they have sent 42 humans to orbit and back. They year they are on track to do their first spacewalk.

Starlink now has 2.3 Million customers in over 70 countries.

I am seeing this outright dismissal of Musk more and more since the whole Twitter saga. Its reeks of ignorance just like all the people that repeatedly make fun of Apple users as idiots who just get duped by fancy marketing. Even in 2024 people here make that silly argument. Musk bashing is the new version of that. It just makes you look ignorant because you are so blinded by what you don't like that you have dismissed all these amazing achievements that no one else is doing.

SpaceX employees take the Musk fundraising and spend it well. They have systems in place to minimize his technical interference.

>SpaceX employees take the Musk fundraising and spend it well. They have systems in place to minimize his technical interference.

Sounds like nonsense used to wave away his success with SpaceX.

If you look at his interviews, it seems like he is most involved in SpaceX of all his ventures. He can explain deep technical details of the product whereas this is less true for Tesla and has been proven many times that he cannot do the same for Twitter.

I was blown away by the Every Day Astronaut Starbase tours.

Elon had all the intricacies and parts of the rockets memorized and was just rattling off details like it was nothing.

Kind of makes me think human intelligence is a direct function of memory.

I think you're interpreting something into my comments I didn't say.

My point is that every product was hilariously under delivered, not that the product itself is unusable.

Let's address the products you're citing:

The Tesla model s was marketed heavily on price and the full self driving. There were essentially no electric cars in the 100k price range the Tesla cost, so comparing the cars at the time the car was announced with when the car actually was delivered, 5 yrs later is extremely questionable. But without Musk's hype, we probably wouldn't have the rivian etc, as they were all riding his hype wave. But we'd still have electric cars. Just less then we've got right now.

Now SpaceX's. It got billions of taxpayers money, there can be no second company because nobody else can get such funding. In the nineties pretty much everything was delivered by NASA. It just threw in the towel for price reasons, so Musk came along and promised a lunar base & manned missions to mars, netting him all contacts.

So yes, now we have SpaceX. The only player that can deliver things to orbit, because Russia is too poor, European nations somehow don't want to spend money on it and China is mostly interested for military applications, so they're not publishing what they're actually delivering to orbit. They're definitely shipping things however, you occasionally get leaked videos from failed launches that spread toxic fumes close to population centers and similar fuckups.

What you're using as an argument is really an inevitability.

Starlink is another highly exaggerated product, which is still decent value if you need/want an Internet connection in an area that doesnt have usable cable connections. It's not the cheapest, nor the most expensive. It's in the middle. It's a solid choice (and so are the Tesla), it just didn't have quite as much impact as people attribute to it.

I'm not even bashing Musk. What I said from the start is that his contributions are exaggerated.

I'm not a Jackson fanatic, but everything Musk is doing could have (and very likely would have) been done by someone else in a relatively close timeframe. I won't claim Jackson couldn't have had a similar counterpart on an alternate timeline or there won't be more like him, but there are remarkably few artists and performers who are so prolific and talented to such a degree that they noticeably shift the direction of popular culture for decades. If Musk went away today, frankly I don't think many people would think of him within 5 years or so.

> everything Musk is doing could have (and very likely would have) been done by someone else in a relatively close timeframe

Why do you think that? As far as I can tell, both electric cars and reusable rockets technically could have been done decades earlier. But for all this time nobody was crazy enough to go all-in on it, until Musk did.

I’ll concede that I can’t prove anything in one direction or the other. Years ago I did admire Musk for these things though, and yet the more I learn the less confidence I have that he truly was instrumental in these developments in a way that meaningfully changed the course of history (sorry determinists).

His individual actions certainly bumped things forward. I suppose what I doubt is that no one else would have done that, or that steady gradual adoption wouldn’t have been as far off as we imagine.

I should add a disclaimer here that I don’t feel very strongly about this stuff, and I’m pretty comfortable with being wrong. I also don’t have any major hang ups about Musk; he has undeniably done some great work.

I didn't mention Jackson's talent (nor Musk's). I mentioned the singer in passing, in the context of a "rich kook", and I implied that he was a kook because he was rich. The Orange Man is another example.

It does seem to me that extreme wealth is a severe risk factor for untreatable kookiness. And arguably, being a talented entertainer is a risk factor for extreme wealth.

I don't deny Jackson's talent, and I assume Musk is very good at several things I've never tried. I would cheerfully forgo even modest wealth, if the deal was I didn't have to be like them.

It's more that extreme wealth allows kookery without consequences.

As Musk said it himself when asked what he thought about the fact that his tweets may cause billions of dollars of stock drops: "I don't care".

Instead of a lack of consequences, I’m concerned that the consequences of kookery for the rich is more money.

He took a roughly breakeven business and turned it into a money incenerator. If Musk actually had to answer to a board or investors things would shut down or change drastically. That'll still happen at some point but he has enough money to subsidise his crazy vanity project for a long time.

Of all the pointless rich people on the planet, you chose Michael Jackson to make that point? So weird.

> who's going to tell him something he doesn't want to hear

The emperor has no clothes.

He literally got removed from Paypal, "his first company" for trying to push the x.com thing there. That's why he owns the domain. It was stupid then and he held a grudge ever since which is why he's pushing it everywhere else since.

I haven't seen any strong evidence that that was the real reason he was ousted. It seems more to me like something that was too good not to go viral, rather than actual fact.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/07/25/elon-musk-...

who owns the washington post?

No he got removed for trying to switch their servers from linux to windows.

He also got removed for creating systemic, existential risk for the company by handing out $10k line limit credit cards to anyone who wanted one, resulting in a 50% chargeback rate. There are so many reasons for them to have gotten rid of him that the answer is highly underdetermined.

Interesting this got AliBaba into trouble with the CCP. As 2008 proved handing out credit can lead to disaster.

He owned x.com before he went to PayPal (they acquired his company which was called: x.com). When ousted, the domain continued to be owned by PayPal until later they ended up selling it and eventually he bought it back.

Correct! I had an @x.com email address when I worked at PayPal a long time ago.

Fun fact: I worked with one of the people who owned x.com prior to Elon (and sold it to him, reputedly for more $$ than he wanted to pay).

There was quite an extended period where all the developer docs for PayPal were on x.com/something ... I found it all quite confusing.

That’s not true. It was mostly over their servers. Elon Musk’s startup was running Windows while Peter Thiel and Max Levchin’s was running Linux. Musk wanted to migrate everything to Windows due to the more mature (at the time) APIs and Levchin was adamant on staying with Linux. He was also busy trying to fight fraud, which was becoming an existential threat to the company, and had no time for migrating to a different platform.

Ultimately, Levchin gathered several other key people in the company, and went to the investors threatening to quit (and destroy the company) unless they brought back Thiel as CEO. The board sided with Levchin, Theil returned and Musk was out of day-to-day operations.

If you’re interested in the PayPal story, I highly recommend Jimmy Soni’s book, The Founders. https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Paypal-Entrepreneurs-Shaped-...

“More mature (at the time) APIs”

I mean, while nothing about the web was particularly mature at the time, the idea that Windows was more mature than Linux for it is… peculiar, from the point of view of someone who was messing around with web programming at the time. Note how much difficulty Microsoft had migrating Hotmail to Windows.

Were you working in anything banking-related? AFIK, Microsoft was dominant in that sector.

Ex-Wives

The model X is part of a separate scheme, to have models S, 3, X, and Y. The 3 was initially meant to be an E until ford sued to prevent it.

Seems Musk always had a desire to use "X" from his pre-Paypal days. He made a boastful post about buying Twitter, didn't actually want to follow through but was forced to do it by the courts.

My take is that Musk then sorta went "f-it, I had to buy Twitter. I might as well try and make it into X."

His first payment company before he merged with PayPal was X.com

The purchase was never about business in the first place, so the running of it could be just as bad.

Exactly! Ownership is not in it for revenue. They'll say they don't care about revenue to everyone who asks. To be baffled, one has to ignore all of that.

There is strong nostalgia for aw-shucks persona of an inventor-turned-business-owner.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/16/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcri...

https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/dealbook-summit-2023-el...

Well, admitting otherwise would be admitting failure of managing that company and we can't have that!

Nearly a year into the rebrand x.com still redirects to twitter.com, rather than vice versa, which you'd think would be the first thing they'd want to fix.

That's one of those situations that feels like: "Executive just hasn't noticed / lost attention span, and engineer is leaving a workaround for a bad call in place."

I imagine that changing it would break a lot of things, otherwise they would've done it already. Copying a link to a tweet already makes it an x.com link too.

Because domain names are tied to security model, they're often the last thing you can fix.

So let's say, hypothetically, they build in a redirect from twitter to x-dot-com. Off the top of my head...

- All logins are now busted. Some percentage of users is lost forever because they can't remember their login credentials and instead of going through the recovery flow, they go use Bluesky.

- A huge amount of third-party integrations are busted because they aren't using client libraries that understand redirects

- A full code audit is necessary. Someone has hard-coded twitter.com into a critical system somewhere. Other people have referenced a variable, but it's the wrong variable. Still others are looking up the value in a database somewhere that doesn't have a search frontend anyone knows about. And some other database has a huge cache of absolute URLs it vends and everyone who built it got fired by Musk. This is probably the most predictable-cost step, but it's still a cost to be paid.

- A significant number of users are confused. The median of web user is profoundly ignorant of how the web works, and no matter how much you warn them and how much you prepare them, day-of-switch they will panic. Staff up your support team. Customers-lost-forever-two-point-oh.

- Every business integration needs to be updated. Google App Store, Apple App Store, Amazon Appstore... They all have bindings to twitter.com, and some part of their flow will panic and flag a security issue if they see it's turned into a redirect to elsewhere. That probably triggers a security audit of every version of the Twitter client (and those companies aren't particularly inspired to foot the bill on Musk's behalf, billionaire that he is...). Hell, Google indexes twitter.com via a dedicated side-pipe. Will that side-pipe handle a redirect?

(source: I've been in the side-seat for a merger-become-rebrand, and the number of things people expect to "just work" and don't is impressive).

> All logins are now busted. Some percentage of users is lost forever because they can't remember their login credentials and instead of going through the recovery flow, they go use Bluesky.

That includes everyone who had 2FA active before Musk made that a "premium" feature and subsequentially lost their 2FA device. What a clusterfuck, that one.

> Every business integration needs to be updated. Google App Store, Apple App Store, Amazon Appstore... They all have bindings to twitter.com, and some part of their flow will panic and flag a security issue if they see it's turned into a redirect to elsewhere.

And that's assuming the integrations even support changing the primary domain name in their OAuth backend, which a lot of them will not. Or you have appliances that got made years ago when Twitter integration was the fad of the day - I 'member there's a fridge out there that showed tweets on its screen -, game consoles or other devices that don't get firmware updates any more.

> Or you have appliances that got made years ago when Twitter integration was the fad of the day - I 'member there's a fridge out there that showed tweets on its screen

Most of those are probably already broken. Twitter dropped support for most third-party API clients a few years ago.

Presumptuously:

It's stupid and irrational because this wasn't a decision that was made based on reason - it was an emotional one. Elon is a bag-holder. He bought x.com in the dotcom boom and doesn't want to admit that the domain he paid a good chunk of money for is worthless - hence the (failed) attempt to make a brand out of it.

Any ideas how much he paid for the domain back then?

It was actually bought back from paypal in 2017, for an undisclosed sum. https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/10/15949862/elon-musk-x-com-...

And now he's sold it to twitter and pocketed the cash.

So far I really haven't seen anyone seriously call it just X. Most news orgs seem to resort to "X (formerly Twitter)" or similar. Some still call it Twitter, not even an acknowledgement that it's been renamed. At least Meta had the sense to just change their app splashscreens and such (e.g. Facebook by Meta). And it seems that Alphabet doesn't make any effort to make their presence known.

> Most news orgs seem to resort to "X (formerly Twitter)" or similar.

I mean, if nothing else, "X did [something stupid]" just looks like someone forgot to fill in a template; no-one is going to publish an article with 'X', unqualified, in it.

X also makes search harder. I'd like to see HN add a recommendation that in headlines about X the submitter should change the X to Twitter.

The thing that really bothers with me with this is why couldn't it just be "Twitter by X"? You want to make an "everything app", that's great Elon, let's call that X. Now what do we call all the mini apps inside the everything app? Oh, they're called "X", too? So you're using "X of X" to call a cab, and "X of X" to send a message, and these are different apps inside the mega app? How does this naming make sense?

That would be too sensible.

Sarcasm aside, they probably were hoping to convert the brand name twitter has to 'x', but failed to realize how sticky the name was/is.

Even X itself resorted to putting "Formerly Twitter" in its App Store and Play Store taglines after their daily installs fell off a cliff. Previously the tagline was just "Blaze your glory!" but nobody knows what that means.

Probably had backend developers write the marketing copy.

Shoot, even the Wikipedia page is still titled "Twitter"

> The Service Formerly Known As Twitter

Was thinking almost exactly this while reading a recent BBC article — their style guide appears to be that the company's name is "X, formerly Twitter,"

You have to write that (or similar) in UIs too since X just looks like a mistake/null value.

I once tried to click in the X logo to close a modal.

> Everything about this rebranding has been baffling to me. First, the original brand was great and pretty much untarnished, and there was no split/merger of business happening that would encourage it. There doesn't seem to be a business purpose to rename it.

Stated goal is to gradually transform it into an “everything app” — https://theconversation.com/elon-musk-aims-to-turn-twitter-i...

First, fire 80% of developers. Then, make the remaining developers create an "everything app" (in addition to the workload they already have with the Service Formerly Known As Twitter app). Something, something. Profit ???

Aside from being a long-standing obsession of Musk's, the thing about the 'everything app' is that it's the Hail Mary move which could make the Twitter thing anything but a dumpster fire immolating $20b+, Musk's reputation, and several years of his rapidly-shortening QALYs. If you force as many people as possible to subscribe, you can then flip them to the 'everything app' and bootstrap a big enough bloc of customers to matter that you control their demand. (cf. Stratechery).

It's not going to work, but it is the only story you can tell yourself and employees about how the Twitter saga ends in any way other than Musk losing interest and getting distracted by AI again and Twitter spiraling into the drain and possibly being dumped into bankruptcy by its debt load.

>it's the Hail Mary move which could make the Twitter thing anything but a dumpster fire immolating $20b+

While Twitter wasn't making money hand over fist, it was bringing in $4,500million in ad revenue prior to the rebrand and had years where it was marginally profitable.

Musk's saddling Twitter with interest on the debt he paid to buy the company is one of the reasons it's immolating money.

Yeah, that's the problem. Buying it was so bad an idea and so overpriced that he had to load the blue bird down with debt. He can't just quit Twitter and toodle off and say 'well, I stopped wokeism, and that justifies destroying my reputation and 3 years even as my other ventures like Tesla run into major strategic problems while I was distracted'. So right now, Twitter is "default dead", as pg might put it. There is a viable business there... but not one that can service the Musk debt load indefinitely while enduring all the usual shocks & risks. So he's either got to put in a lot more money, tell a story which will get someone else to put in a lot more money, or lose it.

Doesn’t a bankrupt Twitter lead to someone else buying it for a fire sale price that presumably could just change it back to … Twitter?

Yes.

I think the "everything app" already exists. It's called a web browser.

WeChat users will tell you something else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat

Ketamine is a hell of a drug. https://www.wsj.com/business/elon-musk-illegal-drugs-e826a9e...

> Everything about this rebranding has been baffling to me.

Everything about the purchase and the way the company has been run since Elon took the reigns has been baffling. The bizarre forced-push of the X brand is just the tip of the iceberg.

> Everything about the purchase and the way the company has been run since Elon took the reigns has been baffling. The bizarre forced-push of the X brand is just the tip of the iceberg.

I dunno, is it that baffling? It seems like he really loved using the product but didn't like the leadership, and he just wanted to own it so he could mess around and have fun following his own whims.

Once you get the idea that he doesn't actually care about financial success it all seems pretty reasonable. Like any hobby, for X/Twitter to be a "success" it just has to amuse him, and based on his usage of the platform it seems to be doing that.

The amounts of money he's losing are staggering to us but also meaningless to him. Our society has allowed him to accumulate so much wealth that nothing he could do "wrong" in a business sense would meaningfully impact his lifestyle.

If the money he is losing is meaningless to him, why has he launched lawsuits to back out of the purchase and sue media watchdog orgs? Why did he replace himself as CEO with an advertising exec? Seems like the money is pretty meaningful to him.

It's really just an extreme version of a boat. They seem like fun, but they're money pits, and a lot of work goes into keeping them running. Alternatively, it's the Cartmanland scenario.

I imagine you're right that the lost cash does have meaning to him, but it doesn't appear to be the primary motivator for his decisions (and is definitely not driving his near-term decision making).

Primary motivator being insecurity and rapidly deteriorating mental health

> Our society has allowed him to accumulate so much wealth that nothing he could do "wrong" in a business sense would meaningfully impact his lifestyle.

This is the frustrating part. If I went around my office tomorrow endorsing nazi propaganda, I would be out of a job by the end of the day and probably struggling to pay my mortgage in a few months.

But this fuckstick can do whatever he wants and never face any real repercussions. He could bankrupt Twitter, SpaceX, and Tesla and just decide to retire early on a private island.

It's so incredibly hard to actually fuck things up when you're rich that it's downright impressive when someone like SBF comes along and manages to actually do it.

So you're incredibly envy of person who actually can express freedom of speech?

If anything, the problem is with your workspace which forces a particular political viewpoint on you.

No, I think actions should have consequences.

I'm frustrated that being born into money can make you functionally immune to most of those consequences.

There are two sides to freedom of speech. You have the freedom to say dumb shit, and I have the freedom to not associate with you because I don't like the dumb shit you say. If one of my employees started expressing pro-Nazi sentiments at the office, I would fire them, because I have a right to do so and because I believe the rest of my employees have a right to a safe working environment where they don't have to put up with people who think they are inferior just because of their race or cultural background.

> expressing pro-Nazi sentiments at the office ...

nazi speech would incur this consequence because it is classified as hate speech.

However, termination of employee cannot apply to just _any_ speech that the boss doesnt like. Of course, the boss would have other ways to "manage out" that troublesome employee, but directly firing for the speech cannot be one of them.

Nazi is strong word that you're throwing around. But let's say you're pro-republican manager and you're firing pro-democratic workers (assuming you're US citizen). Or the other way around. Does it still work for you? Where's the line?

I draw the line at disrupting the workplace. If you're constantly badgering people about your political beliefs enough to make them uncomfortable, left or right, that's a problem. You can't (and shouldn't) fire someone solely based on their politics, but you absolutely can fire someone for creating a hostile work environment. In most cases, I would talk with the problematic employee with HR and try to get them to fly straight. I'm vehemently pro-choice, but I would still have just as much of a problem with an employee harassing a devout Christian about abortion laws.

What I have zero tolerance for is hate speech. These infractions don't get second chances.

> Once you get the idea that he doesn't actually care about financial success it all seems pretty reasonable.

Yes, once one throws reason out the window, just about anything becomes "reasonable"

>Everything about this rebranding has been baffling to me. First, the original brand was great and pretty much untarnished

I always thought the rebrand was a complete shame, if only for the reason that "tweet", meaning "to make a posting on the Twitter online message service : to post a tweet" is in the dictionary!

What a waste to throw that away.

> It just feels like in software when you get a new Product Manager on the project who just wants to superficially "leave his mark" on the product in some way and then move on. Except this PM paid billions to do it.

This is how it goes in all big companies :(

True but there is no way it would be implemented in such a half-assed way at any other big company (including pre-Musk Twitter).

Stuff like this makes it obvious that the people who are still there no longer give a fuck, they just do what they are told with the minimum effort required to collect the paycheck.

What can you do if he likes "X". It used to sound cool at some point decades ago.

The X Games, X-treme X-men, Xander Cage in XXX era

Everyone I know has partially adopted the new brand and started calling it Xitter.

Until just now, every time I saw someone in HN mention Xitter I assumed it was a third-party client like Nitter.

Which is especially fun to pronounce with the Pinyin 'x': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

He really likes X. He even named one of his kids that (well X Æ A-12, with the spaces). The A-12 is indeed a reference to the plane that came out of the oxcart project. Æ Musk pronounces "Ash" which is apparently an accepted name for the character, which was (among other things) used as a latinization of the futhorc rune[1] that means "ash tree"

1: HN won't let me paste the rune, not sure if it's limited to BMP on purpose but you can see it on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansuz_(rune)

They government let him name his kids that? I remember a story a long time ago about a couple that tried to name their kid "Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116" which is about as meaningful as "X AE A-12", but was blocked by naming laws

That was in Sweden, which has naming laws. The US does not have similar laws.

> That was in Sweden, which has naming laws. The US does not have similar laws.

The US doesn't have the same sort of naming laws that are common in European countries, but there are state-specific limits around what you can have in a legal name.

Specifically, in California, you cannot have diacritic marks in a name, which is part of why people were shocked that Musk was able to name his child X Æ A-12, when someone named Ramón Núñez will have their legal name as "Ramon Nunez" in California.

Two kids! (A girl, named Exa, in addition to X).

Exa sounds stupid, but at least it makes sense.

Ironically, Æ is the most useful part of this child's name. Ash short for Ashley or Ashleigh is common for girls and boys in Britain. Wikipedia suggests the name is mostly for girls in the USA.

I live in the US and "mostly for girls" is an understatement. I'm not denying that there might be a few boys named Ashley, but it's now considered about as feminine as "Susan" or "Emily"

The best new name I've seen is Xitter. Very fitting, IMO.

Maybe they need a new slogan to help folks with the transition. Something like: "Don't tweet, Xcrete!"

That's a beginner mistake, it's really hard to make if you dealt even a bit with some regular expressions.

Probably not even a regex, just a straight replace. Hopefully at the render layer and not the backend data.

s/\btwitter\.com\b/x.com/ig

You made the same mistake with the same amount of confidence.

1. your version replaces at-twitter.com with at-x.com

2. your version replaces twitter.com.au with x.com.au

twitter.com.au deserves what they get. LoL

I probably would have pushed back against the replace in the first place.

Beyond the incredibly botched implementation, the actual _idea_ is very funny; the 1984 approach to rebranding. Twitter, the Unwebsite. Like, how the hell could he think this would actually work.

I don't understand the social structure inside a software company where this kind of thing can go from some intern's 3am idea to production, without passing many layers of gatekeepers, any one of which should have swiftly flagged this down. It's not that the string replacement was implemented wrongly (that too)—it's that they're touching, in any manner at all, one of the most obviously-sensitive UX things in their product. Without a commensurate amount of security review.

Like, in my imagination, within five minutes of anyone seeing this, a person with responsibility would have stepped in and said "No, you can't do this. And if you insist on doing this, here's five layers of audits and sign-offs that this needs to go through first, because the thing you're proposing is potentially really dangerous". Am I thinking it about it wrongly?

I cannot understand at all.

> without passing many layers of gatekeepers

Given all the Twitter bugs and issues, it seems they have all been laid off.

> some intern's 3am idea

I think you mean "Elon Musks random demand".

Anyone who would tell Elon "this isn't a good idea" left or was fired.

>I don't understand the social structure

There is none. Stop trying to understand - it's a fool's errand.

>a person with responsibility would have stepped in

There are none left. They were either laid off, or they left before that could happen.

>"No, you can't do this"

... is the last thing anyone says to Elon Musk before getting fired.

Well it starts with the bad idea probably coming from the top, Musk saying I'm tired of seeing twitter.com links change them all to look like x.com links, that plus his gutting of the company when he took over means there's less people around to be the person to say no you can't do this this way go back and start over (or not at all).

It's probably worse with Musk. His executive style seems to be, from his biography, ignore a thing for a while until he gets in a maniac phase and then over the shoulder manage a thing until it's done, regardless of time or context.

I can just take the scene of Musk being on a roof yelling at the crew to change how they install solar tiles late in the night and translate it to him berating a programmer in the office to make it look like x.com and not caring about the details.

> Like, in my imagination, within five minutes of anyone seeing this, a person with responsibility would have stepped in and said "No, you can't do this. And if you insist on doing this, here's five layers of audits and sign-offs that this needs to go through first, because the thing you're proposing is potentially really dangerous". Am I thinking it about it wrongly?

Which part of "anyone who is not a Musk yes-man has already been fired or quit" are you having trouble with?

It's worth remembering, there are two kinds of yes-men:

1) the sycophant who loves authoritarian institutions; the "true believers"

and

2) the young, brilliant visa holder who was the talk of his parents' social circle in Hyderabad three years ago when he graduated and was able to get on board at a household-name NorCal tech company, but who is now being abused by the employer who sponsors the thing that lets him stay in the US.

You'll always have type one; some humans simply love following a dolt. The second type is a result of our laws, and laws can be changed to keep people like Elon from taking advantage of workers.

The visa holder thing might have been true for maybe 3 months before and after the takeover. The job market was absolutely on fire at the time (early 2022). Anyone who wanted to leave should have been able to, especially considering they were good enough to be hired at Twitter.

> The visa holder thing might have been true for maybe 3 months before and after the takeover. The job market was absolutely on fire at the time (early 2022).

The Twitter takeover (and subsequent layoffs, ultimatum, etc) happened in late 2022.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...

But it was announced in April. And it wasn't hard to predict what would happen post-acquisition.

I would argue laying off an insane chuck of the company was not predicable. Some? Yes happens all the time. What Elon did? No. But visa holders would probably be the first to go. But if you did manage to survive, no way you’re quitting in that job market and getting a new gig in a saturated market.

Visa holders wouldn't be the first to go. Not by a long shot.

1) They come from places that have much lower pay for software engineers. Seriously, people forget just how much more American tech companies pay their devs than just about anywhere else. That means that you can wave a smaller pay package in front of them and they'll be more likely to take it. Replacements from local labor markets are more likely to know what they're actually worth.

2) If they aren't making you 100% happy and they're at-will employees, you can hang their entire lives over their heads. Do you want to have to pack up everything in a few weeks and move back to your home country in shame after your families sacrificed so much to get you here? No? Sounds like you'd better sleep in that conference-room-turned-bedroom, then, and be ready to work 90 hour weeks until this company's in the black.

You're thinking of people who work at consulting body shops. Literally none of these things applied to visa holders at Twitter.

Well, that is the specific outcome Elon wanted when he laid off three-quarters of the company. He very clearly stated that he didn't see the value of the "trust and safety" teams that would have been the ones to flag something like this down.

This wouldn't have fallen within "trust and safety" purview. This should've been caught in even the most cursory of code reviews.

It seems this may have only affected the X on iOS App. [1] That greatly expands the range of possible causes. It also makes this quite odd in another way as well, because it suggests this was not a server side change.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39991312

Why wouldn't phishing fall under trust and safety? Perhaps not primarily - but it's definitely a trust and safety event.

They wouldn't "have been the ones to flag something like this down". It should've been caught long prior; the code shouldn't have been written, it shouldn't have survived code review, and it should've failed automated tests.

It's a trust and safety incident now, but it never should have been.

The trust and safety team was only responsible for censoring wrongthink

Go re-read all the comments here during the take over and layoff where people claimed it could not possibly take more then a handful of people to run such a simple site.

he fired a huge number of the staff and the site is still running, so how was that assumption not proven correct ?

I use twitter daily and the site is a shell of its former self. It's slow, prone to bugs, filled with bots, the amount of real users has cratered, user reports go nowhere, there's no support team, the ads are now bot accounts posting crap like "Today is a good day, be sure to make it advantageous", there are no new features besides previously in-flight projects pre-Musk, they've actually removed a lot of features (like Circles, block lists, etc), and much more. He took an otherwise functioning social media service and forced it into maintenance mode. He also fired all of the people that keep the user base alive so now it's flooded with bots (which he presumably likes so he can boast about engagement being up). So yes it's still around but it's dying and the skeleton crew he has left can't do anything.

In other words, he destroyed it.

The bot plague is atrocious. Like, there are tons of "keyword watcher" bots... write "onlyfans" and you'll get ~5-10 spambots in under half a minute, and for stuff involving popular politicians or political events (anything Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Covid) you'll get Russian fake newspaper clones. On top of that come the "human bots" - write the name of infamous German youtuber "Drachenlord" and you'll get that vile hater bunch and it's just the same.

Honest question, why on earth are you on a fascist social media platform?

Honest answer: it's where my friend group's group chat lives. I miss a lot of conversation if I'm not in it. To be fair, I've blocked 235k+ Blue accounts so my experience is actually a lot better than most users.

The site was previously engineered such that an uninformed owner could literally start unplugging servers without it going down.

That said, outage frequency did rise following the mass layoffs.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/technology/twitter-outage...

> he fired a huge number of the staff and the site is still running, so how was that assumption not proven correct ?

Why would you expect the website to stop running though? Keeping a site running with a smaller crew is easy amd baked in - all organizations with >10 engineers do this frequently, over the holidays or Lunar New year. What's harder is building new features at the same pace and quality as a larger engineering team.

I mean, I assume anyone who could get another job has already left, so they're probably running low on competent gatekeepers.

Don't take this as a defense of what is a harebrained idea; but this kind of replacement should be easy to do correctly. You know; in such a way where only real twitter.com links are changed to x.com.

Honestly it is only somewhat surprising to me that no one noticed the error ahead of time. On the one hand, this is the type of mistake I do see in reviews from time to time... usually in the form of a regex that is not anchored to the start of the string, or perhaps it uses a non escaped period which of course means "any character" in regex. On the other hand, it is revealing about the kinds of controls in place that it got through.

even things that are easy (or maybe, especially things that are easy) can benefit from having a review to make sure you didn't miss something obvious.

nothing more dangerous than "oh, that's easy, let's push it straight to prod"

Example: one of the worst and most costly bugs I ever saw during my time in finance involved a code review [1] with the exchange:

"Looks good generally but this will serialize incorrectly if a date is ever negative."

<... pause while everyone digests that...>

"Why would a date ever be negative?"

Noone could think of a reason a date would ever be negative. The resulting code push cost millions in a single day.

[1] I was on the call because I was the SRE[2] responsible for doing the release

[2] We didn't call ourselves SREs because it was like 2001 and that terminology hadn't caught on yet. We called ourselves "Installmeisters" believe it or not.

How did it turn out that a date was negative, and how did it cost millions?

Iirc it turned out some 20+ year old code was relying on an undocumented/unknown behaviour of dates when they are negative to calculate cashflows on very old perpetual fixed income instruments[1]. If you have a codebase that's large enough and worked on by enough people, for every possible hack/undocumented feature you'll have at least one person who will rely on it in some way.

It cost millions, because the serialization corrupted the USD treasury curve when we wrote it to the database, which meant that even though the code was reverted quickly, for a while no derivatives (like literally no derivatives) in the whole of the trading part of a big IB could price (because essentially all derivatives were priced in dollars using some sort of discounted cash flow mechanism which relies on the USD treasury curve). No price means no risk, because how you calculate risk of a derivative is by finding the underlyers, shocking those underlyers a little bit and calculating the new price (essentially an empirical method of finding the derivative of price with respect to each of those things).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_bond

That's a good hypothesis with the non-escaped period! That someone wrote /twitter.com/ for the string substitution, which almost works, and then added a second one like /\w+.twitter.com/ for subdomains, which also seems to work, and would pass simple tests to check if it works or not. Matches everything it's supposed to; rejects most of the things it shouldn't.

You are right the period would line up with the issue we saw.

But also, I can’t help but to think even /\w+\.twitter\.com/ will match unexpected domains like foo.twitter.com.evil.ai. I already gave you the hint it needs to be anchored!

Well, that’s because any org that has five layers of audits for this just has five layers of audits for everything and so rarely gets anything done. This is a clbuttic bug. It’s silly and damaging but easy to fix and move on with.

Not particularly different from Bluesky allowing one guy to own all of S3.

> I don't understand the social structure inside a software company where this kind of thing can go from some intern's 3am idea to production

This is what happens when you "cut the fat" and are left with an adversely-selected[1], skeleton crew of "hard core engineers." The site was never going to fail all at once, instead, it's a death by a thousand cuts and suboptimal engineering.

1. No disrespect to current Twitter engineers who can't leave easily, or believe in the mew mission. However those who survived layoffs but could leave have left.

This article was 5 hours old at the time I'm viewing it and the bug is supposedly already fixed per the article itself. So yea, seems like this was probably fixed within 5 minutes of anyone noticing.

Since most of my tweets where related to work, I moved from Twitter / X to LinkedIn. Twitter under Elon is a huge mess. The irony is that he kept complaining about spam and bots before. Since he took over, my new followers and many of the likes I received were from new only fans like users. Maybe it's by design and he wants to make it an only fans clone. But I'm out. I don't even bother reading my feed yet alone posting.

LinkedIn has its problems too. I would say it's the least bad among the two.

My biggest issue with LinkedIn is their horrible mobile web interface. I didn't trust their app. I know it's been years, but they burned anything resembling trust.

It's been a bizarre ride watching Twitter slowly unravel under the new leadership.

It'll have a long way to fall... the total userbase is still around the same order of magnitude as the population of the United States. But when I read stories of decisions like this, I can't help but think that it indicates the adults are no longer in the room, and a 300-million-plus userbase becomes a massive target surface if it's being run by a team that doesn't really grok the Internet...

I'm just sad they killed the blue bird, and the "tweet" verb as well.

It's certainly less weird in official contexts now though. The brand was OK but not really "scalable" without sounding like something right off Idiocracy in some contexts.

I'm not using xcreting so I'm sticking with tweeting until the platform dies.

Well, I think that's a fair characterization for a non trivial portion of the users.

I closed my Twitter account when this guy took over, for all the obvious reasons. Somewhat to my surprise, it actually turned out to be a massive boost to my mental health. For a week after I closed the account, I'd find myself thinking, "I'm bored, I should check Twitter... oh wait, I can't" and then I'd just go on with my day. It was fantastic and I don't miss it at all. So in a weird way, my life got better when he took over.

Definitely recommend closing your account if you're on the fence. Don't move to bluesky or whatever, just take this opportunity to cut all this crap out of your life. You don't need it.

did the same for facebook circa 2020, and even in lockdown it was a godsend. Obliterated my reading list and actually managed to make headway on the massive list of mothballed projects.

It's okay to be bored. Boredom serves a purpose. When boredom is taken away from you, you end up not making an effort for anything worthwhile.

People worry about what (web caused) divisive propaganda, erosion of social skills, and attention grabbing is doing to us — and I agree those are all real and serious threats — but the lack of boredom is worries me the most.

So, basically, someone's broken regex can be a viable business model. Pretty crazy.

“Now you have two problems”

"OK, what about using AI to solve this?"

https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2022/12/13-20.26.24.html

The regexp example on https://sourcegraph.com/cody has been broken for months (scroll down a bit, second block). Also not a regexp problem and easier solved without regexps.

Please, no one tell them. It's funnier the longer it goes on. It's been like this since at least October (I told a friend on Telegram this), but it had already been like this for some months by then.

Indeed.

Extra fun, I asked gpt-4-0125-preview *:

Explain this regex: [a-zA-Z0-9\.\-]+\.([a-zA-Z]{r,63})

And part of the explanation was to fix the bug. Well, almost, it removed the () in the process, but it did know what was wrong.

When your AI's error can be explained by someone else's AI…

* Why this model? Because the https://chat.openai.com is currently throwing me the error: "You've reached the current usage cap for GPT-4. You can continue with the default model now, or try again later. Learn more" even though I've selected 3.5 in the popup, and my earlier attempt to use ChatGPT to give myself a PAYG chat interface to all the models was done when gpt-4-0125-preview was the best one available.

https://benwheatley.github.io/YetAnotherChatUI/

Your secret is safe with me.

you mean, someone's broken regetwitter

Someone seriously did a s/twitter/x/g seemingly (or the raw string replace equivalent). Maybe there are more requirements here, but it seems like just parsing a URL and checking for `twitter.com` and some other literal domains instead of sub strings would have been completely fine.

if `twitter.com` is mapped to `x.com`, then a link `carfatwitter.com` will go to the non-malicious `carfax.com`, so registering `carfatwitter.com` seems to be just a stunt. When would `carfax.com` redirect to `carfatwitter.com`? Urls with `twitter.com` in the name are affected, not urls with `x.com` in the name.

edit: from the responses looks like I was wrong; the urls still point to `carfatwitter.com`. Leaving my comment up in case others were confused like me.

It's not redirecting but rather rewriting of the URL.

e.g "https://twitter.com/{acc}/status/{id}" -> "https://x.com/{acc}/status/{id}".

So if you post "https://carfatwitter.com/scam" it will be rewritten to "https://carfax.com/scam". Essentially search and replace of twitter.com -> x.com, 's/x.com/twitter.com/g'.

I infer that the display was getting rewritten, but the underlying target of the link would not. So if you posted "carfatwitter.com", the UI would display "carfax.com" but the underlying link would still go to "carfatwitter.com".

Note I have no direct experience with this, it's just the only way this makes sense as a phishing vector. The alternative is that it is being presented as a phishing vector, but was never actually useful as such, and people are just jumping up to yell about a security issue without it actually being one. That happens too.

The links themselves are unchanged, just how they display. So if you type carfatwitter.com in a tweet, then it will display as carfax.com, but if you click on the link, it will still redirect you to carfatwitter.com.

It appears the substitution only affected the text of the link, not the destination.

I just posted carfatwitter.com on twitter. It did not become carfax.com.

What am I missing?

Also, the article says:

> The domain “ametwitter.com” already redirects to the real americanexpress.com.

But it does not here.

Probably that they rolled back the change when it became obvious it was bad.

The article is pretty fresh ("This entry was posted on Wednesday 10th of April 2024 10:28 AM", and the author is from the US. Even if he's on East Coast, it would only be half an hour ago) though.

Unless Twitter just fixed it within 1 hour, I think the author should mention it has been fixed (edit: or that it was limited to certain platform [iOS?], since it's not reproducible on web at least.)

Thanks. I did update the story to reflect the apparent fix. I'm still trying to verify if this behavior remains in some form.

Per the older Mashable article above, it is _partially_ fixed, in that they don't do it for the examples in the article but do do it for other cases.

Are you visiting from the iOS(possibly Android too, but didn't see anyone mention) app? That's where it's generally happening.

I use the website.

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-dot-com-posts-change-to...

> X eventually realized the issue and rolled out a patch later that same day for some of the domains affected by this change. "Netflitwitter.com" no longer shows up as "Netflix.com" for example.

> However, Mashable can confirm that the X for iOS app is currently still changing many other references of "Twitter.com" to "X.com." We noticed that in one instance we found, the change was happening when "Twitter.com" was being used in a subdomain for another URL.

I believe it only happens on the iOS app. Strange the article doesn't mention that.

It started off happening globally - they fixed it in most places, but not yet on the iOS app.

From the article:

> Update: It appears Twitter/X has corrected its mistake, and no longer truncates any domain ending in “twitter.com” to “x.com.”

Glad the site is rotting tbh, it wasn't great before and now it's so full of bots and propaganda it feels surreal. Posting and/or reading from Ukraine is even more surreal.

PSA we don't have to let billionaires own letters if we don't want to. We can just keep calling it twitter if we want.

Well that title didn't take long to go entirely invalid as this isn't a thing anymore.

Reasonable to doubt if this ever was thing as this seemed to only exist on iOS and due to the direction this went it didn't really do anything. Probably different if it had gone x -> twitter

The now rare clbuttic self-inflicted wound.

Programmers love cooking, they like chopping the caret.

Come on guys, this is a good joke.

   new_host = host.replace( /twitter\.com/, “x.com” )

(I wonder if they have escaped the period?)

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1031/

Jesus. How badly is elon running things?

> On April 9, Twitter/X began automatically modifying links that mention “twitter.com” to read “x.com” instead. But over the past 48 hours, dozens of new domain names have been registered that demonstrate how this change could be used to craft convincing phishing links — such as fedetwitter[.]com, which is currently rendered as fedex.com in tweets.

I'm in awe. Does Twitter have any software developers left, or is it just Elon's nephew working his way through W3Schools?

I had to clean the coffee off my keyboard after reading that.

There a lot of people on visas who can’t quit, so …

Do you have any evidence of this?

It is a borderline racist trope that keeps being repeated (mostly by ex-Twitter developers with a chip on their shoulder) without any hard proof. It is equally likely they are upset over a lack of solidarity in quitting and are perpetuating a lie based on someone's citizenship status.

Move fast and break things I guess

I’m confused how this can be used for phishing?

Does the text only get replaced, and the underlying link stays intact? Surely not?

Otherwise, the link would still go to fedex.com.

No, you got that right. Only the displayed text is affected.

> Does the text only get replaced, and the underlying link stays intact? Surely not?

That is exactly what happens.

That’s almost literally unbelievable.

I’m not even sure his nephew is reading W3Schools.

In case you’re reading this, you may have missed this article:

https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp

Yes, only the text gets replaced but not the underlying link.

Once you navigate to the link it will be the actual link in the URL bar however.

But this is an easy miss for people after they have already navigated to the link from twitter thinking it's a legitimate link.

Yeah, looks like _only_ the link label gets replaced, otherwise as you suggest it wouldn't be as bad.

Why do browsers allow this by default? Seems like a feature made to enable phishing and other bad behaviors.

The link I just clicked on to reply to your comment was `https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=39991931&goto=item%3Fi...` but thankfully it just said 'reply' in the UI.

I wonder if there's a browser extension that checks if the link text is a valid URL, but is a different URL (or just on a different domain?) than the actual link target, and adds some kind of warning for the user if so?

I'm not sure what keywords I'd use to find an extension like that.

This would break every website that wants to track what links you click on by sneakily rewriting the link under your nose. Which, to be fair, is a use case that I'm all for breaking, but it would make Google mad, so it won't happen.

> This would break every website that wants to track what links you click on

So, a plan with no drawbacks?

> it would make Google mad, so it won't happen.

Google doesn't control which browser extensions get written?

Exactly it.

Please use your Microsoft gaming account to login to my phishing site, xbotwitter.com

It's Elon himself working his way through W3Schools.

>Does Twitter have any software developers left

Not many people in the field actually understand protocols at the RFC level. That's the real crux.

No, that is not the issue. This is far more basic.

More words?

I’m not sure what to tell you, you don’t need to have ever read a single RFC to see that this was not going to work. It’s just basic careful thinking.

It's a simple string substitution at the display level - fedetwitter.com becomes fedex.com, but at the link level fedetwitter.com remains. It's just replacing the content of the a tag, but not underlying href location.

Musk fancies himself a coder, so he probably wrote it himself and pushed it to master without review; or he did have it reviewed and fired anyone who pointed out the mistake.

Everything that is old is new again: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2138014.stm

Possibly, as with the extremely 90s-feeling 'X' name, Musk is simply introducing retro bugs, to attract internet hipsters :)

Apparently they have just one developer left who knows just enough to break things. Maybe they use Grok.

Anyway some engineer wrote this change and deployed it. The product process failed though, as did the testing process. Rollback was a mess too, given this change was visible for hours (days?)

Salty ex-Twitter developers too busy huffing their own farts to remember when the pre-Elon CISO (mudge) was fired after he uncovered how messed up things were behind the scenes, then filed a whistleblower complaint and testified before Congress.

Twitter was not a marvel of engineering pre-Elon, despite the fantasy arrogant former developers keep perpetuating. Their infrastructure was barely held together with duct tape.

1) Twitter wasn't a marvel of engineering pre-Elon 2) It's worse post-Elon (bot issues, paid blue checks at the top, increase in hateful posts, etc)

FFS. Maybe a tweet with a rickroll to spacetwitter.com will catch his eye. Whoever owns that domain, here's your 15 mins.

It is insane that this would get past QA or any sort of testing.

I doubt there's much in the way of QA or testing after they made developers print their code out on paper for Elon to review.

Elon fired all the people who would do QA.

Something new on twitter breaks every week. It's wild.

I haven't decided if twitter is actually more buggy or if bugs are more publicized because of the extra scrutiny since Musk took over.

There used to be a bug that wreaked havoc for a short time where you could force anybody to follow you. At the time I don't recall people blaming Twitter's leadership or culture--it was just a bug because software sometimes has bugs.

Since Musk took over, I’ve frequently clicked on links to tweets only to be presented with the “Something went wrong. Try again.” Error message instead of the tweet I should be seeing. I then have to refresh multiple times to get it to show up. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all, I decide I don’t care enough, and I move on with my day. I’ve also observed broken embeds around the web. This is core service reliability. I grew up with Twitter. I never observed this behavior once before Musk took over unless there was a well-known incident occurring. Twitter is definitely more buggy.

> I never observed this behavior once before Musk took over unless there was a well-known incident occurring.

Yeah, I have. On multiple occasions before Musk took over, Twitter also had bugs.

Even if you think firing like 6/7th of Twitter's staff (or whatever) was a mistake, there's really no arguing that they're making more visible product changes than they have in years. That means that bugs happen. And frankly...proving that a tech company doesn't need that level of bloat is a valuable lesson for the entire software industry. If they overshot and have X% more bugs for now, that's fine. They'll still be dramatically leaner than before.

Great. This is all completely besides the point anyway. My point is that there are more of them and I think anyone who doesn’t see that is nuts. I’m sorry I don’t have a Grafana dashboard to show you.

The point is, without a Grafana dashboard, you don't have anything but a motivated anecdote.

~90% of the comments here are "motivated anecdotes" and are quite valuable. Perhaps this is not the dis you think it is.

"motivated anecdotes" aren't valuable because they aren't accurate. It's political fuel for to shit on something you don't like.

With this line of thinking, I could say climate change isn't happening because of the temperature outside my house.

I never pretended to have anything else, and “motivated” is a weird word to use here. I have no skin in this game, and from what I can tell neither do you. If Twitter survives, great. I guess some of what you noted could be an interesting lesson, but I don’t think it’s going so hot so far and I’m not willing to call it yet.

You have a belief that the service is more buggy, and were arguing as such from anecdote. That's what I mean by "motivated".

I don't care at all, and am just reacting to the phenomenon of folks going "it's definitely worse now, and I know, because I used the product before". OK, great...I used the product before too, and don't perceive that to be true.

uhh visible product changes as proof that a company is more productive is a joke. A joke PMs love to tell at least lmao.

Making visible product changes is the easiest thing to do in software.

It's totally possible that there was a ton of bloat. It happens when organizations scale and they're looking for market share instead of profitability. But, as someone who has worked in (bio)tech companies that got purchased, first they cut 20-30% of the staff, but that doesn't mean all the work they were doing went away, and it means key people in every role have to do more, which works for a minute, then management thinks "we're right, it was all fat", until those key people burn out and stop producing. Then you end up hiring 10-15% of the staff back. Or, the org slowly dies.

> as someone who has worked in (bio)tech companies that got purchased, first they cut 20-30% of the staff, but that doesn't mean all the work they were doing went away, and it means key people in every role have to do more

Yeah, this wasn't a simple staff reduction. Twitter fired something like 80% (?) of their employees. By conventional wisdom, they should have gone down hard and never recovered. There are lots of people in this comment thread who are (dubiously) trying to make the case that they did.

The Twitter example, for better or worse, revealed that tech companies are not just a little bit redundantly staffed...they're employing tons of people who effecitvely just make work for each other.

> There are lots of people in this comment thread who are (dubiously) trying to make the case that they did. > The Twitter example, for better or worse, revealed that tech companies are not just a little bit redundantly staffed...they're employing tons of people who effecitvely just make work for each other.

I've been arguing since the purge that Twitter was in the "Wile E Coyote ran off the cliff and is still treading air" phase, but that argument is getting harder and harder to justify as Twitter somehow stays alive. How could firing all those people really do nothing to the operational success of the company? What were they all doing? Companies don't hire people where they have nothing for them to do. I look at my (BigTech) company and everyone is running around like crazy with 3-5X more tasks in their backlog than they can possibly do. We always need more people. How do you get rid of 80% and just carry on??? Are they all just writing TPS reports for each other to read?

Yeah, that's why I was careful about my wording. Without excluding the possibility that many people were truly doing nothing, I see this pattern all the time as companies get bigger:

  * project is done to 85% effectiveness by <= 1 FTE

  * company is flush with cash, and can hire someone to backfill that last 15%

  * new person is not fully occupied backfilling that 15%, and therefore *finds new things to do*...which creates more projects that are done to 85% effectiveness

  * goto step 1

Also, of course, as companies mature, they inevitably start moving down the cost-effectiveness graph, and taking on projects with lower and lower expected value. There are all sorts of reasons for this, ranging from valid ("this effort might pay off 10x"), to pathological ("if my team doesn't grow, I don't get a promotion").

Anyway, shovel enough money into the boiler during the "hypergrowth" phase, and you can easily end up with lots of people who are all very busy, but just not productive.

I also thought there was a decent chance the entire product would just die irrecoverably, and that hasn't happened (although of course there might have been near misses we don't know about). I must admit I'm surprised how well it still seems to run, on the whole.

I think it's still an open question whether the business is damaged irrecoverably. I guess now they don't have the same reporting requirements, as a private company, but everything I've read suggests they're losing as much money as ever.

Although... you can certainly imagine a world where they both avoided infrastructure-death and managed to sustain the business (not pissing off advertisers, not pissing off power users, no pointless rebrands, etc).

> I never observed this behavior once before Musk took over unless there was a well-known incident occurring

This bug has been happening since the beginning of time. I saw that constantly pre-musk

Twitter was notorious for crashing. The fail whale was a internet meme... Then they fixed it and for about 7 years I basically never saw a problem with twitter, even in the worst internet conditions.

Today the bugs are back. Things are constantly a problem. This isn't a "well all software has bugs" -- yeah true, but somehow for 7 years twitter was bug-free. Or rather the bugs were quickly caught and fixed. And now... nothing.

Musk got rid of all guardrails, and now we face the consequences.

People keep complaining that:

- Twitter staff were needed - Twitter will fail if the firings continued - He just fired all these useful people

But at the end of the day, Twitter/X is still the same exact thing and runs exactly the same way. It does prove that firing all the slack can change very little but it's a good narrative to cry about Elon Musk and his "sinking soonTM ship".

No, more like something new on X breaks every year. The site is simple enough that that the engineering is mostly focused on optimizations and there's little more I or any other active user would even expect from the platform, outside of growing to new areas like YouTube-comparable video.

I find it quite bizarre how some people still try to push some narrative about the site being broken. It's not more broken it was before the takeover outside the odd Spaces dropout (which is a new feature so doesn't really count), but is now better serving its actual mission as an actually unbiased speech platform, radical as that is in the current day. Now X just needs to stay unchanged for ten years to overcome any competition.

I recently tried to reinstall the Twitter for Mac app. It was never a good app. Although a flagship for Apple’s Catalyst, since its catalysation it never got the UI love other 3rd party clients for the Mac had. But it was at least somewhat usable. But somehow it got never updated for the X'ning, neither name nor icon, never got support for longer tweets and other stuff.

And now I click Install in the App Store and "something goes wrong". Simply can’t install it.

There must be UIKit people remaining at X, after all they’re updating the iOS app which must share the same code as the Mac app. But for some reason they don’t update, but leave a broken, uninstallable app on the App Store.

From day one, the Mac app was a hobby project from passionate developers within the company, at times maintained by a single engineer. With the layoffs, they likely lost everyone passionate about maintaining it.

As devils advocate, maybe this is evidence such QA doesn’t matter as much as everyone thinks? It looks like no actual damage was done and the problem was fixed quickly once users noticed it.

Sure, using your users as QA is a fine business plan and instills confidence. We should extend this to other expensive industries (healthcare, law, civil engineering, etc.).

It seems fine for social media

Testing is necessary even for social media, not doing so is a big security threat for its users. Even apparently dumb bugs like this one can be exploited to steal important information. Social media may not seem as important or vital as banking or healthcare, but most of our modern society depends on it. Socials are the best tools for social engineering after all.

pretty sure they just pushed it live without any messy "testing"

I mean, forget QA. How does this get pushed at all?

If the CTO builds an engineering team that lacks the expertise to write a regex that matches the company's own name, and builds a culture of security and quality process that failed to catch this before shipping to production, then the CTO should be fired for cause.

Unfortunately the CTO also owns the company.

I wouldn’t go that far but there is a teachable moment here. It goes to show how little engineers actually read PRs/MRs these days…it’s just become a rubber stamp at this point. This is not a problem specific to X, I’d wager a lot on that. It’s a widespread cultural problem in our industry. Remember XZ?

How is that connected at all to the Twitter fiasco? One is a very sophisticated backdoor attempt in an open source library, the other is an utterly boneheaded and simplistic mis-feature in a closed source platform. They could hardly be more different.

Incredible to think that some people seriously want to get a brain implant created by this guy’s other company.

Or want to trust him to run a self-driving car. Or save the world from climate change or something.

I think Elon has kind of demonstrated that if you just keep stating that you did something with confidence long enough, some people will actually believe it.

Some stuff he does works (SpaceX), but lots doesn't...

Five years ago he scammed me out of 7500 euros with the self-driving feature that remains dangerously dysfunctional. (It's sort of the computer vision equivalent of this Twitter regex.)

So I'm not falling for his bullshit again. But I suppose that's why he wants to own the world's biggest megaphone — to ensure he doesn't run out of us suckers.

I don't think I've directly given Elon any money [1], but there was a time that I really wanted a Tesla car, and if I didn't live in NYC I probably would have bought one.

I'm very glad I didn't now, because I'm pretty convinced I would have done this half-baked quasi-self-driving feature and probably be dead, or worse killed someone else.

[1] I own a few ETFs that probably buys Tesla stock, so indirectly sure.

I would not v12.3.3 describe dangerously dysfunctional, but you dont have access in Europe yet.

Hats off for admitting it though, it's worse than owning up to being romance scammed.

His companies did literally re-boot the electric car industry, American rockets industry, American battery production, satellite internet business.

These aren't the confident boasts of a charlatan, we have very concrete proof this happened.

You might be able to argue the point for SpaceX and Starlink, but honestly I'm not sold on the rest. He bought his way into Tesla, for example.

Moreover, I don't even know that I buy the idea that the CEO is really the reason for any company's success; are we going to claim that Bill Gates is responsible for the success of desktop computing? I mean, you can if you want but I would not personally say that. I think it's a combination of good marketing, right-place-right-time, and happening to hire the right people for the job.

Even before SpaceX got off the ground, since I was a kid, people have been complaining at how little NASA was accomplishing, so I think someone breaking into the commercial space flight was inevitable. Elon probably does deserve a bit of credit for funding it when he did but I'm not convinced that he was uniquely qualified to to it, and I absolutely reject the notion that "because he was successful with some businesses, he's going to save the world".

He also lies. A lot. Like, more often than he tells the truth. He just makes shit up. He has claimed we will have self-driving cars "next year" for the last 6 years. He has repeatedly claimed that it's something we can do "today". He claimed that the Boring Company can "pay for itself with brick production".

All of this to me kind of implies his success is more stochastic than any kind of eccentric genius.

Or it's a different kind of genius. A lot of these claims helped juice the stock value at critical times. The "battery swap" demo happened to get a specific tax incentive from Uncle Sam[1]. These are specific actions meant to get other people's money - follow-through be damned.

[1] https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2015/0312/Tesla-b...

I don't know that that really requires "genius" though. Having a lawyer tell you "hey there's this clause in the recent tax code that might make us a lot of money if we make an interesting demo", and then him saying "ok, lets make that demo" doesn't seem like it takes a 10,000 IQ.

Lying is pretty easy, and I can think of lots of habitual liars that I also think are very stupid. Without naming anyone specific, think of any politician that you dislike.

> He bought his way into Tesla, for example.

He did, but that doesn't come close to the whole story:

• July 1, 2003, Incorporated by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning

…

• August 2007, Eberhard was asked to step down by the board; Michael Marks was brought in as interim CEO

• December 2007, Ze'ev Drori became CEO and President

• May 2008, "The Truth About Cars" website launched a "Tesla Death Watch", as Tesla needed another round of financing to survive

• October 2008, Musk succeeded Drori as CEO and fired 25% of Tesla employees

Leading to:

• By January 2009, Tesla had raised US$187 million ($70 million from Musk) and delivered 147 cars.

Not 147 thousand, just 147. After 5.5 years.

> I don't even know that I buy the idea that the CEO is really the reason for any company's success; are we going to claim that Bill Gates is responsible for the success of desktop computing? I mean, you can if you want but I would not personally say that. I think it's a combination of good marketing, right-place-right-time, and happening to hire the right people for the job.

I think it's all those things, plus luck and skill. Likewise for all the other CEOs out there. It is the opposite side of the same coin as complaining that Musk didn't really found Tesla — yup, he wasn't in the room with Eberhard and Tarpenning, but it was Musk's choices and actions as leader which turned the company from "Tesla Death Watch" to a viable business rather than choosing to close it down and sell off the assets to compensate the shareholders, which would not have been unreasonable given how many people at the time (and even today) are going "Batteries? Pah! Give us hydrogen!" for whatever reason.

> Even before SpaceX got off the ground, since I was a kid, people have been complaining at how little NASA was accomplishing, so I think someone breaking into the commercial space flight was inevitable. Elon probably does deserve a bit of credit for funding it when he did but I'm not convinced that he was uniquely qualified to to it,

I'm excited to see what Relativity Space and Rocket Lab do in this space.

Conversely, Blue Origin (founded 18 months before SpaceX) hasn't done anything impressive.

Musk's qualification sure isn't unique, but that doesn't mean it's universal either.

> and I absolutely reject the notion that "because he was successful with some businesses, he's going to save the world".

Agreed; some of his recent hubris does seem related specifically to this.

> He also lies. A lot. Like, more often than he tells the truth. He just makes shit up. He has claimed we will have self-driving cars "next year" for the last 6 years. He has repeatedly claimed that it's something we can do "today". He claimed that the Boring Company can "pay for itself with brick production".

> All of this to me kind of implies his success is more stochastic than any kind of eccentric genius.

There's a phrase about putting people on pedestals, and the view from those on the ground looking up.

I view him as being a relatively unfiltered stochastic genius. D&D aligment, chaotic neutral. He may only be half as smart as he thinks he is, but he's not actually an idiot, just wildly (and in some cases horrifyingly) over-optimistic.

And his successes are all directly tied to the same personality traits as his failures: he has an idea, he won't let go of it, so he keeps bashing at it until progress happens. And he's an effective salesman so he can bring investors along for that ride.

> He did, but that doesn't come close to the whole story:

Sure, maybe I was being overly simplistic, Tesla did grow under his watch so he probably deserves some credit for it. Again, though, I'm not sure how much the CEO actually has to do with that stuff, and I really don't believe that he was directly involved with the engineering.

> Agreed; some of his recent hubris does seem related specifically to this.

What really bothers me are his attempts to intervene in the Russia/Ukraine conflict, to a point where I think that the DHS might need to investigate his bank transactions. I must have missed the election where we decided to choose him to lead the ministry of defense.

> I view him as being a relatively unfiltered stochastic genius.

How much of this is "genius" and how much is just "a stopped clock being right twice a day"? I'm not going to pretend to know, but I could probably write a markov chain to generate a dozen ideas for a product, and if one of them happens to be successful, does that imply that the markov chain is some kind of complicated genius?

I think the way he's handled Twitter has demonstrated that he might not be the genius we thought; I wonder how many of his dumb ideas were quietly rejected when he had some oversight; if nothing else he had to answer to investors and whatnot with Tesla and SpaceX and the like. With Twitter, it's more of a dictatorship and it's a mess.

> I think the way he's handled Twitter has demonstrated that he might not be the genius we thought; I wonder how many of his dumb ideas were quietly rejected when he had some oversight

Reminiscent of George Lucas and the first Star Wars trilogy (IV-VI) versus the second (I-III): in one he had people around him pushing back (being part of a team), and the other he basically had carte blanche.

Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking of too. And I suspect most M. Night Shyamalan movies after The Sixth Sense.

I think it's a mistake to think that most notable things are the result of "one person". Most big projects, good or bad, are a group effort, and which is why it really bothers me that people act like Elon is singularly responsible for every cool thing to come out of SpaceX or Tesla.

I don't think I've met anyone willing to express that opinion, but would also roll my eyes at them if I did.

> How much of this is "genius" and how much is just "a stopped clock being right twice a day"? I'm not going to pretend to know, but I could probably write a markov chain to generate a dozen ideas for a product, and if one of them happens to be successful, does that imply that the markov chain is some kind of complicated genius?

I've played with Markov chains, and… no. While you can totally generate some stuff with them, they're not even close to the level of ChatGPT — and ChatGPT is the reference point I use these days for "are you sure you know about this subject?", in part due to someone else describing it as "mansplaining as a service". For a lot of the stuff Musk suggests which horrifies domain experts (like how the tunnels are so narrow that if a car catches fire the people in it can't get out), what he says is stuff I'd put in this category.

But he seems to have more lucid and self-aware moments besides those, and many of which are also things which are more mocked than being horrifying (e.g. powered vertical landing to reuse rockets). It comes across to me (not a psychologist) as something of a bipolar personality — or as if some of his ideas resulted from snorting a white powdered stimulant (a category which includes caffeine, unwise as that is).

> I've played with Markov chains, and… no. While you can totally generate some stuff with them, they're not even close to the level of ChatGP

Even before ChatGPT you had things like Context Free Grammars [1] that could give results kind of like GPT, superficially. You could certainly get it to generate a bunch of sentences that could be used like business ideas. That's kind of what I was going for.

> powered vertical landing to reuse rockets

Most of your points are fair, but I reject that this is actually a clever thing on Musk's end. NASA experimented with reusable rockets in the 60's. The X-15, for example, while slightly different, demonstrates that this was something being toyed with quite awhile ago.

No doubt, SpaceX's achievement here is notable and cool, and to whatever extent Elon helped with that he deserves credit. But I think "having the idea" does not really count.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen

> But I think "having the idea" does not really count.

Indeed.

But between this and what you say of CFG generators, I think you misunderstood me.

He didn't just have the idea, he got it to work.

If it was just ideas that counted, I've got one for 3D printing diamond with CVD, and metal with electro-deposition, and a way to radically improve Farnsworth-type fusion.

You'll note I'm not even the most famous person with my own name, let alone for any of those things.

Well kind of what I'm getting at, is I don't know how much he got it to work. He owned the company that got it to work, and probably deserves some of the credit as a result, so fine.

I guess what I was trying to say in regards to a reusable rocket is that it wasn't an idea that people laughed at. It's an idea that's pretty obvious: rockets are expensive, the way that the previous rocket stuff had worked is pretty wasteful, wouldn't it better if we can reuse more?

So hiring a bunch of engineers to build an obvious idea just doesn't impress me that much. The engineering impresses me, no doubt some very clever did something very cool, but I'm just not 100% sold that Elon deserves the lion's share of the credit on this.

He has done stuff that actually worked in the past. Yes he's an asshole, and yes, Twitter faceplanted. I'm not sure why these two things require the entire internet to vehemently deny that he can ever succeed at anything and invent increasingly convoluted reasons why Tesla and SpaceX aren't going concerns.

I think what most of the internet gets frustrated at the fact that people take the implication to a logical extreme: he succeeded at SpaceX, therefore he's the savior for humanity and he's infallible and actually a fucking genius and OMG HE'S GOING TO SAVE US FROM THE WOKES. How much of Teslas and SpaceX's success can actually be attributed to him? It's impossible to know, probably more than "0%", but also probably a good chunk less than the "100%" people act like it is.

And, as I stated in a sibling thread, he lies all the time. He just makes a lot of shit up. He acts like self driving cars are just around the corner, he pretends that the hyperloop is basically done, he says there's so much shit "we can do today". He calls people pedophiles if they don't want to use his stupid little submarine. There's overconfidence, and then there's grifting investors, and I think at this point it's thoroughly moved to the latter.

Dude shit on all sorts of stuff but Noland Arbaugh's life is objectively better now and he himself certainly thinks so.

Please let's avoid repeating the most obvious flamewar for the thousandth time (if not the 10,000th by now).

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39991316.

Edit: I suppose I need to add that this is not a muskpoint, it's just the principle of HN to try not to repeat things this much. Especially when the repetition is indignation-fueled.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Usually when you rebrand, it's because you've run your brand name into the ground. Elon did it just because the letter X is very cool or something?

Revenge for being forced to honor his word at buying Twitter, he made them regret it by killing it.

> Revenge for being forced to honor his word at buying Twitter, he made them regret it by killing it.

This makes no sense. The court forced him to pay the shareholders the agreed upon price. Consequently, the shareholders were paid, and now they're no longer shareholders. Why would they regret that?

Theoretically, there's a universe where Twitter wasn't bought out and the share price grew substantially, which will never come into place due to Elon's actions?

(I'm grasping at straws, mostly because Elon's ability to spite the shareholders is fairly limited.)

Realistically, Twitter's old leadership were just leading it to the same demise, just slower than Musk now is.

Because it’s not about being a shareholder. It’s about trying hurt Dorsey’s pride. “Watch me destroy your greatest achievement!” Musk is trying to damnatio memoriae.

That is assuming Muskbis doing this purposely.

I thought that Dorsey was a supporter of the Musk Twitter boondoggle. Or at least less against all Musk's antics than other major shareholders.

Dorsey played Musk not the other way around.

And that's why Musk is mad.

Man, I swear media literacy is trash anymore.

> It’s about trying hurt Dorsey’s pride.

Dorsey was not part of the lawsuit and in fact rolled over his Twitter shares with the acquisition instead of taking the payout, so again the "Revenge for being forced to honor his word at buying Twitter" theory makes no sense.

You're thinking it's about money. It's not. It's about vibes.

I didn't say what it's about. I only said what it's not about: "Revenge for being forced to honor his word at buying Twitter".

Nobody has yet made sense of that nonsensical theory.

He's been obsessed with this since the beginning with x.com in '99

All he needs is a ufo defense org and he is good.

I once worked at a company where the head of our department announced we were doing a re-org. He later explained that another department did so and at a board meeting the news was well received by the board ... so he was doing it too.

Sometimes leadership just feels the need to put their stamp on things so everyone knows they're there.

Elon's personality means he can't be in anyone's shadow. He needed to refound the company to remove the mental association with Dorsey and create the association that he's the founder.

Which begs the question: why buy it?

(And when the answer is "someone knows how to pull his strings and push his buttons", that makes me more worried about prompt injection in organic intelligence than the same attack in artificial intelligence).

His initial offer was motivated by a desire to be the savior. In his information bubble of American culture wars, freeing the bird from woke censorship offered him a way to roleplay the archetype of the individual hero and get his fix of narcissistic supply from his flying monkeys. To those ends, it worked. I believe he tipped his intentions to buy it quite early in a private conversation with Babylon Bee writers.

So this is actually a good line of inquiry; intelligent people like to assume they are invulnerable to propaganda and nudging, when this is far from the truth. It looks like he's fallen into the rightwing rabbit hole, to the extent of prioritizing particular posters such as the notorious "libsoftiktok". The persecution complex that comes along with this tends to make him view dissenting views as the work of invisible enemies.

> Which begs the question: why buy it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHTc77PTLVI&t=101s

Interviewer: Did you [buy Twitter] because you thought a court would make you do that?

Musk: Yes.

>Which begs the question: why buy it?

he spent half a year in court trying to get out the deal, and lost. so you probably shouldn't assume actually buying twitter was really his plan.

he bought a smaller stake first to get some influence and then offered to buy the rest when it didn't buy him the influence he hoped it would, presumably with no intention of following through. then the board called his bluff.

The "X" makes it sound cool. At least that's what Bender from Futurama taught me.

Elon rebranded to run Twitter into the ground.

Imagine acquiring the Bugatti brand then changing the name to “Karr”

Musks multiple unforced fumbles might be the biggest boneheaded blunders in corporate history

Whatever you say, teddyTwitter

He owned the X.com name, this is a way to get paid for use of it. That reduces the sting of the bad overall investment.

Curious if he sold his x.com to Twitter for profit, like Neumann sold to WeWork the brand and real estate

He bought x.com early and has probably paid stupid amounts of feed to hold on to it all these years so he's forcing it on his new pet project he totally wanted and had a plan for when signing legally binding documents. (/s)

I do believe he's just been obsessed with having x.com since he got it in the 90s and had a chance to use it and jumped at it just to put his own imprinter on the site.

I mean once you buy a domain (for whatever price you paid), isn't it basically 20 bucks a year to keep it?

From what I understand, Elon has owned the x.com domain for a long time and in the past wanted to rebrand PayPal to X the same way he did Twitter. Seemingly at that point in his career there were still people around to tell him no.

He also wants to make X into an "everything" app where you'll do shopping, calls, chat with friends, send payments, etc. And if that was pulled off successfully it doesn't seem like the craziest thing to distance from the Twitter brand which has long been associated as an app primarily for news and shitposting? But he has a long way to go to get people to think of it as anything other than what it was before. Everyone on the platform is still calling it Twitter and refers to posts as tweets.

> He also wants to make X into an "everything" app where you'll do shopping, calls, chat with friends, send payments, etc. And if that was pulled off successfully it doesn't seem like the craziest thing to distance from the Twitter brand which has long been associated as an app primarily for news and shitposting? But he has a long way to go to get people to think of it as anything other than what it was before. Everyone on the platform is still calling it Twitter and refers to posts as tweets.

I feel like the way to go there would have been closer to the Meta/Facebook brand hierarchy.

X is the platform / super app and Twitter is the first app within X. Twitter accounts become X accounts but you still use them to Tweet on Twitter.

The destruction of the Twitter branding seems more out of spite than business development goals. Really the whole follow through of the Twitter purchase reeks of spite and destruction rather than building something new of value.

But I'm not a successful billionaire so I'm probably wrong.

There are similar "everything" brands that are very successful in other countries, notably WeChat which is chat, text, photo sharing, gaming and mobile payments.

If X became the first in America it would be quite powerful, but IMHO is very unlikely.

I thought facebook already had all of those?

You're forgetting the biggest ones - Google and Microsoft

I didn't even know MS had photo sharing or mobile payments.

Google kills and relaunches products so often that I'm genuinely surprised Google Photos still exists and that my old data from when I had a Nexus 5 is still there, but I guess that's fair, I did forget them.

Google platforms like Google Pay, Google Photos, etc are very common across the developing world (India, Indonesia, Brazil, etc).

Microsoft doesn't have mobile payments but they do provide photo sharing via OneDrive.

FB/Whatsapp ofc is a massive one, and is the goto everything app globally outside of China and North America.

Most of these platforms are targeting developing countries now because any growth in market share that could be extracted in the west has been extracted.

This is why most ads made by Google, Meta, MS, etc tend to target the Indian, ASEAN, or Brazil markets now, and a lot of investment in localization is happening (eg. Meta/FB/Whatsapp partners with local telcos to install it's apps by default and integrate with telco platforms, Google has constantly massive ad campaigns in India, etc)

WeChat does a lot more. You basically can't function in China without it

Apple are closer to that than X in the USA.

We have those in the US, they're called "Android" and "iOS", not to mention every other OS and/or app platform, including the web itself.

Also "Facebook"

Everyone seems to forget WhatsApp. It's the goto everything app globally, and IG is increasingly becoming a similar one in the US.

Meta is truly a behemoth

The only times I can think of where a re-branding exercise has worked well, have been where the brand started off in the mud and they fixed their image rather than the name.

Specifically, Skoda — and when they did the transition, their adverts were very much aware of the need for an image change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWTJ_TPraLQ

It was before most of our times, but I don't think the Esso brand was "in the mud" when they rebranded to Exxon and that seems to have worked out ok for them.

Skoda did not have that bad an image, their pre-VW cars were very sucessful at rallying.

That ad is from them, by them, and about them. And it matches what everyone in the 90s was telling me about them.

"Have you heard about the new 16-valve Skoda? It's got eight valves in the engine and eight in the radio."

"How do you double the value of a Skoda? Fill the fuel tank."

Etc.

> The destruction of the Twitter branding seems more out of spite than business development goals

Or just incompetence. Plenty of that. Assuming just because he is billionaire that he's competent at everything related to any company and the reason for failure is something else is silly.

He had no idea what the fuck he is doing and he fucked up.

> Or just incompetence.

Oh there is likely plenty of that too. But I think there was at least some malice in being forced to follow through on his overvalued purchase offer, in the treatment of "blue check" verified accounts, in the treatment of laid-off employees and those who remained or tried to stick it out, and in the destruction of the Twitter brand.

> Assuming just because he is billionaire that he's competent at everything related to any company and the reason for failure is something else is silly.

Yes, that part was tongue-in-cheek.

He started X.com which merged with PayPal, but lost control of the domain over 20 years ago and didn't buy it back until 2017 [0].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/10/15949862/elon-musk-x-com-...

he is an extreme narcissist and is very mentally unhealthy / unstable. X is his favorite letter. it's not "cool", he just fancies himself to be King Joffrey who can do anything he wants on a whim.

> it's because you've run your brand name into the ground

And even then it usually doesn't work. It's _very_ unusual for full-scale rebrands of consumer-facing companies, where the original brand is utterly expunged, to stick.

He's spoken about this in length. When it actually happened it did feel like a bit out of nowhere though, but makes sense in the engineering mindset to get it out of the way clear before fanning out to other areas, regardless of the hard-to-estimate ETA's for those features (talking payments, "mega-app"-like features, different ways of integrating Grok, possible new UI flows for YouTube/Twitch-like fronts etc)

It's Twitter.

It's not "X".

Not sure specifically why Mr. Musk lost the thread but very little involving Twitter has demonstrated whatever qualities were involved in the "positive" reputation he'd earned via Tesla and SpaceX.

The one thing for which I am thankful is that his various decisions have completely removed Twitter from my life, but that doesn't seem like the sort of outcome one wants for the platform.

To call this "amateur hour" would be unkind to amateurs. But maybe they can at least get the "hour" part right if they roll it back quickly enough.

Looks like their devs learned RegEx on regetwitter.com

NO REGETS

I have Elon hit piece exhaustion.

Are you talking about the original article? How is this a hit piece in any form? It doesn't even mention Musk by name.

And this, dear Elon, is what happens when you fire your experienced developers because they cost too much...

What code LLM tools are Twitter employees allowed to use? Would be funny to find when this exact code was generated.

All this heady analysis because a company changed its name without permission from gestapo.

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