Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Amusingly this was posted on reddit, and the top comments were all "What's X?" "Oh they mean Twitter why doesn't the headline say that?" "I thought this was some Xbox integration, didn't realize it was Twitter".

Talk about the worst rebrand ever.

View on HN

I thought the headline was talking about the X Window System, like "Wait, did they actually run Linux and X?"

I clicked on it because while I knew it couldn't mean the X Window System, I couldn't figure out what it possibly could be. The only time I remember Twitter is called X now is those rare occasions of when I type the URL.

Yeah I had the exact same thought. I really sat there thinking "are you telling me that they were going to let me run Gimp on my Xbox??"

I think X is a really stupid name for a social media platform, but I'm not a guy worth $200 billion who calls people pedophiles if he doesn't like them, so what do I know?

Ditto. When I clicked on the article, it was an "oh yeah, that makes more sense" moment, but I certainly don't feel stupid for making the mistake. The Twitter -> X is terrible. I hearby rebrand it to "Wasteland." That sometimes feels like an appropriate name and at least there's a couple of letters difference between that and Wayland.

I never got into Twitter to begin with, so to me it wasn't a huge loss to see it fall apart, but I have to admit that the branding of Twitter was way better than "X". "Tweet" very quickly became part of the English lexicon, people knew what it was almost unanimously (in no small due to one controversial politician), and Elon decided to throw that away, presumably because "X is a cool letter".

Even Mastodon (which I got slightly more into) has realized how important having specific branding is to a platform like this, and uses the word "toot" instead of the generic "post".

So what's the verb for the "X" platform then? Just "to X"?

Xitting.

Pronounce it however you prefer.

For some reason, whenever I see the term "Xitter", my mind always parses it as "shitter". How do you pronounce it?

"The social network formerly known as Twitter". At least when in polite company.

I think it's just called "posting" now. Which is accurate but boring.

Xcrete

Jut aXe the tweet for eX-friends.

Xweet

Xitter, with a “sh” sound for the X

I typically use term / emoji "eggs" when referring to the zombified husk formerly known as twitter.

"It's gotten hard to read eggs without an account these days" or "ever since they got rid of content moderation eggs really smells." or "did you see that egg Musk dropped last week?"

Ditto. When I clicked on the article, it was an "oh yeah, that makes more sense" moment, but I certainly don't feel stupid for making the mistake. The Twitter -> X is terrible.

hahaha this was exactly my thought! X Window System

Their logos look quite similar, so I can understand the mixup.

Everyone is switching to Wayland now.

I still call it Twitter because 100% folks will know what I mean.

X ... even if they know what X is, it's too short and people mishear it / misunderstand it.

We've all taken to calling it Xitter...... pronounced 'shitter'.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Xitter

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Xitter

i am partial to ex-twitter myself. because it sounds like X/Twitter or X(formerly twitter) and it actually shows that it is no longer twitter, ergo ex-twitter.

This affords the brand more respect than it actually deserves.

maybe. i put the focus on ex. be gone, it's over. good bye.

Same here. It shortens appropriately too.

It is a stupid rebrand.

But is the juvenile nonsense really just political Elon-Hate?

“I say Shitter”… wow, that’s really clever.

It would be hard to effectively defend Elon solely on the premise that his attacker is juvenile.

I’d say it’s more clever than telling advertisers fleeing X to “go fuck yourselves”, but then again I’m not worth $200bn, so what do I know?

> is the juvenile nonsense really just political Elon-Hate

Juvenile? No. That is reserved for those who choose to refer to Mr Musk as "Xitler".

Frankly, 'shitter' is a very accurate description of what x/twitter has become. You would need to have your head in the sand to think otherwise.

Tell me more about how Threads is going to eat their lunch or was it going to be federated everything, or bluesky? Which one is it now?

I guess network effects don’t matter when the guy is charge says things you don’t like.

So the things people post there become... shits? Or sheets? I mean I realise it's 90% shit and hot takes but what's the nomenclature for a post?

It's also easier to search for. Searching for "X" returns too many things that aren't about the site formerly named Twitter.

I'd like to see HN add an exception to its title rules that would say that when submitting articles whose title refers to that site as "X" replace it with "Twitter".

I'm all for that exception, the clarifications and title confusion is pervasive. It hasn't magically gone away / people are no less confused.

Facebook is the same for me.

Honestly for a lot of things I could just say Facebook instead of X and nobody would know the difference.

Judging by the header of their own embeds, it seems like even X themselves have conceded that their service's real name is X (formerly Twitter).

Hah! I hadn't noticed that, but sure enough:

    <meta content="X (formerly Twitter)" property="og:site_name">

To their credit, they did finally switch over to x.com being the main domain instead of just redirecting to twitter.com

HBO to Max might be second for me. I associated premium and original content with the name HBO (Game of Thrones for example). I get they're trying to convey that it's not just prestige dramas, but in a world where people have multiple streaming services I think it makes sense to standout in terms of quality.

Close number 3 is Angie's List. It's been 3 years and the top link still says "Angie's List is Now Angi".

In my mind I went through the train of thought: "is this something related to Xbox? Ah no, it said the three game consoles, wait, did they support X [the window system]?? Ah, no... It's Twitter".

A stupid rebrand continues to be stupid...

Anecdotally I am hearing more people shifting back to just calling it Twitter.

I call it Twitter whenever I want someone to understand what I'm talking about.

> Talk about the worst rebrand ever.

I don't think they could have chosen a more generic name than the world's default variable.

It's uber-cool if you are stuck in the year 2001. X Games, XFL, X-files, XXX starring Vin Diesel, the aka xtreme James Bond.

I clicked here just to confirm it was twitter under discussion.

SpaceX, ModelX, xAI, seems like a pattern.

Recent rebrands:

Twitter/X: Confusing, throws away a good brand, associates the brand even more closely with Elon, and doesn't really do much to make it feel like a platform for more than tweets. Very bad.

Google/Alphabet: Causes financial reporting to mention Alphabet. Extremely minor annoyance, mostly nothingburger.

Facebook/Meta: Successfully ditched a bad brand and got a stylish name without much baggage to umbrella their projects and do new projects under. Doesn't seem overly associated with the metaverse. Actually very good rebrand.

Don't forget "HBO" -> Max. Or something. Is it the whole HBO brand or the app? No idea. It's even more confusing because there used to be some other "premium cable channel" with "max" in the name. Sin A Max?

Whatever, I guess I'm just old. First they came for my Magnavox, then my motorola, now my eggs and my HBO.

At least I still have X11.

I think they merged, or cinemax was acquired more likely. The brand change was likely related and could be considered failed on the basis that people still haven't realized it.

In terms of brand equity, HBO was and still is (if it still existed) synonymous for "quality content". I still have warm fuzzies for their well crafted brand noises and other signals (the static, the duha da da, da da, da dadada, da da da, the big chrome HBO flying around, etc)....

I guess as close as it gets these days is apple tv and ragin horn dog lee pace and the alternate space race shows.

Max. That's the name of a dog, or mel gibson, or a condom size.

Anyhow, ditching twitter for eggs and then slapping eggs all over everything else is just .... lazy. Not quite as dumb as swapping "HBO" for "Mags" but pretty close.

HBO Go and HBO Max came from two different departments and were different things was the problem. Go was for people who had a cable subscription, and Max was for people to have a digital only subscription, and we're duplicate implementations. The consumer confusing was (entirely predictably) too great, so they finally got their act together and merged them, though not before wasting a ton of money.

The rebrand of HBO Max to just "Max" was a result of the merger between Warner and Discovery.

The rebrand was not related to Cinemax. HBO (or their parent company) has always owned Cinemax for its entire existence, but Cinemax content is not available on the Max streaming service.

So Chewbacca is a Wookie, and he lives on Endor with the Ewoks? Even though he's much bigger and they Ewoks are cannibals?

(Non-requiter aside -- I get that there are explanations as to how "HBO" became "Max", and I was vaguely aware that Max and Cinemax weren't the same thing, but it's still an example of "watch me juggle burning tires while gargling gasoline and standing on a mound of bunker fuel" curation of a brand. Unless they're getting big tax write offs for brand destruction, Warner and Discovery would have been smart to rebrand one of the other or both "HBO")

er, ok? I was just stating that jfyi's comments regarding cinemax were factually incorrect.

I actually completely agree that it was a terrible rebrand.

I stand corrected. Admittedly, it was just a feel from somewhere they were related that I had picked up in the last few years.

I have like two derelict hbo apps on my xbox at this point. Why? What was wrong with hbo go? Did market research really say max was a better word with, I’m guessing, a cohort of probably a dozen people from Burbank?

...but your X-10 stuff will need to be replaced.

I think rebrands are always stupid. I refuse to play along with corpo mind games, and don't understand why anyone is willing to do so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com