I may be biased because I still go to Twitter via twitter.com.
Also, I don't watch TV and only smoke menthols. I mean vape. Or whatever.
Been waiting ever since to see if it would become worthwile for me, or even stand the test of time.
X marks the spot where it seemed to achieve arrested development, so not holding my breath.
edit: have a corrective upvote while I'm at it :)
instagram/facebook over my 20s left some real mental scars though im still trying to sort what the f those apps did to me and to culture at large. i quit instagram like 3 years ago, the classic millenial exploration of pruning your life of shite things to lower the anxiety. the scars i am still stuck with, and mind you i literally don't have these apps anymore:
- i still feel this soft pressure that anything i do doesn't matter unless there is a witness (a post, a story, etc). that is insane. it's been three years and i can still feel that what the hell? there's just no way the guy from 100 years ago who trainhopped around the country ever experienced that kind of pressure. it literally messed my brain up and i have no idea how to fix it for me at least the feeling hasn't gone away
- when you're on the other side it feels like you're just sitting outside of the rest of the worlds culture at this point. it can actually challenge why you left it in the first place and make you consider sacrificing your own well being just to not feel like you're not an outsider from another planet
i never did the tiktok thing so i dunno what that's like. at least leaving twitter felt like shutting a book that kinda sucked and you don't really ever think about it again
Short messages bias toward simple slogans and memes devoid of context or nuance. It leads to “context collapse” in the discourse and the worst kind of echo chamber effects. You can’t ask for a better medium to spread rumor and disinformation.
Then, to supercharge its badness, it sorts by “engagement” which promotes the dumbest or most triggering stuff.
Think of the last point this way: two people walk past you. One says “hi.” The other strips and smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken and saluting Hitler. Which of these two people maximizes engagement?
The peanut butter smeared clucking Nazi is now President. The opinions that dominate discourse everywhere are now the opinions of those types of people.
Social media is collective brain poison. Bluesky and Mastodon might be slightly less bad on the “maximizing engagement” part but they still cause the context collapse and echo chamber effects. The “microblogging” format is inherently toxic and irredeemable.
I get why you or anyone would say that. But I assure you, it is less accountable and more disinformation than anything remotely positive or helpful. Source? Arab Spring.
Twitter, and other similar designs are parasocial mass media.
(And I should note I left in 2017 when even the funny people couldn’t get a grip on what was happening online)
This is what short form posting was meant for. Jokes and quips from witty people and announcements for things I care about.
That Twitter became a primary source of news for anyone is a major indicator of the decline of civilization
mostly bad, though.
For example, instagram is clearly trying to understand what political side i lean on and pushes me that kind of content. I have to be very careful what kind of stuff i like otherwise my feed gets very polluted with political content rather than with interesting tech stuff and cats videos.
On the other hand, X/Twitter is routinely serving me better and more interesting technical content.
One of the core things a company needs to do to demonstrate it needs a trademark protected is that it’s actively using said trademark. If X has effectively abandoned Twitter, then it can’t really claim it still needs to protect the name.
What you’re describing is more the “Kleenex” effect where words become commonplace. In this case another company builds a platform that has “tweets.” There it’s even more important that the company with the trademark shows that they use the trademark. Here the owner has basically scrubbed the trademark from their existence hence why folks are making these claims.
Nonsense. The core reason to enforce trademarks is to prove that you have it.
The yo-yo used to be a trademark too, but the problem was what else do you call it? If the "owner" of a trademark cannot defend it, they don't have it. That's how trademark law is very different than copyright (which is implicit and automatic): You can lose a trademark even if you register it and popularise it, if you can't prove that the trademark represents your actual trade.
> [I think] the trademark should hold for as long as a reasonable person can be confused by the new Twitter regardless of people's dislike towards Elon.
That's your opinion man. Thankfully the law doesn't work that way.
I don't even know whether you mean X (the new thing that was once twitter) or tweet (the new thing that claims to will-be what twitter once was)
> I may be biased because I still go to Twitter via twitter.com.
and that didn't help in the slightest, but domain squatting is very common on the Internet.
That's something we hear often but it's not grounded in an legal reality: trademarks are purely a form of intellectual property that a person (physical or moral) can hold and it doesn't come with any attached liability: you can't hold a company accountable for violating the trust built around its brand name in past year, and the owner is free to sell the brand name to another company or change their products in a way that mislead the consumer about its quality.
In fact, should a trademark come with a promise about the quality of the product, Twitter would have lost it's trademark as soon as Elon transformed it into a disinformation machine (by breaking how the blue tick works and boosting paying account's content).
The legal purpose of the trademark is to protect identifying marks for the purposes of conducting business (trade)--literally its name. The subsidiary public interest of attaching trust to that mark isn't directly protected, but failing to police the use of trademark is sufficient grounds to lose the trademark, which is why companies tend to be overly aggressive in suing people for violating the trademark.
Not quite. There is no litigation requirement to renew a trademark registration. Trademarks are in fact the only type of intellectual property that can be preserved in perpetuity.
Litigation is an attempt to prevent genericide, and might fail at that.
Trademarks can be preserved even in the absence of litigation. Cancellation cases in US law typically require evidence of abandonment and lack of evidence for intended re-uptake. Litigation is not necessary to refute abandonment.
The heksher marks and logos offered by kosher-certification organizations are protected by trademark; using the trademark under license specifically assures the customer that the organization's standards have been followed precisely, and using the trademark without license defeats the purpose.
Similarly, the American Halal Foundation, the USDA Organic seal, the UL logo and many other programs use the mechanism of trademark to guarantee that the product or service meets their standards.
But the American Halal Foundation could revise their definition of what counts as Halal, and then license the brand to a company that doesn't meet the current criteria, without asking for permission from anyone.
It's in your wording already: “the customer that the organization's standards have been followed precisely” (emphasis mine), nothing prevents the organization from changing their standards (well, maybe the licensing agreement with their customer brands does, but that's purely a contract thing and has nothing to to with the trademark per se).
You can come up with other mechanisms that would work, but this is the one that we have in existence now.
> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.
We could need some decentralized way to share "tweets" though. Not linked to greedy billionaires.