I’m genuinely curious about peoples thoughts on this.
It made sense for a while. But the branding change was 16 months ago. The URI change was 3 months ago. Everybody knows now what X is. Yet for some reason, I still see in news stories today:
“… on X — formerly known as Twitter — and said …”
I really don’t think that’s needed anymore. But I’m always one to want changes as fast and painless as possible.
So what do you think would be an appropriate amount of time to keep reminding everyone that Twitter is now X?
Months?
Years?
How many?
I have been mentally keeping track how often I see “formerly Twitter” and I’m surprised that it’s lasted this long tbh
I’ll keep calling it twitter as long as musk keeps deadnaming his daughter
Which daughter, what’s the source for that?
Edit: I have now been provided with a source, thanks!
Vivian. She publicly denounced him, changed her name, and gave an interview about how horrible musk is as a father. There are many articles written about this, here is just one.
Thanks!
This might not be to anyone’s satisfaction though because it suggests he doesn’t refer to Vivian at all, considering her “dead”, not actually deadnaming her, per se.
So you’ll call it X if he becomes a good parent?
Ha! Fat chance of that happening.
I dunno, maybe.
They really shouldn’t be allowed to name anything after a single letter. VW, BMW, ABC, TBS are all bad enough. X conflicts with too many established uses.
None of those brands you mention are letters. They mean things, and in fact started by being called those things, but people organically shortened their names. Stress on organically. X as a name is trying so hard to sound cool and futuristic that people felt forced to adopt it, and instantly hated it.
Comcast introduced the “Xfinity” branding in 2010. I still call refer to it as “Comcast”. Any conversation I have where an ISP comes up, the word “Comcast” is used. If someone says “Xfinity”, they often follow it up with “you know, Comcast”.
Now that’s a VERY clear brand change.
The name “X” is a VERY confusing brand change. It will likely be called Twitter forever. In fact at some point Musk will sell or give up on “X” and I guarantee within a year the new owner will change the name back to Twitter.
In that case Comcast is still the company name. Xfinity is just a branding of the consumer services division.
Sure it isn’t a perfect comparison, but the idea is the same.
I never stopped calling it Twitter and I never will. Just like Facebook will always be Facebook.
Until the company is dead
I think it will take a whole generation to die off before that happens, because X just isn’t significant enough as a word. You can’t say “I saw it on X” and have people understand you. You can’t say I exed, people still continue saying “I tweeted”. “I posted on X” is simply inferior.
X is just a vague term though. It’s also often used as a placeholder for unknown or variable things. So the “formerly Twitter” is going to stick for quite a while.
It’s like naming a product “The Thing”. Anyone who talks about it will always have to clarify what Thing they are talking about basically forever.
Without another name change, I don’t think that phrase will ever go away, for the simple fact that X as a name is too short and nondescript. In speech, X could refer to a someone you broke up with, or it could just be the beginning of another word, serving as a prefix. In text, it could refer to the actual letter itself, or the close button on a window, or a placeholder, or something NSFW.
There’s simply too many ways that X can be interpreted that even if people associate Twitter with X, people will still specify “formerly Twitter” just to avoid confusion
They will just call it threads. Because that’s what they will use
We didn’t stop hearing Prince referred to as “the artist formerly known as Prince” until he changed his name from that symbol back to Prince.
I expect the same for the website formerly known as Twitter.
Twitter is the only time I will ever be okay with deadnaming.
I think one of the reasons why we’re still seeing this dome by journalists is because Elon’s takeover is probably relevant to whatever it is they’re reporting. I’ve definitely seen articles just refer to it as “X”. But whenever it’s a story about some crazy racist shit someone said or how poorly their advertising business is doing, it’s “formerly Twitter”.
That said, I think online people who aren’t writing for news outlets and aren’t insane will — for the most part — always call it Twitter out of spite until the site either dies or Musk sells it and it changes back.
No one likes their x
I see what you did there
Hopefully in a year or two they’ll eventually just call it Twitter or maybe if we’re lucky it will go out of business and then they’ll probably still just call it Twitter because the X thing would then have just been a short lived portion of its overall lifespan.
