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?
Forever, because X looks like a placeholder and media wants to be clear so they use the name that people actually associate with that trash website. It will never just be X because it is a terrible name for a business.
I never stopped calling it Twitter. X is a window manager, a letter of the alphabet, or the most algebraic variable name. It’s not a name for a company.
tHe EvErYtHiNg aPp!!!11
As long as it makes Musk mad 😂
I think it might be this. A lot of traditional media outlets are mad about twitter becoming such a necessity for them. The old guard is mad that they have to cater to this bullshit online platform. The new guard is mad at the fact that the best outlet for breaking online news is suddenly owned and operated by a fascist.
All of them want to say that x is bullshit, but they don’t want to actually lose the clicks/ market share that comes with it. So they keep passive-aggressively calling it twitter.
Drunkenly thinking about it, this is kinda like calling a trans person by their dead name. Except it’s insulting a shitty company led by a shithead, so I’m cool with it.
Especially when said shithead is fine with deadnaming people.
I think, the main problem is that “X” doesn’t look like a name.
When someone’s not starkly aware of the platform being called that, they might think the author typoed.
Or is using it like the idiom “they posted it to X, Y and Z” (so just a nondescript set of platforms).
Or genuinely means the letter X and that just doesn’t make sense in the context presented.“X, formerly Twitter” is just a better name than “X”, because it is recognizable.
Twitter is the only time I will ever be okay with deadnaming.
I’m pretty sure that “x, formerly known as twitter” is the name of the company. So… forever.
Everyone collectively agreed x is stupid and I hope spite will make sure this sentiment never changes
Almost as stupid as facebook creating a platform called threads. Zero creativity, and maxium collaboration inconvience with our language usage, plus facebook trying to stick their nose in fediverse where the whole point was to get away from their centralized metaverse BS. Facebook can fuck off.
Pretty sure it’s still just twitter
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.
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.
I think one of the reasons why we’re still seeing this done 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.
The next gen is gonna be making fun of Gen Z by saying “formally Twitter” and Millennials are finally going to win.
Only allowed to use it when wearing a penguin suit.
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.
It is happening. If you look for news of, e.g. “Arnold Schwarzenegger endorses Harris”, most outlets just say ‘X’.
In my results, The Guardian, the BBC, The Independent, Fortune, MSNBC, The Washington Post and The Hill just used ‘X’. Politico said ‘on social media’. Only Forbes did the ‘formerly Twitter’ thing.
I never stopped calling it Twitter and I never will. Just like Facebook will always be Facebook.
