The reason I don't call X "Twitter" is because it's pretty clear to me that it's not Twitter.
Elon Musk might own the intellectual property known as Twitter. He might own assets that used to be called Twitter. Some of the folks who used to work at Twitter may now be working at X.
But X ain't Twitter because Twitter is dead. I'm not spreading false info; it's the plain truth. And you know how I know? Because Elon Musk himself admits it.
What we used to know as Twitter had an API that third-party developers could mess with. It had that account verification thing, even if it kinda sucked. Twitter was the spot where you could find cool new ideas and news.
That ain't X, and calling X Twitter is just disrespecting what Twitter once was.
@jwz Sometimes I hear people—even people who should know better—make statements like, "It's a shame that Twitter re-branded itself as X."
But actually, that's not quite accurate.
Here's what really happened: Elon Musk owned a company called X for many years. And guess what? This company ended up acquiring Twitter.
Once X took over Twitter, Elon Musk made some significant changes. He decided to let go of a lot of employees and removed many of Twitter's core features. As a result, Twitter no longer focused on its original purpose, which was to share information with the public. At one point, Elon Musk even went so far as to rename it "Titter."
Eventually, X fully integrated Twitter into its operations. They essentially used Twitter as a building block to create an entirely new product.
It's important to note that X's objective wasn't to become Twitter. Instead, they aspire to be a versatile "everything" app similar to WeChat.
In a way, Twitter became a sacrificial lamb, sacrificed so that X could come into existence.
@atomicpoet@jwz You're kinda condescending here. My bio translates literally as “I was saying Twitter was a far-right social media before it was cool.”
Dorsey has delayed the shift to targeted posts (through mass surveillance, based on its users' “interests”) after the 2016 US election not to tamper with the Pepe bots advertising before each of the candidates' posts.
And there's a lot more to say about that. You shouldn't “'know more”, you just haven't done any prior research on this topic. I've been researching on this topic for years, and I've been abused by Twitter – as in “domestic abuse, by its stakeholders, automated through computers” – for 8 years, I still haven't fully recovered from it.
Please don't cherry pick on the fact that I'm calling it “domestic abuse”, it would just harm the note object type as an information factory/plantation/school/prison/military camp/whatever.
