One of the most recognizeable brands from the past 20 years is suddenly changing it’s branding and throwing all that recognition into the trash. I don’t know why people keep acting like this isn’t worth talking about. I don’t give two shits about musk or Twitter and don’t even have Twitter accounts or whatever, but even I recognize this is a noteworthy change (and his reasons for doing it) for the world.
I actually do wonder whether he is trying to destroy it on purpose. Every step he’s taken is perplexing if he wanted the platform to actually succeed. Of course it is also possible he is just very very stupid.
I believe he wants to feel like he created this platform all by himself. He buys platforms and makes them his own. This is just him trying to make Twitter more his own. Ego
Meta’s rebranding at least makes sense. The company has been more than Facebook for a long time, so collecting everything under a different umbrella isn’t too far fetched. Facebook still exists as a product, so they haven’t thrown away all the brand value. Google did kind of the same with Alphabet.
Rebranding Twitter to X doesn’t make sense at all.
Especially because they bought a bunch of companies that weren't Facebook. Another example is Google rebranding as Alphabet. Those make complete sense.
But they're not just re-branding. Twitter is now under some kind of corporate shell company. I haven't seen much coverage of that, but my suspicion is that it's intended to act as some kind of insulator to contain Twitter's debts.
Like when they break a company into pieces and put everyone's debts and no assets into a single part and then that part declares bankruptcy and all the debt magically goes away, leaving everything else with lots of assets and no debts and a future that looks really rosy. I can't help but think that this is something similar to that.
Wow, I wish I could split myself up into separate entities to bankrupt part of so that I can get away Scott free. But alas, I’m a real person, not a company with “personhood.”
Can we also talk about how absurd that picture at the bottom of the login page is? It looks like something a warez site would have as its landing page in like 2003. Made by some guy named xXx_l33tz3r0_xXx
Haha, this makes me actually nostalgic thinking about some of the warez sites I frequented back in 2002/2003! Scanning for “pubs” with scetchy software was what I considered a good time back then.
Part of me wonders if it’s an attempt to tank the SEO, so people can’t search for or news or easily talk about the site anymore - because it’s been nothing but bad.
Musk previously owned an online banking site known as x.com, which would later merge with PayPal, another service founded by Musk, which then became a separate entity with Musk no longer being involved it.
And when Musk was forced to complete the purchase of Twitter, he announced plans to make Twitter into a “Super app” like China’s WeChat application, which can be used for payments.
Musk’s hyperfocus on X might also be because when he was in his twenties, everything “cool” was having an X in it, like XForce and stuff like that.
He also wanted to create his X Corp company to have a single X as its name, but he couldn’t do that because there was an Alphabet company already using that name.
Musk didn’t found PayPal. X.com merged with Confinity, another online financial site (founded by Peter Thiel and others). Confinity had already begun development of PayPal at that time. In the resulting company, still called X.com, there was a series of leadership conflicts, with Musk pushing out CEO Bill Harris to become CEO, before himself being replaced by Peter Thiel. It was under Thiel that the company changed it’s name to PayPal, and later went public. By the time there was a company called “PayPal”, Musk was not longer involved with daily operations.
More seriously: Elon decided it’s a good move to rebrand his new toy. Nobody knows for sure what’s going through his head. It’s probably some sort of OCD, or something…
Some dumbass made a country song with the usual horrifyingly cliched sort of lyrics, in this case lines such as
”Try that in a small town/ See how far ya make it down the road/ Around here, we take care of our own.”
“Got a gun that my granddad gave me/ They say one day they’re gonna round up/ Well that shit might fly in the city/ Good luck.”
The problem is where the video was set, and contents (many modern protests). WP sums it up as
Accusations of racism prompted a country music channel to pull the video, which is set at the site of an infamous lynching and race riot. But Republicans are embracing Aldean.
Thanks for the summary! My bad, didn’t think “small town country music” would’ve been specific enough to go off, but guess I underestimated the algorithm again. Should’ve at least tried according to some of these responses I guess
Imagine there’s a big public square and everyone is encouraged to draw on it in with chalk of any color. Except you only get one tiny fragment of chalk every five minutes.
Hard to make anything meaningful, huh?
So people coordinate, usually via discord chat. Someone comes up with a pattern, maps it onto coordinates on this square, and users go out and put down their mark at preselected coordinates, and others mark on top of it, and the most coordinated communities succeed in creating and maintaining coherent images - which are usually ads for their own community. Or flags. Or anime characters. Or something else just as mind-numbingly boring.
Because it’s difficult to maintain any real estate on this square with so many people throwing chalk everywhere, communities build robots to go make their chalk marks for them. You get your chalk piece and you give it to a bot and it goes out and puts it in the proper coordinates. Individuals can still make marks, but they usually only last a few moments before a bot or community horde of zombie people come by and place their marks over it.
And this boring nonsense goes on for a few days until the admins decide arbitrarily that the event is over.
I’ll admit it’s interesting to watch these efforts coalleswue into a mosaic of vaguely coherent digital graffiti, but actually participating is tedious and frustrating as heck.
It’s a subreddit where people can add pixels to a big blank canvas to make a community image. It’s something Reddit only does every few years. People are using it to protest because it was put up in the middle of Spez actively destroying Reddit to get it ready to sell in the IPO.
This was in fact a stroke of genius on Reddits part because all those protesters who ran to log in and show their discontent did nothing but boost Reddits engagement figures and make it look like all the previous protests failed and that Reddit is more popular than ever.
If you’re really upset about the changes to Reddit the best thing you can do is STOP USING REDDIT. People don’t seem to care though as long as they get to graffiti a swear word onto a digital wall…
Don’t feel bad about not noticing it, r/place is usually only accessible for around 72 hours. After that it goes away for a few years until someone way up the ladder decides to grace us with it’s presence again lol
The media oligarchs are tired of giving crumbs to the actors that make their content and create their wealth.
They would prefer to give aspiring actors a day’s pay to scan their likeness, own that person’s likeness in perpetuity to generate with AI, and that aspiring actor can go find another career or can fuck off and die as far as they’re concerned.
Humanity’s tolerance for encouragement of insatiable, sociopathic greed will be humanity’s end, and given the current climate, it’s coming soon. Insatiable greed is a destructive disease.
We should look at high level millionaires and billionaires the same way we look at practicing pedophiles, as people with a dangerous disorder they lack the capacity to suppress that need to be stopped, restrained, and treated so they don’t continue to harm the rest of the population. Instead half of us deify them, it’s bonkers.
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