this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14106579

On Monday, it appears X attempted to encourage users to cease referring to it as Twitter and instead adopt the name X. Some users began noticing that posts viewed via X for iOS were changing any references of "Twitter.com" to "X.com" automatically.

If a user typed in "Twitter.com," they would see "Twitter.com" as they typed it before hitting "Post." But, after submitting, the platform would show "X.com" in its place on the X for iOS app, without the user's permission, for everyone viewing the post.

And shortly after this revelation, it became clear that there was another big issue: X was changing anything ending in "Twitter.com" to "X.com."

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 7 months ago

I don't even use Twitter, but I find it so enraging that no regular person could so publicly fail at their job and face no repercussion. I know that rich people have a totally different set of rules and playing a totally different game, but goddamn dude. I don't know how geeks, dorks, hacker-types, and techno-wizards, can continue to think that these MEGACORP leaders are anything but fuckin' losers. "BIG TECH" and even mid-sized tech companies are full of this sort of stupidity at the top. From a labor standpoint it really sucks that individuals or teams will get the heat for this not the management level for sort of thing.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Someone on here pointed out the name change would break links the day it was announced and somehow Elon found a way to make it break in an even dumber way

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

He basically tried taking a post-it note with "X.com" written on it and stuck it on top of anything he saw that said "twitter.com" without actually fixing it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

for a second i thought you were talking about chapo chat lmfao

[–] [email protected] 23 points 7 months ago (1 children)

THEY HAVENT EVEN CHANGED THE ACTUAL FUCKING URL AFTER A WHOLE YEAR AND A HALF LMAO

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

I'll bet that a lot of the devs that managed backend tooling are gone now and their scripts just won't work with "x.com" as the domain name.

The fact that they're essentially overwriting url hyperlinks instead of swapping domains shows that there's some sort of major bitrot happening behind the curtain.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

it will always be twitter and I will continue to mock anyone who tries to call it "x" by feigning ignorance and asking if they're talking about some porn site

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago

This is so dumb

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago

Shoutout to revolutionary black liberationist Malcom Twitter

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I'm by no means an expert at website things, but wouldn't it be way simpler to take any request to twitter.com and just redirect it to x.com? Pretty sure websites do this all the time, like if you type chapo.chat into the address bar it loads hexbear.net instead.

Actually they literally already do this in the opposite direction. x.com goes to twitter.com. So someone types twitter.com in a tweet, twitter filters it to x.com, then when you click on it it loads twitter.com. Great job Elon, 10/10 no notes.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

This is a branding move. He wants the name "x.com" to show up more.

The rewritten url still hyperlinks to "twitter.com" and "x.com" still redirects to "twitter.com"

They didn't want to change domain names because that's a nightmare for backend tooling. I'll bet there's over a decade of internal tools that check for "twitter.com" in some response or something.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

Damn that sucks, hope he didn't fire all of his experienced engineers who could have gone through the backend and made those changes.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Has there ever been an instance of a very well known brand changing its name and being successful at changing it?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago

germany-cool was a successful rebranding even though they tried their best to keep the same ingredients

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago

Comparable to this? I honestly cannot imagine. This situation would be like if Kleenex had tried to rebrand themself as "A" or something. Like the joke about Kleenex is its brand name is so known and superfluous that even generic tissues are called "kleenex". That's ubiquity you frankly can't buy for any amount of money. People used "tweet" in casual fucking conversation for gods sake and the fucking petulant idiot king just flushed it down the toilet. Breathtaking.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I still call this place chapo chat

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

Excuse me but it's chacha

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

the only half-decent execution of this I can think of is Datsun becoming Nissan

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

//TODO: add comments

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

And shortly after this revelation, it became clear that there was another big issue: X was changing anything ending in "Twitter.com" to "X.com."

aaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

We don't need to multiply

We don't need to multiply

We don't need to multiply

We don't need to multiply

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Without clicking through to the article myself I want an example of this, can't think of any websites that end in Twitter.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

The concern is that scammers can create fake phishy versions of sites that end in "__x.com" as ___twitter.com to trick Twitter users into divulging passwords or other sensitive info. Because to the Twitter user it'll look like the genuine site that ends with __x.com on the Twitter app but it won't actually be.

Some examples of sites already made to prevent scammers from using them are:
Netflitwitter, Ametwitter, Fedetwitter, and Roblotwitter, dot com, which falsely showed as Netflix, Amex, FedEx, and Roblox, dot com.
Though I think they (xitter programmers) already manually added exceptions for the examples that trended which stopped that from happening, for those specific examples.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Oh damn, smart

Thanks

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

The problem is that you can make websites that end in twitter. An example used in the article is someone makes a site called "netflitwitter.com" and posts a link to it on twitter. Twitter will now display it as "netflix.com" and if you click it it sends you to "netflitwitter.com"

Twitter is now a phishing paradise, in other words.