X automatically changed 'Twitter' to 'X' in domain names, breaking legit URLs

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.”

X is just a BAAAAAAD brand that it’s almost insulting the people who uses it, honestly were I’m from it sounds like an adult website…

One of the rules of branding is to choose a unique name to prevent confusion. Half the time I see the X logo I don’t know if they’re talking about X11 or the website formerly known as Twitter

Not to mention that from a visual perspective the icon ‘x’ is synonymous with closing or exiting a window. It’s a horrible choice on so many levels.

It’s funny that if you need to clarify X, you can say x11. If you need to clarify X, though, it’s still twitter

Oh, do you mean X the window manager or X the social media website?

The fact that a clarification like that needs to be made shows that Twitter has a branding problem.

Now, tell me which is which:

Heh, now as you mentioned, the logos do look very similar.

I immediately thought of the good old Scheiffler and Gettys book: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51YpMj4WSPL._SL500_.jpg

X is just a BAAAAAAD brand

So - a perfectly accurate name for the company then.

I mean… stockX exists too

No worries, it sounds like an adult website pretty universally. There’s three popular porn sites I can think of, which prominently have an X in their name.

My mate sent me a link to a twitter post that had the x.com link and for a moment I legit thought he sent me a porn link by accident.

Also it’s not really a brand, it’s just a fucking letter of the alphabet. It shouldn’t be possible to trademark letters of the alphabet. Basic decency, people

How about trademarking Alphabet?

Exactly. Believe it or not, someone invented that word at some point in history. And it wasn’t google.

I don’t really have an issue with that. No one else was using it to do business in the tech space, at least.

It’s a hell of a lot better than Facebook just stealing Meta from a company that was actively using it.

https://youtu.be/QDaKTTZtJZY

Elon is a living joke they already made in Futurama.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/QDaKTTZtJZY

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.

It’s like that everywhere. Elon is a fucking idiot.

It a dumpster fire branding, that they took an extremely long time to actually implement, and they still spit out this absolute trainwreck of a rebranding rollout.

People need to stop using Twitter. It’s like trying to using AOL or whatever now. It’s basically a dead product.

I am so puzzled by this. I’ve been using the Internet for 30 years, and in early 2000 people were much more standing up to principles. The greatest example was when digg changed how it operated with v4, people left it overnight. Now they prefer to be fucked over and don’t have any intention of changing it, and excuses are really lame like “alternatives are too hard”.

I think Yuval Harari was right and social media figured out how to hack our brains and control us.

It’s not only laymen either. I have Software Engineering friends who continue to use Twitter because RSS, Mastodon or any other alternative is “hard”. They have no core values or integrity whatsoever.

Why are they your friends, then?

Edit: I should have added more context. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be friends with Twitter users. I was referring to this:

They have no core values or integrity whatsoever.

I wouldn’t want to be friends with someone with “no integrity whatsoever.”

Reddit already existed and was a better option than Digg v3, sort of like how Digg was more useful than Fark for many. I don’t think there is a good replacement for Twitter yet because the people that create the best content are addicted to it.

Funny, Nicholas Gurewitch, the creator of the comic Perry Bible Fellowship, just got his Facebook account stolen from him and made a comic about this subject, how he’s still addicted to social media despite that happening…

https://pbfcomics.com/comics/hacked/

Literally the point.

The greatest example was when digg changed how it operated with v4

What did they change exactly?

Digg used to look like this: http://web.archive.org/web/20100603035130/http://digg.com/

They updated it to this: https://web.archive.org/web/20101231083935/http://digg.com/news

And basically reduced the amount of user-content, to promote… their own stuff? I don’t remember what they replaced it with. Users got pissed; left for Reddit.

Now it looks like a typical corporate website: https://digg.com/

News sites also need to stop going on about it. Its like feeding the troll. I’ve never used the thing other than looking at it briefly in its early days, and yet I’m constantly hearing about it. And here I am commenting about this apparently (Western) globally important website which has served no purpose in my life. What a waste of energy all around. Self perpetuating negative feedback loop tech wank. Digital town square my arse. The little I know about it is from bad headlines which I wish I could unsee as its of zero consequence.

There’s a whole host of modern journalists who don’t know how the fuck to do their jobs without twitter, I’d put money on that being the reason we still read so much about it

Porn twitter has been totally unaffected by all of this

Well, let’s add a couple more X’s to the domain name then.

I thought Elon was insane for wanting to rebrand twitter but apparently he’s not alone.

It’s twitter. Always has been.

So you mean setwitter.com ?

Let’s all start using AOL and MSN messenger

Msn messenger was perfectly fine, until people left me alone on there to join bloody skype

And Skype was great until Microsoft bought it.

AIM using Pidgin client when not on IRC with mIRC or X-Chat. MSN Messenger was never even on the list.

/gatekeeps 00s IMs ;)

I have stopped using it to read news. I still use it to keep touch with my professional community (scientists who haven’t moved to Bluesky or Mastodon), but that’s it. I wish it would just die. Until then I’ve scripted it and blocked lots of elements to make it look exactly like old Twitter

but what’s the alternative? mastodon is quite different, I’ve tried many times but always give up

I too have underestimated the glee of right wing trolls at twitters turn around. They are keeping it alive somehow.

Sell the twitter.com domain name you cowards.

I’m waiting for this day

That’s inviting phishing. Bad idea.

With a domain as valuable as Twitter.com it’s very unlikely it would be sold to a phishing group.

I still don’t ever see this happening.

Usually they end up abandoned (can’t name your company “Twitter” the next tens of years) and get hacked for phishing.

Just because it’s a bad idea doesn’t mean Musk won’t do it. On the contrary.

Not if someone runs a real site there.

Maybe a mastodon instance. I’ll put 20$ towards that.

Why not just switch your site redirects? Instead of x.com opening twitter.com make them go to x, and eventually stop the redirects and put a landing page on Twitter with a link to x.com. How do you expect people to stop calling it Twitter when that’s literally the site name even if you type in x.com

He doesn’t just want the links to change. He wants the mindshare to change. To erase twitter.com from consciousness. Because X is like, super cool, man. So the solution is to rewrite tweets so it’s impossible to say the ungood name.

Prob too many references to twitter.com in their code or whatever to fix or something similar?

find -type f -exec sed -i 's/twitter.com/x.com/g' {}\;

Take a backup first in case it breaks something, which it most likely will.

I don’t really know code but he has that curvy line and some different colors and shit so this should work. Ship it. No need to test.

in case it breaks something, which it most likely will.

Partially because you didn’t escape the dots.

Tell me you didn’t read the article without telling me you didn’t read the article.

Not like he doesn’t have the money to hire some people to get it done.

Not when he can just threaten everyone and tell them that they will all sleep on air mattresses at the office until it is done.

That’s what they’ve been doing. Shared links have been going to x, which redirects to Twitter. They started doing it the first time they tried changing and everything broke. This is their second try.

The only time it’s ok to dead name anyone is, Twitter. Twitter Twitter Twitter Twitter Twitter Twitter Twitter Twitter Suck it elon!

It’s fine to deadname any corporation. Corporations are not people.

Biologically it is a twitter and nothing can change that.

What’s the name on its original articles of incorporation?

I’m waiting for someone to marry a corporation just to show how absurd the idea of corporate personhood is.

I’ll believe a corporation is a person when I see Texas fuckin’ execute one.

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X automatically changed 'Twitter' to 'X' in domain names, breaking legit URLs(mashable.com)

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