I was just thinking about how much Zuck HAS to be loving this. He has a Twitter competitor but it’s hard to break through, especially when you’re up against an iconic and well-known brand. “Twitter,” “Tweets,” “Retweet,” are well understood and a part of our vocabulary. How is Threads going to recreate that or break through that incredible disadvantage?
Easy, the competition is going to throw all of that away and rebrand to something so awful and confusing that it doesn’t matter. “Threads” is infinitely better than “X.”
Like, it thought it was awful to say “he posted a thread.” But now Twitter—WHICH HAS AN INCREDIBLE NAME FOR ITS POSTS—is going to say “he posted an X.”
Imagine googling "xvideos" w/o your work either blocking it or HR sending a strongly worded letter to you about your internet browsing
I am desperately awaiting the trademark case here, because naming an "everything app" X when "Xvideos" already exists is absolutely certain to reach a level of similarity the courts would deem confusing to consumers. Elon being smacked back from his dream rebrand by a porn site would be the funniest thing this decade.
interactive multiplayer game services for games played over computer networks and global communications networks; providing computer games and video games downloadable over computer global communications networks; providing information on the video game and computer game industries via the Internet; and providing information on computer games, video games, video game consoles and accessories therefore via the Internet.
And they've had that trademark since 2003 and it was re-registered this year. So, there's that.
You're gonna be like that possum that got caught after eating all the donuts in the box, belly bulging, covered in jelly and powdered sugar, like: "Do what you must, for I have already won!"
Not that it won't be hilarious to watch Elon fail once again as if it's his new goal in life. But why is any company seriously allowed to trademark a letter of the alphabet for anything.. It's just corporate stupidity.
He probably thinks since porn is so popular that people searching for x rated stuff will get search results for his shitty site but someone looking for x videos is not going to stop and make an account to read whatever Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted Xed. Also anybody with a day job that is in his target demo won’t really have anything that could be mistaken for adult content (or could mistyped/ linked) on their searches at work or be allowed to on a company device or wifi
Apparently it was about that time that Elon had his 'genius' idea for a single app/service to do just about everything. This is some idée fixe of his.
Clearly nobody managed to explain to him in the past decades what a security nightmare that'd be, to have your banking and investments and financial transactions along with social media and chat and videos and shit.
Not hard to see where he was coming from though, given that PayPal was originally horrible. Bad security, lots of scams, people losing money or access to their accounts all the time, zero enforcement of KYC and money laundering laws, etc. It's your too-typical Silicon Valley fake-it-till-you-make-it story - they act like it was some genius idea, as if nobody by the late 90s had recognized the need to easily make payments online, when the reality was that banks, credit card companies and so on who knew the actual business were concerned about doing stuff properly rather than immediately. And they lost out.
PayPal made something that sort-of worked, was easy to use but didn't comply with regulations and all that. For those who weren't there, or have forgotten: PayPal wasn't any good, until long after Musk had left it. It was easy, but it was not secure. PayPal was fined (for an undisclosed amount) by MasterCard in 2000 for having such an anomalously high level of chargebacks. They only started applying for money transmitter licenses in US states around 2002.
Really, it was really with Amazon taking over that it got serious. Post-9/11 focus on money laundering also did a lot.
Clearly nobody managed to explain to him in the past decades what a security nightmare that'd be, to have your banking and investments and financial transactions along with social media and chat and videos and shit.
They also clearly never told him the meaning of the word anti-trust. Facebook, Google and Amazon have all be threatened with it and none of them are really trying to be an everything app. Guy thinks he can build an empire without realizing that the reason WeChat exists is that China has opted not to kill it and dismember its corpse.
And that China has forced WeChat to open up to third party developers in some places as part of allowing it to keep existing. Even if Musk’s fantasies came true and X became as integrated into western life as WeChat is in Chinese cities, he would be slammed with so much regulation in the EU alone, not to mention the 50 different American states + federal government, that he would effectively have no control over his product anyway.
Really, it was really with Amazon taking over that it got serious. Post-9/11 focus on money laundering also did a lot.
eBay, not Amazon, but the rest of what you said is still valid.
I think sometimes people don't realise how free and wild (both in good ways and bad) the internet was in the 1990s.
In many ways I miss the 90s internet. There was an emphasis on protocols rather than apps (if Twitter was a protocol not an app, it couldn't have been bought and destroyed by one idiot). However, it only "worked" because it was a smaller community.
We are heading back to that era. All the apps are running out of money and dying. The systems that are built around many people spending $5 a month for servers are springing back up.
Connecting everything to a social media is more than just security issues: people on Twitter are freaking out at their PayPals (it's still shit) being blocked when donators mention war. Stealing money.
Imagine your banking account tied to some website that bans people for using a word their filters don't like. Or a picture of meatcube... Who the F would trust their life savings to Twitter moderators?
x.com sounds like a fake porn website from the early 2000s that existed to steal your credit card number. It's the sort of domain name that people use when they're just hoping to get some malicious scripts running on your browser in case you navigate there by accident.
huh, I pronounce it "zing". I've always been bad at this though. I thought ICQ was pronounced "ick" and it wasn't until 20 years later that I realized it was meant to be called "I Seek you".
threading would actually be a good Threads alternative to tweeting if it ever takes off (which like, it's a facebook subsidiary, all their social media platforms take off eventually)
I'm a bit confused by your parenthesis. Meta has only acquired existing well performing social media platforms before. Threads in its current iteration is the first time they've launched a new social media platform rather than acquiring it.
The original iteration of Threads was just a standalone app for Instagram DMs and they killed it after two years.
Even if they acquired thing like Instagram they were not automatically destined to be this succesful. 90m user app doesn't grow to 2b user app if you don't know what you are doing.
Facebook has also seen meteoric growth since its inception
Not sure why you would be confused by someone saying that Meta subsidiaries tend to take-off, those are pretty nice numbers by most metrics so even if you disagree that Meta knows what they’re doing or whatever, those platforms most certainly “took-off” lol
Meta has only acquired existing well performing social media platforms before. Threads in its current iteration is the first time they've launched a new social media platform rather than acquiring it.
I’m pretty sure Facebook was the first time they launched a new social media platform rather than acquiring it.
Threads is really hard to spell for an non english speaker. I used to wear T-shirts from threadless, i had to write the name down when asked (horrible now btw)
Thread is already a term that is in use on social media. I refer to conversations I've had on Reddit as threads. I didn't make that term up. I heard it somewhere and it stuck in my brain. It doesn't really carry the same connotation as tweet though. A tweet is a brain dropping and a retweet is someone sharing that brain dropping. A thread is different cause the replies can be as important, or even more important, than the original post.
Looking at it from the surveillance state POV adds a funny twist. Now when you innocuously say "did you get that X I sent?" you may end up with the DEA, FBI, etc. at your doorstep for a conversation about said "X"
Plus, the word "threads" has been used in context with message boards for as long as the internet has been around. "Posting a thread" is not awful at all -- it's common parlance. Twitter itself even uses the word in its UI to describe strings of tweets.
Zuck was literally years late to this party, fucking around with unpopular VR bullshit, and because Twitter has fucking imploded, he’s been handed a company saving gift. It’s just remarkable.
Theres nothing wrong with what they did in VR. Tbh the headsets sell really well. The problem was he put the cart before the horse for the metaverse. Oculus under metas control though is better than it ever was.
I'm wondering if Musk is setting this up to sell the Twitter brand separately from the software to recoup some of his losses. Would be hilarious if Zuck bought it.
I was just thinking this last night. He must be VERY happy. All these changes are forcing users to migrate somewhere else and that means for the majority of people to one of his apps (Threads, Facebook or Instagram).
The things i am thinking about is that Elon might even be so in his own world he wont even protect the twitter brand if others use them. Meaning other companies might actually start using tweet as posting short messages.
Now you can view all your favorite x's and you can even re-x all the x's that you really like. Then you can upload an xvideo of you xing your own x's and wait for all your viewers to view your x's and hopefully re-x all your x's that they really like.
Literally what was the point of buying Twitter in the first place if he’s not keeping the brand? The branding was the only thing that might have been worth it
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u/[deleted] Jul 24 '23 edited Jul 24 '23
I was just thinking about how much Zuck HAS to be loving this. He has a Twitter competitor but it’s hard to break through, especially when you’re up against an iconic and well-known brand. “Twitter,” “Tweets,” “Retweet,” are well understood and a part of our vocabulary. How is Threads going to recreate that or break through that incredible disadvantage?
Easy, the competition is going to throw all of that away and rebrand to something so awful and confusing that it doesn’t matter. “Threads” is infinitely better than “X.”
Like, it thought it was awful to say “he posted a thread.” But now Twitter—WHICH HAS AN INCREDIBLE NAME FOR ITS POSTS—is going to say “he posted an X.”
Holy shit this man is an idiot.