I think there's a transition period, as with Meta and Alphabet. For as long as it's all hosted on the twitter.com domain, it doesn't really make sense to abandon the name Twitter.
Companies are allowed to change their names. If we didn’t roll with it then FANG would be something like TCKB (The Facebook, Cadabra, Kibble, BackRub).
I didn’t know about that one - and that article/obit is a great find, thanks for sharing. :) Funny thing is that Monday is now a productivity/team tool that I know a few people really like. Maybe they got a deal from PwC on the URL?
It was the peak of dotcom boom silliness. One of my friends worked there and said the company were beside themselves with glee that they’d bagged a six letter word dotcom domain name and had to use it.
Their rebranding didn't really effect anything beyond the holding company. Facebook is still called Facebook, and the Google Pixel is still made by Google. I bet the general public has pretty much zero familiarity with the Meta / Alphabet brands.
In essence it was nothing more than an attempt to misdirect public attention away from their well-known brands. See, it's Alphabet doing a bad thing - they are totally different from Google!
While they are, everyone else is allowed to ignore them doing this, particularly when it's silly. For instance, there was a period of about 18 months in the early noughties when the Royal Mail (the UK post office) changed its name to Consignia. Everyone sensibly ignored this, and they quietly changed it back.
I heard one of the people responsible for the Consignia branding change talking about how the drama was entirely a media fiction, and found him convincing.
The basic gist was "The Post Office" and "Royal Mail" brand were not going anywhere. "Consignia" was a brand intended for Europe (and indeed worldwide) cargo, logistics and transport parts of the business where those existing names were ill-suited (e.g. other countries have royals too).
But you get enough misleading media stories and you're forced to roll back things you were never intending to do in the first place. A victory for common sense, it was not.
edit: apparently the parent company is now called "International Distributions Services plc" which is super generic.
but then all the spoiled, overpaid programmers on hacker news would have to get jobs in the real world for actual competitive wages, rather than the current raising rivals cost to crush competitive startups monopoly maintaining strategy employed by companies making outsized profits by being a monopoly conduit for reaching people with advertising...............................................
I still follow Twitter a bit because it is a better source for local news than the cesspool that is Nextdoor. Over the past two months or so I haven't seen a single big brand advertiser.
A quick scroll right now: ads for a shirt that hides belly fat, a dating site for unvaccinated people, a "natures dongs" 2024 calendar, a website that may or may not sell ketamine, and a few knockoff "mindfullness" and sleep aid apps.
Twitter is the new cable channels after midnight advertising where you randomly run an ad for a food chopping device and see how many insomniacs call and order it.
I'm in Germany, and my Twitter account still technically exists. (I have wiped the history and log into it once a week to retain the username that I wrote on talks etc. for over a decade.)
I had a look around the "For You" feed to compare: I got ads for Babbel (the language learning app), a company that etches images into glass cubes as a souvenir, a bank selling personal credits at dubiously low interest rates, a "ChatGPT prompting cheat sheet", and a travel ad for Abu Dhabi.
Not quite the cesspool you describe, but still, a significant change from what I remember when I used Twitter actively. It used to be mostly big-name brands, both international and national ones.
Yup. I never used Twitter as social media, but it was a decent source for local news. The format just works really well for short-form realtime updates.
No bullshit, just a "tanker exploded, keep windows closed" from the fire department, and some dude who happened to be passing by sharing pics of it.
Heh, that sounds _exactly_ like my feed as well. There also is a calendar of dogs pooping that I've gotten about a hundred times. Seeking Arrangements also showing me tons of ads despite the fact that I make it no secret that I'm happily married on twitter, which is funny too.
Design twitter is still very hot which is why I recently rejoined, to connect with more folks in my industry. But the ads(and bots) definitely seem like a much worse problem than when I had an account in 2016.
> It’s not really worth going into the mechanics of what led one of the world’s richest people down the same dumb rabbit hole...
Wow, what journalism. Not worth going into? A journalist uninterested in investigating a bizarre, damaging set of allegations? You have to pay journalists to not do that!
I find it funny that they focus on the pizza place, when the real meat of the conspiracy theory, that the most powerful people in the world frequented a plane called the Lolita express and went to an island owned by a known pedophile and human trafficker known for throwing parties for the sake of trafficking people, that cameras malfunctioned right when he killed himself in a federal prison cell, is much more interesting. I don't think anyone really disputes that powerful people do whatever they want regardless of law or morality, that they use their power to get away with it, or that it's likely that for at least some subset of them, the "whatever they want" involves trafficked children. But sure, let's talk about the pizza place, it's not worth going into.
If you need any more evidence that the media is nothing more than state or special interest propaganda you really need to contemplate all your choices that you've ever made, because your mind was lost to you somewhere in your past. If you don't have the stomach for that, numerous videos exist online for you to find of prominent news anchors talking about having the Epstein story years before his arrest and subsequent death and their higher ups telling them to squash it, that should suffice.
Again with the pizza place. I don't care about the pziza place. Nobody really does. It's a distraction.
And we aren't talking about Epstein's activities. We are talking about the activities of everyone else involved with him. Presidents, billionaires, senators, filmmakers, power brokers and influential people of all sorts. Our world is run by organized crime and the people covering for them won't shut up about some pizza joint.
Twitter has all sorts of content. They are maybe filtering that stuff for you for some reason. Their algos move in mysterious ways. This is quite interesting just at random - AI turning memes into video https://nitter.net/Suhail/status/1729365655227711812#m
51 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2163472.stm
So it should be MANA.
Updated FB/Google's names, dropped Netflix (because it's really more of a media company), and added MS.
Their rebranding didn't really effect anything beyond the holding company. Facebook is still called Facebook, and the Google Pixel is still made by Google. I bet the general public has pretty much zero familiarity with the Meta / Alphabet brands.
In essence it was nothing more than an attempt to misdirect public attention away from their well-known brands. See, it's Alphabet doing a bad thing - they are totally different from Google!
Meta
Microsoft
Alphabet
Apple
Amazon
Netflix
The first few years of this century were _weird_.
The basic gist was "The Post Office" and "Royal Mail" brand were not going anywhere. "Consignia" was a brand intended for Europe (and indeed worldwide) cargo, logistics and transport parts of the business where those existing names were ill-suited (e.g. other countries have royals too).
But you get enough misleading media stories and you're forced to roll back things you were never intending to do in the first place. A victory for common sense, it was not.
edit: apparently the parent company is now called "International Distributions Services plc" which is super generic.
Contemporary news article covering this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2002480.stm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu_(Citizen_Kane)#Cultural...
I think people get cancelled when you don't use the name they wish to be called. That would be ironic.
Was getting tired, after clicking on salacious headlines, of being thrush in-my-face by paywalls.
It hooks you with a quick dopamine rush but also sneaks in some low-key anxiety.
The buzz comes fast and goes fast, while the anxiety creeps in slow but hangs around longer.
When I'm stressed, I go after those dopamine hits, but they just end up making my stress worse.
That's why I've stopped using it and feeling much better for it.
A quick scroll right now: ads for a shirt that hides belly fat, a dating site for unvaccinated people, a "natures dongs" 2024 calendar, a website that may or may not sell ketamine, and a few knockoff "mindfullness" and sleep aid apps.
Twitter is the new cable channels after midnight advertising where you randomly run an ad for a food chopping device and see how many insomniacs call and order it.
I had a look around the "For You" feed to compare: I got ads for Babbel (the language learning app), a company that etches images into glass cubes as a souvenir, a bank selling personal credits at dubiously low interest rates, a "ChatGPT prompting cheat sheet", and a travel ad for Abu Dhabi.
Not quite the cesspool you describe, but still, a significant change from what I remember when I used Twitter actively. It used to be mostly big-name brands, both international and national ones.
No bullshit, just a "tanker exploded, keep windows closed" from the fire department, and some dude who happened to be passing by sharing pics of it.
Design twitter is still very hot which is why I recently rejoined, to connect with more folks in my industry. But the ads(and bots) definitely seem like a much worse problem than when I had an account in 2016.
Wow, what journalism. Not worth going into? A journalist uninterested in investigating a bizarre, damaging set of allegations? You have to pay journalists to not do that!
I find it funny that they focus on the pizza place, when the real meat of the conspiracy theory, that the most powerful people in the world frequented a plane called the Lolita express and went to an island owned by a known pedophile and human trafficker known for throwing parties for the sake of trafficking people, that cameras malfunctioned right when he killed himself in a federal prison cell, is much more interesting. I don't think anyone really disputes that powerful people do whatever they want regardless of law or morality, that they use their power to get away with it, or that it's likely that for at least some subset of them, the "whatever they want" involves trafficked children. But sure, let's talk about the pizza place, it's not worth going into.
If you need any more evidence that the media is nothing more than state or special interest propaganda you really need to contemplate all your choices that you've ever made, because your mind was lost to you somewhere in your past. If you don't have the stomach for that, numerous videos exist online for you to find of prominent news anchors talking about having the Epstein story years before his arrest and subsequent death and their higher ups telling them to squash it, that should suffice.
And we aren't talking about Epstein's activities. We are talking about the activities of everyone else involved with him. Presidents, billionaires, senators, filmmakers, power brokers and influential people of all sorts. Our world is run by organized crime and the people covering for them won't shut up about some pizza joint.
Why isn’t the WP pausing advertising there?
https://advertisers.mediaradar.com/the-washington-post-adver...
>Last ran on Reddit on 11/1/2023.