1y ago

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."

181 comments

...
- 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
  
  Or the XCOM games.
  
  Heh, now as you mentioned, the logos do look very similar.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
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.
  
  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?
- 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
  
  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
- 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
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  Not like he doesn't have the money to hire some people to get it 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.
  
  I’m waiting for someone to marry a corporation just to show how absurd the idea of corporate personhood is.
Some poor mfer's shitty regex just got put on blast at a Twitter emergency software dev meeting.

I don’t care what they do. If I have to refer to that social media platform/shitshow of a vanity project in any way whatsoever, I’m calling it Twitter.
- Xitter.
  
  Pronounced shitter
  
  An acceptable alternative
They should switch the name to Wayland.com as a compromise.
- People on X with Nvidia cards are gonna have a bad time.
  
  They already are on that alt-right shit hole. Too bad people are too brain broken to love their outrage propaganda garbage.
When Elon stops allowing deadnaming on Twitter, I'll stop deadnaming his website.
- The only kind of reverse deadnaming that is ethical
  
  I’ve been dead naming Puff Daddy since he first tried to change his name to Diddy.
Petty.
He doesn't have control over what others think and say no matter what he tries.
Social media should be owned and operated by the people.
Love you lemmy/mastaon
- Not just petty, but incredibly stupid. He bought one of the most recognizable brands on the planet. Everyone knows what a tweet is, a retweet, a quote tweet, hell, hashtags exploded in popularity because of Twitter. An entire community (re: customer base) self-organizing and inventing the concepts of your product for you, organically and for free - it's any business owner's wettest of wet dreams.
  And then he threw that all down the drain because he couldn't recognize what was right in front of his face. Either that or he did recognize, but still wanted to relive some tech fantasy he cooked up twenty years ago and can't let go of. Either way, astronomically, gigantically, absolutely unfathomably stupid.
  
  I'm still convinced that he's actively and intentionally trying to destroy Twitter.
Ctrl+F: Twitter.com Replace all with: X.com
Someone at Xitter should hire me ASAP! My development skills are on-par with Elon.
I've been thinking about this while on the toilet. Why there? Because that's about the only time I waste time thinking about Twitter.
Call it X. Call it muskX. Call it whatever
But don't call it Twitter
See, twitter is dead. X is trying to capitalize on the corpse.
Continuing to call it Twitter just gives validity and credibility to X by pretending that it's the same thing under a different name.
Call it Shitter, call it anything but what gives musk any validation at all
- Interesting reasoning, but I prefer mine. I will keep calling it Twitter if only because its CEO fumes when it's being called Twitter. And I'm okay with that.
- It is usually spelt "xitter"
  
  I'm partial to Twixxer myself.
- I prefer Ex-twitter
  
  The platform formerly known as Twitter.
- Twatter
- Call it twitter, but just make it a mastodon instance. Toots not tweets.
- I just... don't talk about it at all... Nothing of value is lost.
But is X gonna give it to us?
- It's funny cause X is as dead a platform as that artist...
Whatever, i'm still calling it Xitter.
I'm thankful that with my overkill combination of Firefox security extensions and various adblockers that they have completely broken the bird site from ever loading for me.
- You mean the X site (formerly known as bird)
  
  Nope. Twitter. My tracker blocker still shows that the URLs for them are coming from Twitter, and I'm pretty sure if you go to X it still redirects to Twitter. I don't know why this is the case, but it is. I have no idea why he'd want to buy a recognizable company and remove the recognition though.
  
  Owned by an ex husband and ex father! Yeah!
What happened to Xitter being a paragon of free speech? You can't even say "twitter.com" without them censoring you.
How unfortunate they can't deal with the spam bots quite so effectively.
For someone who is supposed to be smart, he’s an idiot.
- I'm interested in why people have hyped him up to be smart?
  I've watched a few podcasts with Elon as the guest and he comes across as average as an average person can be.
  The only thing I've seen is that he jumps at opportunities he believes will be profitable, and has leveraged what he has against partners and adversaries for his own personal gain.
  
  It came from a long time ago. See the power of people like Elon was being rich enough they could throw money at shit with little risk and also be rich enough to get smart people to do all the good shit.
  But he was the face of it all for a long time, people legit saw him as the person who brought in electric cars (yeah i know he wasnt) and thinking space x is the rival to NASA.
  Many people idolized him as a genius.
  Then he ruined it, and you know why? Because he opend his fucking mouth just like the podcast you're talking about and many people saw him for the idiot he was.
  The problem? Elon himself believed the bullshit, he hinself thought he was a genius. And now hes trying to "run" things and its all falling to the ground. Because he never realized the only reason he had anything good was because of the actual smart people employed there.
Start, using, Mastodon.
thissitesutwitter.com
- buttsetwitter.com
I don't get why he's so stubborn on X dot com being a thing. Especially since when I hear dot com I think of the 90s or early 2000s, and specifically the dot com bubble.
x.social or x.net sound way cooler tbh.
- finally a use for the .fail TLD
- how about x.org lmao
- I choose x.org
  
  Man what a banger domain to have. Good on xorg
- Maybe he just likes the game Xcom.
- From what i understand, it actually is a name he came up with in the early 2000s and have tried pushing it before.
- Especially since when I hear dot com I think of the 90s or early 2000s, and specifically the dot com bubble.
  x.social or x.net sound way cooler tbh.
  Dot com is the high ground of web links though. The best real estate, basically.
- Do you have that same problem with Twitter dot com?
  
  Well, let's talk about when Twitter was founded...
  
  Yes but to a lesser extent. The name Twitter doesn't sound like it's trying to be "cool internet thing" as much as X
- X-Com sounds pretty cool tbh
A shame that the pioneering Japanese visual kei band stopped referring to itself as just "X" back in the mid-1990s. That would have been a trademark fight for the ages. (Or at least, the hair and costumes would have been more interesting than what Musk usually sports.)
- X, the cowpunk band from Cali, would like a word with you. They were formed in 1980 and still perform.
- As funny as it'd be, it needs to be something that could confuse a customer for that to be an issue. I don't think people are going to get a band and a social media site mixed up.
  
  Technically true, but they could still have an epic argument about the ownership of the x.com domain name.
"Well that's embarrassing" - everything Musk / X does
I only think of glass onion and chuckle to myself everytime I think of Elon.
- Do you mean the song by the Beatles?
  
  Of course, or the movie.
He should just rename it to elon.social instead. That's what I think of it nowadays and especially since the name change.
- Is it social?
  You’d think elon.bot maybe?
  
  True!
- X sounds like a porn site of some kind
  Ha, just like people gave you side-eye for mentioning 'hotmail' back in the 90s. "Hotmail, eh? Why do you need a raunchy e-mail address?"
  I do agree that X is a stupid name.
- I don't know dude, some of those sites are unbanned.
  Besides, you can get around the ban by using cloudflare warp
Good. Let the platform die for good.
In 1981 IBM tried renaming the computer motherboard the 'planar board'. Nobody would call it the planar board though.
I wish the people know the alternative, like Mastodon for example
- I had just started to appreciate twitter when musk bought it and it turned to shit. The big advantage of it was that it seemed like pretty much everyone was on there to some extent. Mastodon doesn't have anything like that user base, though it feels like it's growing and I much prefer the UI.
Are any of you fine lemmings currently in business school or studying marketing?
I wonder if this whole branding debacle is already actively studied and discussed in academia.
- I don't know if there's much to study about this... make a product shittier and then rebrand to remove any positive brand association with the product when it was better in the past. Yeah, that's a bad idea.
  
  Yeah true, but nothing drives the point home like a huge embarrassing real world example!
it would have been perfection if they had done this last thursday (on 4/04), add another fail to the list.
Someone at twitter has clearly never heard of the buttbuttination of Lincoln.
You know how you always mention that brock turner the rapist is a rapist because brock turner is a rapist who doesn't want people to know that he, brock turner, is a rapist?
Same with elon, owner of the now failing Twitter, who was forced to buy twitter after over committing. Since the purchase elon, owner of the now failing Twitter, then proceeded to continually publicly fail for SOO LONG as he tried to unsuccessfully rebrand Twitter, the now failing site that elon musk owns, to x.
So now it's "The Site, formerly known as Twitter"?
- Nah. The ex site. Owned by an ex husband, ex father, ex respected-businessman
BRB, registering webetwitter.com for the lols..
I wonder if they were also lazy (or dumb) enough to only do .com? Would for example .co.uk be renamed as well?
Imaging paying 50 billion for a company and being too cheap to keep their old domain name
- I hate Musk and I hate Twitter. But your comment doesn't make sense. It would be cheaper to keep the old domain name.
ECKS
- Let's see if Antonio Bandaras and Lucy Liu are up for a sequel.
Twixer
- Xitter
  ('X" is pronounced "Sh")
A solid defeat to leftism.
- What’s leftism?
  
  An idea.

181 comments