We're fast approaching the 1 year anniversary of Elon Musk buying Twitter. I gotta be honest, I'm surprised it's made it this far. Anyway, today I wanted to share my thoughts on the supposed rebranding of Twitter to X and how it may well be the worst rebranding in history. Before that, let me just state what the site lost from this rebranding.

Twitter may not have ever been the most popular social media platform, but everyone still knew its name. It could be seen as one of the staples of social media, alongside Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. It's been the platform of choice for journalists as it's always had a chronological feed, allowing them to deliver news quickly, directly, and chronologically. The news, or any Twitter users posts for that matter, were sent using tweets. Tweets are just what Twitter calls their posts, but everyone understood the concept of a tweet and knew it was related to Twitter, and it can be compared to how people "google" things online. Speaking of tweets, if you want to, you could re-tweet someone else's tweets to have them appear in your feed almost as if it was your own. You're not just posting an image of their tweet, but you're actually linking back to the original post. Finally, Twitter as a whole had very strong theming. Its logo was a bird, the posts were tweets, like the sound a bird would make. New accounts had an egg as the default profile picture, and the Home icon was that of a birdhouse. The theming had been made worse prior to Musk's buyout as some of these had already been altered, like new accounts using silhouettes of a person as icon, but most still applied. Also, Verified accounts (something I believe started on Twitter and was later added to other platforms) used to be a good way to tell when a person or company was who they said they were.

With that out of the way, let's go over the changes made since. To start, tweets are now simply calles posts, same as any other website, nothing unique about it. Re-tweets have therefore been renamed to reposts, which just makes me think of a person manually posting someone else's content on their own profile, like accounts that just post memes or cats. Alongside this change, any theming around birds have been removed, so it's just as sterile as any other social media platform. Verified accounts are a load of crap nowadays, as anyone and anything can purchase the badge via a subscription for a monthly fee, leading to tons of bots and shady stores appearing as legitimate accounts to Twitter's veteran userbase. I'm not even sure what the subscription is called anymore, as I've seen either Verified, Blue, and Premium all over the place. Not all properly Verified accounts are gone however, as they had to introduce gold and silver badges for companies and governments, respectively, to counter the impersonating you were able to get away with at the start of the subcscription era.

The final change is, of course, renaming the platform from Twitter to X. All the knowledge people have of Twitter, gone. The almost ubiquitous understanding of tweets and re-tweets and having it tied exclusively to your platform, erased. To an extent I can agree with Musk that having a single letter domain is pretty cool in this day and age, where every name has either been taken already or require a minimum amount of letters to work, but X just isn't a good name for anything. Heck, I'd argue that ANY other letter could have worked, as long as it wasn't X. X is just too synonymous with generalized statements and examples, in my opinion. X is always used as a stand-in to replace with other information, like saying "Tommy hates X", "X can do a handstand", or "have you tried replacing X with Y?". The first thing I personally think of when I think of X isn't Twitter, but rather math problems where you need to "solve for X", so that's that for any chance of me associating it with Twitter. The actual changing of the name was done terribly as well: changing of logo and website name without any prior marketing, only vague mumbling from Musk himself. Not every feature on X has even changed its name from Twitter meaning the branding is inconsistent, which isn't good if you're planning to change to a new name!

In addition, one thing I've noticed when searching on the net is that you often can't search using fewer than three or so characters, meaning X only having one character absolutely demolishes any chance of SEO for them. If you can't search for "X" as it has too few letters, what are you supposed to write in the search field? "X website"? "X social media"? Again, that just sounds like generic statements, and how often do you feel the need to clarify what you're searching for when searching? One could ask if that's the intent; make it invisible from search to have its controversies brushed under the rug. Whatever the case, the name change is most likely the worst one I can think of, as even bigger companies like Google officially changing name to Alphabet is at least changing it into another word, not just a single letter. I don't even think you're allowed to trademark a single letter, and that's a big no-no for companies in a world where your IP's are so important. Anyone could theoretically make their own social media platform called X and there'd be no one there to stop them.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the name change. I ain't calling it X as the name sucks, and I doubt I'll even have to worry about it for too much longer anyway, whether it's due to the platform being banned in EU or due to it imploding entirely. Catch me on BlueSky if so, or check out the links in the footer for other places to find me.