A scammer's dream and a disaster waiting to happen.
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."
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...
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.
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
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