It’s been right around 3 weeks since the rebranding of Twitter to X began and, quite honestly, beyond a few more textual changes removing the terms like “retweet” and uses of the Twitter name, things are still about the same. The URL is still functionally twitter.com, and nothing else appreciable has changed.
In three weeks a few word references and some graphics have been changed. That’s it.
It’s quite funny to me just how long this process is taking. I’m even more convinced absolutely nothing was planned and this was something done on impulse because Elongated Muskrat just felt like it one evening, but almost a month in finally learned about the complexities of databases and internal API calls in one of the most complex and perpetually active computing platforms in existence. This, all happening after he likely fired the very people who would have had the best chance at actually making the transition complete from a functional backend level — the most critical and practical aspect of such a web rebranding.
Then again, Musk has never really been focused on things being practical or thought out, has he?
Now, saying this again since I feel like in this era of troglodytes online just wanting to argue about everything, I know such a change is massive. That’s my entire point — that a change as to completely functionally rebrand something like twitter.com into x.com and have it work is a massive undertaking, with untold hardlinked variables that need to me changed, databases that need to be updated, and who knows what other kinds of modern web tech that I have barely even heard about.
The fact that none of it seems to have at all been planned is the part that’s hilarious — that someone treated as a genius by so many would do this process so terribly. Hell, I manage my BBS with more planning than that, and that place is a ghost town — you’d think Musk would have waited and come up with some idea on what to do and how he wanted to do it! Evidently, that’s not the case.
It’s at least nice to see that the “Xodus” from the platform formerly known as Twitter seems to have died out as people realized that they really had nothing to gain by moving to a new platform (at least, I presume that’s what they realized, maybe they just forgot, I don’t know) and seem to have mostly stuck around.
As I said before, it isn’t like the site being rebranded is going to change what it actually is. It’s still Twitter: the same shithole filled with the same dumbasses as ever. Only difference is for the past year an egomaniac has run it and recently he decided to rename it because he just felt like it.
The only really terrible thing done since he took over, honestly, was the API changes that outright killed many social sharing platforms that heavily used Twitter. More on that soon in an overdue article.
Ah, enough rambling about this. I felt like an easy topic to write about today and this one is like shooting fish in a barrel. Don’t know why you would want to shoot fish but whatever, it’s just an expression.
See you in 2037 when Twitter is finally fully rebranded to X, only for the Cybernetic Ghost of Elongated Muskrat to decide to rebrand it back to Twitter.
See you then.