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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's rebrand to X could also be a nightmare because it's fucking dumb.

This could have been soo much better.

Personally if he wanted to make an "everything app" I would have gone with making X an "exclusive" edition of twitter, i.e replacing twitter blue.

Twitter is a free app for the unwashed masses and X is the Exclusive App.... if you login to twitter with a X login you get the rebrand

Then add new features to X

Except he can't make an "everything app" because we're not in China. People don't want the "convenience" of being able to do everything in the same app because they rightfully fear monopolies and over-consolidation of major corporations, and they doubly fear the government and corporations creating a way-too-convenient method of collecting every detail, large and small, about one's life in a single app.

WeChat is what it is in China because it replicates (in a sense) how things are in Chinese society.

Also, X is fucking stupid.

People don't fear this at all. They have their iphones, imessage, apple tv, apple pay. The only thing apple is missing is a social network (AFAIK they don't have one).

Apple makes a big point of highlighting their privacy features and pushing back against some government requests for exactly this reason; to allay fears about consolidation and overreach. I doubt Tim Cook is a passionate believer in privacy as a human right, but it's effective messaging so he pushes it.

Musk's approach is the polar opposite from Apple. A capricious and petulant owner who goes out of his way to appease racists and dictators is not someone most people are comfortable with handing a lot of control and information about their lives to.

Apple is a corporation. They could be lead by an entirely new executive team tomorrow if that's what the shareholders want.

I wouldn't do business with Musk personally, but I don't think most people view him the way you do.

In any case, we're talking about normies are comfortable with. They don't really consider any of this stuff.

> I doubt Tim Cook is a passionate believer in privacy as a human right

What makes you think this? Lots of tech people have this perspective, and lots of gay people understand this perspective at a very deep level (especially if older)

Just curious why you think what you think.

Tim Cook believes in all sorts of things....when he in the US/EU.

When he's sucking up to China, all the morals and values he ingrained by growing up a gay man in the American deep South quickly and rather conveniently go right out the window.

The market share of the iphone is about 20%. So I think your comparison falls short with the very first item.

I am okay, to be totally vendor locked in the apple-ecosystem, because Androids market share is so much higher. If the iPhone fails to be a good product I will just switch. I am okay, to be totally vendor locked in gcp, because aws is a thing...

In the US, the country of origin for both iOS and Android, iPhone market share is closer to 60%

Alternatively: we already have an "everything app". And, unfortunately, it's Facebook.

> People don't want the "convenience" of being able to do everything in the same app

I really really really wish this were true but It is not. People take the path of least resistance and companies have been working on superconducting these paths for years.

> WeChat is what it is in China because it replicates (in a sense) how things are in Chinese society.

I put out a version of this that is WeChat is the way it is because of the way China regulates its markets. Chinese regulators prioritize e.g. surveillance so that it makes sense for them to have fewer competitors that do more things. (Note that they do not regulate their hardware markets this way, so there are many more companies operating in that space.)

Regulators and market incentives are different outside of China, so there is no pressure to end up with an everything app.

> to do everything in the same app because they rightfully fear monopolies and over-consolidation of major corporations

How is it different than Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc?

The difference is that none of the corporations you listed have products that are effectively mandatory to use for one to exist in modern society.

Helpful, yes. But mandatory? No.

In China, it's borderline impossible to do anything if you don't have WeChat. It centralizes everything related to personal and professional life in China.

Your rideshare app is not sharing data with your fitness app, or with your laundry service app. In China, there's 1 app. It centralizes everything.

Isn't it a little more complicated though?

WeChat has turned into its own operating system offering and app store offering mini-programs that other companies can create.

These mini-programs do work through WeChat and Tencent probably has all the data that goes into or through these mini-programs but couldn't the same be said about our current situation?

In a way isn't that just like Android or iOS itself?

You listed multiple companies. That's the difference.

We debate Android vs. iOS (vs. awesome Linux shenanigans), or Microsoft vs. Apple vs. Linux. Those are choices. Most of the market is essentially duopolies, but that's a different issue than a pure monopoly.

They are not owned by Musk, and they support government censorship so they get a pass from many here

Apple and Microsoft supports Goverment censorship?

Sure under the nebulous charges of "hate Speech" and "Disinformation"

99% of the population doesn’t care about any of that. They will use whatever works best

We fear monopolies, but most people clearly don't. The eagerly submit to Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. And they cheer when one of them adds a new payment system to their platform.

china is not the only nation where something like this exists

I also think you massively over estimate the average persons fear of monopolies over convenience.

Where else has something compatible to WeChat?

Or he could have just renamed the company to "X" and left the current Twitter product as "Twitter." All his hypothetical fancy new stuff could get its own branding (or not) but he still gets the X. The "Twitter" branding could be subservient to the company branding.

Like Alphabet, or Meta, or Microsoft, or countless others...

It really seems he just wants to start fresh and kill the Twitter brand immediately regardless of the short term cost. It's a strange play indeed, and it's hard to guess why he wants to disassociate with the brand so strongly.

It has provided me endless entertainment in meat space because I cross my arms to form an "X" every time I talk about X.

Tim Apples even saw this coming and had an emoji in place, Man Crossed Arms.

You're joking but still… that emoji is from Japan, where people use this sign to mean "not allowed" (だめ).

That's pretty much what Twitter means today too

Throwing away a brand almost everyone has heard of and verbs that have become common in spoken language because you own x.com is just incredibly stupid stuff. The guy is surrounded by yes men.

> The guy is surrounded by yes men.

Or maybe he just doesn't care when people tell him "no".

Or maybe he enjoys when people tell him "no" and he does it anyway, because he wants.

This will not age well.

Yeah. I give it 12 months at most before Twitter goes back to being Twitter and X becomes some kind of guiding vision blah blah blah.

12 months? I was thinking 12 days. If he actually follows through with this, I think that's the final nail in the coffin for Twitter.

The letter X, brought to you today by Mr X (Elon Musk).

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