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Comment by thih9 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t like the letter “x” being used as a company name, I find it impractical and confusing.

I’d like to call it something different, and since many people say “x/twitter”, I guess others have similar thoughts.

I’m not unhappy that there are few other single letter domains, especially if they were to be claimed by corporations.

You can just call it Twitter, in the same way that everyone just says Facebook rather than Meta and Google rather than Alphabet.

This is different though - Facebook wasn’t rebranded to Meta, Facebook is still the official name for Meta’s product. Meanwhile most of Twitter’s logos and other branding have been replaced.

And yet the vast majority of humanity, who do not use Twitter and who, at best, merely know about it in passing, are not in a position to observe this rebrand and would be confused by even calling it "Twitter/X", as though that's some sort of new product under the Twitter brand. Calling it Twitter just reduces confusion.

I'm just disappointed that people go along with takeovers of useful words: x, meta, alphabet. If one was renamed "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" would people still go along with it? What's the limit?

We don’t need renames for takeovers of useful words, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexa_(name)#Modern_popularity

> Popularity continued to climb and Alexa was ranked in the top 100 in the mid-1990s. According to the Social Security Administration, its highest popularity, 39th, was achieved in 2006. The name's popularity decreased rapidly after Amazon picked it as the wake word of its voice service Amazon Alexa, which was released worldwide in 2016.

More at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2021/p...

Alphabet is such a cringe name for a company no less. Especially with the meaning google infers. I bet they giggled like little kids in the board room that day. We're so cunning and witty! hehe!

What meaning do they infer?

That they're going to make a ton of stupid company names and it's their company-name umbrella dad-joke used for tax and legal purposes?

We didn't just all get the memo that that's the joke?

Or it could be that they are obviously a front for the alphabet agencies

lmao. I would love to have been a fly on the wall "We need a new company name!" "Alphabet!" "YES EXACTLY!"

> In a 2018 talk, Schmidt disclosed that the original inspiration for the name came from the location of the then Google Hamburg office's street address: ABC-Straße.

From Wikipedia about alphabet Inc

What! Well that deflates my entire theory

> I'm just disappointed that people go along with takeovers of useful words: x, meta, alphabet.

X is not a word.

Still, it’s probably the most generic letter that you can use alone in a lot of domains.

If you had the opportunity to buy any unique letter domain name of your choice but you may choose only one, most people on this planet would chose X because it can mean anything.

> takeovers of useful words: x, meta, alphabet

Apple, Blackberry...

Shell, Ford, Coke...

I think we really should adopt the name "X". Because Musk took Twitter and turned it into something else, which is not the old Twitter anymore. So giving it a different name is fitting. That said, I don't necessarily like the name "X".

It’s not like Twitter wasn’t a shitshow several years before Musk. Sure he made it way worse but it was already a global dumpster fire.

There was plenty of shit there, but it was the best way to get real-time updates on big news events, as plenty official accounts used it as their primary site.

I don’t think this has changed much, it’s still the best place to get real time updates.

But all the controversy around verified accounts, over-abundance of far-right wing content, etc, doesn’t help its case.

Is it? Live streaming got more popular and is supported by major platforms; discord and related communities are more accessible; the pandemic taught everyone group chats and video calls; the list goes on.

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