X automatically changed 'Twitter' to 'X' in domain names, breaking legit URLs

Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 735 points – X automatically changed 'Twitter' to 'X' in users' posts, breaking legit URLs
mashable.com

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."

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One of the rules of branding is to choose a unique name to prevent confusion. Half the time I see the X logo I don't know if they're talking about X11 or the website formerly known as Twitter

Not to mention that from a visual perspective the icon 'x' is synonymous with closing or exiting a window. It's a horrible choice on so many levels.

It’s funny that if you need to clarify X, you can say x11. If you need to clarify X, though, it’s still twitter

Oh, do you mean X the window manager or X the social media website?

The fact that a clarification like that needs to be made shows that Twitter has a branding problem.

Now, tell me which is which:

X is a window system not a window manager. The window manager is a client application that talks to the X server.

Actually it's refered to Window System/GNU/ Linux

Can’t believe I didn’t catch that. Good catch.

The top left has some design aesthetic to it. Normally I'd assume the logo with the better aesthetics wouldn't be an open source project logo, but given Musk probably fired anyone that could make a good logo, I'll assume the more boring one (the lower left one) is the Xitter logo.