Specifically, it looks like they've broken any http links to t.co, while the newer https ones still work.
The practical effect of this is actually worse than the thread stated -- all old media and links on Twitter are broken (at least, since 2010 when they started using t.co). But perhaps they can fix it by restoring the http version of t.co?
My guess as to what happened: they wanted to clean up t.co URLs so ran a query like "select all words in tweets starting with https://t.co/" and deleted all entries not present in that search, accidentally deleting all the plain http ones.
Same energy as "I refuse to call it Meta"? I wonder why such thinking takes hold in the first place. It is fascinating someone would so invested in products like they'd be in sports, for example.
X is incredibly awkward as a brand. Twitter is still located at twitter.com, the company isn't even dedicated to the namechange enough to redirect to a new domain. What's a tweet now? What's a retweet? Nobody cares. So twitter is now The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, Attempting to Rebrand to X. And on that platform at twitter.com, people continue to tweet and retweet.
Meta is different. Meta is an umbrella company, Facebook is one of its holdings. There's a legal distinction to be made, because Facebook isn't so foolish as to set fire to their most lucrative brand.
Should have gone with Y instead, making the verb "yeet", which is, coincidentally what I want to do to my computer every time Musk / Twitter news forces itself upon me.
I remember calling the Citibank derivatives trading desk and they would answer the phone as "Salomon..." a full 15yrs after it had been purchased by and absorbed into Citi (post scandal, post acquisition)
Large parts of Goldman derivatives still uses J Aron name spaces and naming, particularly in the SecDB world. These sorts of things reflect a harkening to a time of ascendancy, often emulated, but slowly being strangled out by the hideous bureaucracy of the megacorp.
IMO it's mostly incumbency. Everyone knows what Twitter and Facebook are, but I've seen it several times here, other forums, and experienced it in person, where people don't know what X/Meta are.
Both seem like scooby doo mask rebrand. Nothing substantial, just a costume over the bad guy. The rebranding is mostly to confuse masses and put some distance between them and what they did yesterday.
I am not the OP, but I just don't have the mental bandwidth or care to invest in these random swings and title changes at the whim of billionaires. I don't use either site, am not in tech, and my social circle will still refer to either as Facebook or Twitter. Maybe a relatable example: There are a couple major roads that have been renamed in the last ten years in my city and everyone still uses the old names in conversation.
I still call it the Tappen Zee bridge, not because I’m a big enthusiast for Dutch and Lenape. It’s not so much being invested as not wanting to give in to the rebranders.
In general, I don’t take any notice of wholesale company rebrandings; they very, very rarely take, and most will be abandoned within a year or so, or certainly within a decade.
In particular, when the UK Royal Mail renamed itself ‘Consignia’ (this actually happened; the early noughties were weird) everyone ignored that. This X business is similar, I think. Just so obviously stupid that most people will ignore it.
you might reflect on why companies do these sorts of rebrands to begin with. it's not usually to put a positive reputation behind them.
I don't quite get why people are so emotionally invested in brands like facebook/meta and twitter/x. at least from my perspective, it seems pretty easy to simply ignore them if you don't like what they're offering.
that said, I do have fairly strong feelings about comcast. I've lived in a few different places in my life, and in every one of them, comcast has been the only option for >5mbps down. their service and support sucked 15 years ago, and it still sucks today. I realize it has absolutely no measurable impact to their bottom line, but I'm still not going to help them get away from all the bad associations that go with the name "comcast".
To be fair the signage, GPS directions, subway stations, mail etc all use 6th Ave. I think that’s more a vanity nickname than a legit attempt at a rename. I believe there are other similar secondary names to streets around industries that flourished there etc.
The signage used to say Avenue of the Americas but they started changing it back over the years. They did seriously intend for people to actually call it that but nobody did.
I also find it fascinating how one person can buy the communication platform 450 million people use, only for him to change it for the worst. And somehow all users should go along with it.
You can roll your own at your leisure. In fact, everyone probably should if for no other reason than to ensure such communication platforms remain as neutral as possible.
I wonder if the guy posting even knows that those of us without Twitter/X accounts cannot read any followup comments to his post, and that when we go to his (or anyone else's) main profile we just see some random ass comments from a long time ago. And the search URL he included doesn't work at all.
Twitter is already a broken platform for sharing your thoughts with others. Congratulations on discovering a way it just became even more broken.
This was actually bad for me recently, cause I was unable to find tweets from a utility. Twitter would only show me tweets from random years ago, none of which were newer than 5 years old.
Later, I saw that they had tweeted about outages, and I just couldn’t see it cause I dont have an account.
This has not convinced me to get an account. I hope it convinces businesses to stop using twitter and Facebook as main platforms for pushing status notes.
idc about businesses using Twitter for comms but I have a huge problem with official govt agencies using it as their exclusive means of comms with citizens. I'm cool with Twitter being run into the ground if it helps us recognize the need/ develop a solution for a proper govt->citizen alerting system that doesn't involve proprietary and scummy businesses.
Wow I wonder how much record of the arab spring protests and uprising are now lost forever. Those protests were all around 2010 to 2012 or so and was in my mind what really pushed Twitter into the public consciousness. I hope the Library of Congress managed to archive all that stuff like they said they would years ago, it would be a big loss to historians for it to disappear overnight.
The parent comment did not say anything about whether or not it was good or bad, simply that it was historic and that the record of it should be preserved
My question is, are we going to highlight every single substantive change to Twitter as it morphs into WeChat?
I think the fact that there’s no valid alternative means that we’re going to probably get stuck in the cycle where people are continuing to expect Twitter to revert or somehow go back to the old Twitter - and being frustrated and dissatisfied that it isn’t
WeChat works because it is government-backed and I don't really see how Twitter can morph into WeChat without an authoritarian regime controlling it, promoting it, and stamping out the competition.
Having a simple tool for publicly posting snippets of text seems like a useful thing for a free society though and people are still using Twitter because it still mostly serves that goal. People are highlighting every substantial change because each change moves the needle to where it doesn't serve that purpose for some. Although it's not a hard line and even when it becomes unfit for purpose, it may be better than nothing and also it may be hard to stop using it (you may have a job that involves posting to Twitter, and you can't stop posting to Twitter until you find somewhere else to post.)
> Twitter can morph into WeChat without an authoritarian regime controlling it, promoting it, and stamping out the competition.
Did that with all of his other companies so I wouldn't count that out
Imagine if DeSantis or Trump win the next election. If Musk is running X still, then it's not that far fetched that a conservative executive branch would figure out how to sponsor it somehow
I feel half of Norway collectively moved to bluesky two weeks ago. Mastodon people couldn't overcome the hurdle of selecting a server, and hence it didn't get much widespread traction or adoption. But bluesky most people found each other quickly and just continued there.
How did half of Norway get an invite? I don't see how it takes off like this. Their SEO keeps it off of some front pages as well. Very much a closed platform, sadly.
Not many people would care if this was deleted from Twitter. The photo has already been reproduced endlessly in other media anyway.
I only posted this link because it was provided as an example of the terrible “loss” by the original poster on Twitter.
I guess the people who consider pre-Musk Twitter a great thing would be sad that a big moment in the history of the site was lost (the tweet had some record for likes/impressions for some time from what I understand).
Consider yourself lucky that you were able to have usable accounts.
Whenever I tried to sign up, even years before the recent ownership change, the newly-created account would be automatically locked within minutes, and I'd be forced to give a phone number to unlock it. I wasn't going to do something stupid like that, of course.
That kind of a user experience, even a long time ago, wasn't so nice.
Friendly reminder that Twitter used to (and maybe still does) offer a “sign in with twitter” feature, and that users should review which serviced they signed up to with their twitter identity.
If there is any, either add an email address or find a way to move your data off that peofile.
Awesome. But what about the media posted after 2014? And when will they stop people posting new media, returning it to a text only site, forcing people to put at least some effort into trolling? It's easy to troll people into quote RTing you with images.
That is definitely not a question asked enough. Many people complaining about things they don’t use/vote for/etc. So they want to use but don’t because ‘it’s is not what I want’ or lie they don’t and yet do (which is better).
My point is that someone who doesn't use Twitter probably wouldn't even notice that media before 2014 were deleted. And even if they did notice, they probably wouldn't care. Twitter users complain about Twitter because they notice and they care.
There are many reasons to leave Twitter. In fact, I did leave Twitter last year. But this particular issue would be a strange "final straw". If you had to leave a platform because of every annoyance, then you wouldn't be able to use any platforms.
Please read the second part of the sentence before commenting. Or should I rephrase it? I could do, but I really can’t see what you missed or understood.
You can complain over things even if you don't use them. It's very common for people to say that X is bad even if they are not using X.
Here is an actual live real world example:
I find it silly that Apples mouse charge port is located on the bottom of the mouse because then you can't use it while charing. I would never buy such a mouse.
I think you're missing my point. The question isn't whether you can complain about it, the question is whether you would complain about it if you weren't using Twitter.
If they were removing old media, then I doubt that said media would still be present on the CDN. https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1692926763481862438
I'm no Musk fan, but I still try to ensure that my criticism of him and/or Twitter (I refuse to call it X) is accurate.