[kzrdude]

I see that many of you still call it twitter. I get if it's a protest, but current X seems very unlike twitter, so I don't understand why it should be called by that name.

[ImPostingOnHN]

The term "X" is already in common usage: primarily as a letter. If I said "I saw on X" out loud, most people would have no idea what I was talking about; "They saw on _a letter_?"; "Are they saying some kind of algebra?"; "Did they forget where they saw it and X is a placeholder?"; etc.

You could disambiguate by saying "X Dot Com", but that's longer and more awkward to say than Twitter.

Essentially, "X" as a name for Twitter is a confusing, poorly-forced meme that most folks don't care to entertain.

[nemomarx]

X is just a really weird name. It's not natural to say "someone posted this on X" to me, and we had like a decade of Twitter and talking about it.

[azangru]

I think all of us who does this strongly prefer the old name. It doesn't have to be protest; it's personal preference that doesn't yet hinder understanding. When the majority forgets what twitter was and we start getting blank stares, then, if X is still alive, we'll probably have to call it X.

[consz]

In what way is it different? They increased the character limit? It's still a short form reddit-style message board, same as it was 3 years ago.

[rob74]

The technology itself hasn't changed, but almost everything else (owner, headcount, moderation, userbase etc. etc., not to mention the name of course) has changed dramatically...

[azangru]

Reddit-style? Why would you say reddit style, and not facebook-style, mastodon-style, or bluesky-style? At least Reddit is arranded thematically, and Twitter is arranged around individuals; this is quite a significant difference.

[have_faith]

X is just an awkward name to say out loud, I don’t think most people have given it much thought.

[laughing_snyder]

> X seems very unlike twitter

In what way? More fascists, bots, and bots posting fascist things? The application itself is 99% identical to Twitter.

[egorfine]

Why would I call Twitter something else?

[kzrdude]

Because it's not twitter anymore. The twitter that was is dead.

[immibis]

Because it's a completely different website now, even though it happens to have the same user database.

[knorker]

Every second spent arguing this point, or spent saying the words "X, formerly twitter", is free advertising for a multi billion corporation.

Why are you wasting syllables giving it free advertising?

It was a sewage when named twitter, it's a sewage now. At least "twitter" has the benefit of being unambiguous. X is not. X can be literally anything, or specifically X11, XOrg (x.org).

I don't use X. I use Wayland.

So I say twitter for clarity, not protest.