Originally published at: Twitter snatches another favored username | Boing Boing
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Changing my handle to @muckfusk
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Perhaps legally maneuvered in some six dozen pages long signup boilerplate, but it sure seems that the owner of a market, who invites in (as an essential feature of the business model), independent merchants, can’t then just take over their successful kumquat stand for nothing. Maybe the original owner of @music needs to find themselves a particularly hungry Lionel Hutz.
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For those who are unaware, Twitter has been renamed to X by Elon Musk, and X Corp is the company that now operates X/Twitter. Now Twitter’s @TwitterMusic account is called @music.
This is both terrible behavior toward those who provide the real value of the site AND inconsistent.
Why didn’t they create “@XMusic” instead?
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It sure is lucky that twitter has no embarrassing problems with impersonation; or ambitions to ‘everything-app’ their way to a wide variety of goods and services being connected to real-world payment methods; or the plan to skip having official channels be clearly distinguishable in some way in favor of sniping whatever idiosyncratic collection of former usernames is deemed to have the greatest visibility and/or best pleases the boy king might pose trivially obvious risks…
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MusiX?
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Yeah, Amazon would never do that. 
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Oi!
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I am ever so grateful that earning my livelihood does not depend on social media in any way…
And I hope those who do depend on social media, especially the microblogging site formerly known as Twitter, to make a living will get through this and/or find viable alternatives.
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The Ars Technica article sheds some light on the person he took the handle from. He said
“it’s highly annoying, but Twitter is still my preferred social media,” Vaught said. “That’s how I communicate and learn my news about what’s going on. Nothing else compares.”
His only “minor protest” to X’s action, he said, was to cancel his Twitter Blue subscription.
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*looks nervously at my @69HeyHeyHeyItsYaBoyElon420LOL handle and starts counting the days.
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A shitty company is still being shitty when they steal from a stupid person.
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Confusingly similar to XM Radio’s brand maybe?
Case study #9,845,337 in why using “X” as a basis for a new brand identity was a dumbass idea.
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“Nice twit handle you got there, shame if something were to happen to it”
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They could follow SpaceX and use MusicX and TweetX and such
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Maybe because they would like to avoid the confusion of @XVideo and @XVideos.
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I understand it was 11 million (which is, indeed, over 500,000, but…) followers. So it was quite a significant account.
Yeah, that’s the thing - if they’re taking over music, then why not “video,” or “tv” or “banking” or “finance” or a million other things relevant to their future plans to turn Twitter into… something completely different. Any kind of basic handle is now threatened by the vagueness of Musk’s plans and the incompetence of his execution.
Musk wants people to trust Twitter for future financial services, but they’ve already screwed over anyone who previously relied on it for any sort of business purposes, even if they got to keep their accounts. It’s like every step Musk takes towards creating the “X” of his dreams, he undermines it at the same time. (Leaving aside that Twitter was not an appropriate foundation for any of it.)
It is hilarious how Musk’s attempts to turn Twitter into whatever financial abomination he has in mind end up creating all sorts of impersonation problems that didn’t exist before (while his whole plan hinges on being stable and dependable). Yeah, this will definitely turn out to be a service people will trust!
Elno learned from Amazon, but decided the smart thing was to go straight for the enshittification before he even had a service. Genius!
Reading about Musk’s old “x.com” was illuminating. Elno thought he was really clever with the name, “X marks the spot! Treasure!” and was put out when market research found that people didn’t read it that way at all (more likely to see it as porn). He went full-on “No, it’s the customers who are wrong,” and has been desperate for the opportunity to show he was right (about both the name and the service) ever since he got pushed out of the company. He’s clearly been stewing over it for years, getting more and more obsessed in the absence of any sort of feedback from anyone else.
Yeah, but it makes it a lot easier to not feel so bad for them, making the whole situation more humorous than tragic.
Not “XMusic” or “ExMusic” or “MusicEx” or… (and never mind “VideoX,” and all the variations thereof…)
Thanks to Elno’s changes, it’s all confusion!
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Missed opportunity to make the new icon an engaging “X” from a pirate map instead of the ominously pornographic Xerox logo on a distressed background?
Maybe that’s already taken by some mobile game.
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Even if it wasn’t already taken, people would probably read that kind of imagery as a mobile game. (Probably also not the kind of associations you want for a marketplace/financial transaction app. “We’re like pirates - but, uh, not the kind that are going to steal from you!”
