Why I don't call it "X"
It has nothing to do with my opinion of Elon Musk
A lot of people are angry that Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it “X”, so they refuse to name it as such. I do so too, but for a a somewhat different reason. Let me be clear, I am not a fan of Elon Musk. I believe that, aside from being a parasitic capitalist, he is not a smart man and he never has been. Back when he was a liberal darling he was just as dumb and cringe1 as he is now that he’s jumped on the MAGA bandwagon, in fact his political affiliation is really the only thing that has changed about him since then. But, of course, to the BlueSky liberals to whom that is the be-all and end-all of everything, he has gone from Epic Real Life Tony Stark to the second coming of Hitler. I suppose since Ukraine I shouldn’t be surprised by such displays of rank hypocrisy from liberals any more, but they are not the only ones who have flip-flopped on Musk recently. Remember, before he saw which way the winds were blowing and backed Trump, Musk was an early patron of “Meatball Ron” DeSantis’ doomed campaign, and even contributed to its downfall with his disastrous Twitter Space launch event that was rife with technical difficulties. To all genuine populists in the MAGA movement (I know RFK Jr. brought in at least some), I have two pieces of advice for you: do not trust this guy2, and don’t feel the need to call it “X” just to trigger the libs. Say whatever sounds right to you, that’s as far as it should go.
By now you may have guessed why I still call it Twitter: it’s just what sounds right to me. Well, why is that? The obvious explanation is that Twitter is just the name I’m used to, but I don’t think that fully captures it. I don’t really have any attachment to the name “Twitter”, or indeed to Jack Dorsey and everyone else who ran the site prior to Musk’s takeover. No, in fact I only joined Twitter after the buyout, as previously I saw it as a hellscape of censorship, drama and clout chasing that wasn’t worth spending any time on. The buyout felt like a time of new opportunities when everything was genuinely shaken up: maybe, without the old bureaucracy breathing down their necks, more people would actually start speaking their minds and finding interesting things to say. It sounds hard to believe now, but in that period quite a few reforms were introduced that made the site easier to use (all of which have since been undone, naturally), and I thought I should strike while the iron was hot. Of course, we all know that Twitter never really stopped being what it always was: maybe it has a more edgy and right-wing image now, but the underlying psychology of its power users and moderators hasn’t changed.
So, it’s not nostalgia. I think it goes deeper than that: Twitter is just an inherently better name for a social media website than X. I said that I don’t believe Elon Musk is smart, and that’s why I genuinely don’t think he understands why this is. It’s really rather simple, although it can be hard to consciously notice: almost every popular social media site has a name with exactly two syllables3, and those that don’t are very often shortened so that they do. For example, Instagram is referred to in casual speech as “Insta”. But “X” has only one syllable, so there is no way to make it into two: continuing to call it Twitter is the only way to reference it without sounding awkward. It doesn’t matter if you see it as something beyond just social media, an “everything app” that deserves a suitably monolithic name. Two syllables is just the naming convention that has stuck, and I don’t think it’ll go away any time soon. As to how the two syllables convention arose, that’s a question I don’t yet have an answer to, although I know it’s at least as old as Friendster and MySpace. Maybe I’ll write something looking into it more deeply in the future.
To paraphrase one of my Twitter mutuals: the guy has even made space exploration, a noble goal that was recognised as such by Americans and Soviets alike, seem insufferably Reddit.
Popular movements shouldn’t rely on rich backers in general, as they have a nasty habit of turning the money taps off when you say anything that offends them.
Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, Tumblr, WhatsApp, Snapchat, YouTube, Discord, LinkedIn, and even 4chan, just to name a few.