The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name. So the trademark should hold for as long as a reasonable person can be confused by the new Twitter regardless of people's dislike towards Elon.
I may be biased because I still go to Twitter via twitter.com.
I just stopped using twitter and I've not actually felt like I've missed out
as it turns out short form stream of conscious rambling was sometimes funny sometimes interesting even sometimes pivotal as a communications tool in countries experiencing civil unrest / injustice. but in its current stage and the state of all social media at this point one wonders why anyone pretends twitter is what it was a decade ago. it just isn't, it could also disappear tomorrow and things probably might even get a little better for the world given how much of a vehicle it is to amplify division. i remember like i dunno 5-6 years ago when the people in my life started to wean themselves off twitter and i smoked a lot of cope to justify why i was still on it. can't even remember when i stopped using it but again... nothing of value was lost. feels like a fever dream i always thought i had to be tuned the hell in theres just no way that's good for anyone's brain.
instagram/facebook over my 20s left some real mental scars though im still trying to sort what the f those apps did to me and to culture at large. i quit instagram like 3 years ago, the classic millenial exploration of pruning your life of shite things to lower the anxiety. the scars i am still stuck with, and mind you i literally don't have these apps anymore:
- i still feel this soft pressure that anything i do doesn't matter unless there is a witness (a post, a story, etc). that is insane. it's been three years and i can still feel that what the hell? there's just no way the guy from 100 years ago who trainhopped around the country ever experienced that kind of pressure. it literally messed my brain up and i have no idea how to fix it for me at least the feeling hasn't gone away
- when you're on the other side it feels like you're just sitting outside of the rest of the worlds culture at this point. it can actually challenge why you left it in the first place and make you consider sacrificing your own well being just to not feel like you're not an outsider from another planet
i never did the tiktok thing so i dunno what that's like. at least leaving twitter felt like shutting a book that kinda sucked and you don't really ever think about it again
Twitter in its design has never been a platform for discussion, but for shouting into the void. And that seems to have empowered people to voice their most awful opinions because they don't see much pushback
It’s worse than that.
Short messages bias toward simple slogans and memes devoid of context or nuance. It leads to “context collapse” in the discourse and the worst kind of echo chamber effects. You can’t ask for a better medium to spread rumor and disinformation.
Then, to supercharge its badness, it sorts by “engagement” which promotes the dumbest or most triggering stuff.
Think of the last point this way: two people walk past you. One says “hi.” The other strips and smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken and saluting Hitler. Which of these two people maximizes engagement?
The peanut butter smeared clucking Nazi is now President. The opinions that dominate discourse everywhere are now the opinions of those types of people.
Social media is collective brain poison. Bluesky and Mastodon might be slightly less bad on the “maximizing engagement” part but they still cause the context collapse and echo chamber effects. The “microblogging” format is inherently toxic and irredeemable.
> even sometimes pivotal as a communications tool in countries experiencing civil unrest / injustice
I get why you or anyone would say that. But I assure you, it is less accountable and more disinformation than anything remotely positive or helpful. Source? Arab Spring.
Twitter, and other similar designs are parasocial mass media.
I'm even cooler. I never used it.
Also, I don't watch TV and only smoke menthols. I mean vape. Or whatever.
People thought twitter was pretty cool at SxSW in 2007, I didn't go to Austin that time but heard about it plenty.
Been waiting ever since to see if it would become worthwile for me, or even stand the test of time.
X marks the spot where it seemed to achieve arrested development, so not holding my breath.
edit: have a corrective upvote while I'm at it :)
I’ve never used any microblogging platform and feel like I’ve never missed out. :)
Microblogging has always felt so strange to me, I could never get into it. Why would I want to hear dozens of different short-form opinions from people? Maybe it's the 'tism, but that sounds so anxiety inducing & overwhelming.
When your follower/following count is small and you're getting to know people and build a community of people you otherwise wouldn't meet IRL, it can be a great thing. When you start getting inundated with too much information when you have 10K + followers, it can be overwhelming and you lose the signal within the noise and find that it may start affecting other parts of life. I suppose each person is different, but that burned me out and made me uninterested and I burned it all down. I found I was losing sleep checking my phone and getting unusually addicted to stupid things.
Twitter was best when I followed comedians, record labels and venues.
(And I should note I left in 2017 when even the funny people couldn’t get a grip on what was happening online)
This is what short form posting was meant for. Jokes and quips from witty people and announcements for things I care about.
That Twitter became a primary source of news for anyone is a major indicator of the decline of civilization
politics and hack takes abound, but there were some legitimately funny people on twitter (some of whom've migrated to other platforms).
mostly bad, though.
Don't know why yer downvoted because this is for real and winning at life.
Im so cool that the only social network I use is hacker News and I don't even use that - I use hckrnews.com!
I opened it again after many years and frankly i'm seeing better content than i find on other social media platforms.
For example, instagram is clearly trying to understand what political side i lean on and pushes me that kind of content. I have to be very careful what kind of stuff i like otherwise my feed gets very polluted with political content rather than with interesting tech stuff and cats videos.
On the other hand, X/Twitter is routinely serving me better and more interesting technical content.
I'm the opposite. Ignored it for so long, and had only signed up post-acquistion.
Why would you do that to yourself?
Except US trademark law doesn’t work like that and hence the case.
One of the core things a company needs to do to demonstrate it needs a trademark protected is that it’s actively using said trademark. If X has effectively abandoned Twitter, then it can’t really claim it still needs to protect the name.
What you’re describing is more the “Kleenex” effect where words become commonplace. In this case another company builds a platform that has “tweets.” There it’s even more important that the company with the trademark shows that they use the trademark. Here the owner has basically scrubbed the trademark from their existence hence why folks are making these claims.
> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.
Nonsense. The core reason to enforce trademarks is to prove that you have it.
The yo-yo used to be a trademark too, but the problem was what else do you call it? If the "owner" of a trademark cannot defend it, they don't have it. That's how trademark law is very different than copyright (which is implicit and automatic): You can lose a trademark even if you register it and popularise it, if you can't prove that the trademark represents your actual trade.
> [I think] the trademark should hold for as long as a reasonable person can be confused by the new Twitter regardless of people's dislike towards Elon.
That's your opinion man. Thankfully the law doesn't work that way.
I don't even know whether you mean X (the new thing that was once twitter) or tweet (the new thing that claims to will-be what twitter once was)
> I may be biased because I still go to Twitter via twitter.com.
and that didn't help in the slightest, but domain squatting is very common on the Internet.
yeah thats what it boils down to as long as they are using twitter.com. They are also using the twitter trademark.
> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.
That's something we hear often but it's not grounded in an legal reality: trademarks are purely a form of intellectual property that a person (physical or moral) can hold and it doesn't come with any attached liability: you can't hold a company accountable for violating the trust built around its brand name in past year, and the owner is free to sell the brand name to another company or change their products in a way that mislead the consumer about its quality.
In fact, should a trademark come with a promise about the quality of the product, Twitter would have lost it's trademark as soon as Elon transformed it into a disinformation machine (by breaking how the blue tick works and boosting paying account's content).
No, there is an amount of legal reality built into it. With copyright and patents, once you obtain the intellectual property, you keep it for the rest of the term no matter what you do. But with trademarks, your actions (or inaction) can cause you to lose the trademark.
The legal purpose of the trademark is to protect identifying marks for the purposes of conducting business (trade)--literally its name. The subsidiary public interest of attaching trust to that mark isn't directly protected, but failing to police the use of trademark is sufficient grounds to lose the trademark, which is why companies tend to be overly aggressive in suing people for violating the trademark.
> Failing to police the use of trademark is sufficient grounds to lose the trademark, which is why companies tend to be overly aggressive in suing people for violating the trademark.
Not quite. There is no litigation requirement to renew a trademark registration. Trademarks are in fact the only type of intellectual property that can be preserved in perpetuity.
Litigation is an attempt to prevent genericide, and might fail at that.
Trademarks can be preserved even in the absence of litigation. Cancellation cases in US law typically require evidence of abandonment and lack of evidence for intended re-uptake. Litigation is not necessary to refute abandonment.
Nothing you've written above contradicts my argument. which is that there's no liability attached to a trademark as opposed to what something made to protect the consumer would require.
is-ought distinction, but specifically:
The heksher marks and logos offered by kosher-certification organizations are protected by trademark; using the trademark under license specifically assures the customer that the organization's standards have been followed precisely, and using the trademark without license defeats the purpose.
Similarly, the American Halal Foundation, the USDA Organic seal, the UL logo and many other programs use the mechanism of trademark to guarantee that the product or service meets their standards.
That's the licensing agreement between the owner and the trademarks, and their customers for the use of the trademark.
But the American Halal Foundation could revise their definition of what counts as Halal, and then license the brand to a company that doesn't meet the current criteria, without asking for permission from anyone.
It's in your wording already: “the customer that the organization's standards have been followed precisely” (emphasis mine), nothing prevents the organization from changing their standards (well, maybe the licensing agreement with their customer brands does, but that's purely a contract thing and has nothing to to with the trademark per se).
Trademark is the mechanism of enforcement for this usage, just as copyright is the mechanism of enforcement for the GPL.
You can come up with other mechanisms that would work, but this is the one that we have in existence now.
Sure. But the same way it would be disingenuous to say that copyright exists so that we can have copyleft, it's a fallacy to say that trademark exist to protect the consumer, which is the point I'm arguing against:
> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.
I stopped going. Between the spam and the racist unmoderated AI slop cannon that is discovery there, what's the point
I never went (just don't like it), but for a long time it was a primary source for a lot of important things so one kinda gets exposed to it anyway indirectly and / or through embeds. But that's the filtered version, anyway.
I don’t even open twitter/x links anymore because the page is so unusable.
I made the experiment some times ago: it's faster to edit the link, replace x.com with nitter.net and load the content from there, than wait until the original page load. The time difference isn't meaningful (it's less than a second), but the fact that a website loses against a manual redirection to another front end is still a spectacular proof of incompetence.
I found a Firefox plugin which does an automatic redirect to XCancel.
I wonder if it is by design. On Nitter, which is fast-loading and streamlined, it is trivial to ctrl-click on a bunch of commenter accounts and readily see they are bots (photo from This Person Does Not Exist, unrealistically single-issue posting, etc.). On X where things move slow as treacle, it is harder for the average person to figure that out.
Same here. There is always the "log in" nagging pop-up. But I will never log in again to the right-arm-gesture guy, so this is just time wasted for me.
We could need some decentralized way to share "tweets" though. Not linked to greedy billionaires.
fb and insta have the same annoying login screens too. seems like most of the web does these days.
If you want to share tweets from X, there is exactly that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283
Recently found textlog.cc here on HN. At times it felt (the content especially) like the early days of twitter.