 The renaming and rebranding of the Twitter platform to X is not something that many people were expecting. It seems like Elon Musk was so upset over PayPal executives rejecting the X payment system name for that app back in the early 2000s that he just went ahead and bought the world's most popular social media site and bought back the x.com domain name from PayPal so that he could combine them for some kind of revenge. But this combination has been backfiring in many different ways. Never mind the fact that a single-letter company is kind of a trope for evil corporations and media, there's already other companies and groups that have made trademark claims to X. Like Meta literally filed a patent for an X trademark just a few years ago. Microsoft has had an X trademark relating to the Xbox game system since 2003. We've got the X games, we've got X org, there's so many Xs already. Plus on the internet, X is more often than not related to pornography. For example, Indonesia has already banned the domain x.com because according to their ministry of communications and informatics, a previous owner of the site used to host porn there or gambling or one of the many things that are banned on the Indonesian internet. And similar things have happened in other countries where the governments are more strict about what you're able to view online, but those issues are mostly localized. The problems created by the rename in the app stores though, that affects everyone on mobile, which is the majority of Twitter's users. So when you search for apps in the app store, and especially when you go on Google or another search engine to try to find apps, the app developers really need to make sure that their listing in that app store has good search engine optimization or SEO. Like you're probably not gonna find a camera app, for example, if it doesn't have the word camera in the title and the description. So when Twitter first renamed themselves to X, they removed all mention of Twitter from their app store listing. They didn't even call the app X, formerly Twitter or nothing like that. Meanwhile, nobody else was targeting the word Twitter in the app stores, not even third party apps because most of those got killed off by Twitter's API prices. So it was pretty much just a free-for-all for anyone to target the word Twitter in these app stores and trick a bunch of people into downloading their app. And we all know how rampant malware is in the Google Play Store, and that's without a hugely popular social media site, basically committing SEO suicide overnight. Now, as some of you know, SEO isn't as powerful as it used to be. These days, it's mostly a pay-to-play game. And well, Facebook took the opportunity to pay up and buy ads in both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. And they bought these ads in order to make their Twitter clone called Threads show up first whenever people would search for Twitter. That probably got Threads a lot of new users. I mean, put yourself in the mind of someone who chronically uses Twitter. You're barely able to use a smartphone or a smart anything. So you type in the word Twitter into your app store and some weird squiggly thing comes up, but you install it anyway and it gives you that dopamine hit that feels pretty similar to the mindless scrolling that you did on Twitter. And boom, now you're addicted to a new drug, just like a crackhead switching to meth for financial reasons. Meanwhile, if you are the kind of person who does actually kind of keep up with internet news and you decide to install X on your phone, just to see what the deal is, you're like, oh, they rebranded, maybe the site's got a different feel to it now. So you go and you search for X in the App Store or you search for X on Google with Safe Search Off, which probably led you to finding a bunch of apps associated with Chuck and his line of work. I mean, imagine grandpa getting a shiny new iPhone for his birthday, and then he decides that he's gonna download X to try to talk to his grandniece in Connecticut. Those kids, they're always using X. He's gonna end up installing a hentai app and giving himself a stroke. I mean, this is just irresponsible rebranding at that point. Now, if you thought that that SEO drama in the App Store was bad enough, X could end up just getting delisted from App Stores altogether if they end up removing the block feature, like Elon Musk recently said he wanted to do. Most social media apps, they give you the option to block people or even block specific kinds of content, which I honestly think makes a lot of sense. I'm all for free speech, but I'm also for people being able to cover their eyes or ears to avoid seeing or hearing things that they don't want to hear or see. It's certainly a lot better than canceling people and blocking people online, it's pretty much just the digital equivalent of that, of covering your eyes and closing your ears. And it turns out having this feature on your social media site is a requirement in order to be listed in the App Stores. The specific wording from the Apple Store says that apps must include the ability to block abusive users from the service and a method for filtering objectionable material from being posted to the app. And on the Play Store, they say that apps with user-generated content, so there's meaning tweets from people in this case, they must have an in-app system for blocking user-generated content and users. So if these two App Stores decided to deal with Twitter, the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, I think that would pretty much tank their user base. I don't even think iOS users are gonna be able to get on X if they can't sideload apps. And imagine letting your average Twitter user that has an Android phone loose on Google or some other search engine to find the official x.apk and then download it to their phones and install it. It's going to lead to some malware devs somewhere creating the largest compromised Android smartphone botnet in history. Oh, and speaking of botnets, it turns out that a very large percentage of Elon Musk's followers on X are bots. Or at the very least, they use the platform in a way that kind of makes them look like really lazy bots. So of his 150 million plus followers, 42% of them have no people following them on their accounts, absolutely zero. 72% of the accounts that are following Elon have less than 10 followers and about 40% of his followers haven't even made any tweets. About two thirds of his followers have made less than 10 tweets. And finally over 25% of the accounts that are following Elon Musk have been created since October 27th, 2022, which is the date when he completed his acquisition of Twitter. So either Elon managed to become the most followed guy on that platform with a relatively inactive fan base or something fishy is going on. If I had to guess, someone at Twitter, like an engineer, probably created some kind of script to create fake accounts for Elon to pump up his numbers because he wasn't always the most followed. I think Obama or a couple other people had more followers than him. So yeah, they probably just did some magic in the back end to pump up his numbers. So that Elon would now be the most followed account and the engineers could avoid getting themselves fired because when Elon first took over Twitter, he was complaining so much about the engagement, especially the lack of engagement on his tweets. He didn't think that there was enough going on. But hey, when you own the servers, I guess you're allowed to do that. You're allowed to hack your follower amount, whatever the owner thinks is best. But I still don't think that this rebrand from Twitter to X was the best move. Like at least with Facebook rebranding to Metta, the only real name change was with the parent company, Facebook. The app, Facebook, still remain the same. So the only people that might have been confused when Facebook renamed themselves were people owning Facebook stocks or maybe people tracking at stock price. The X rebrand, as you saw here, is having serious side effects directly to the platform's traffic. But it's something that nobody has really pulled off before, like the whole one-letter domain and one-letter company thing. Like I know that Overstock did a long ad campaign years ago telling people that they now own the domain, ooh.co. That URL is short and sweet, and that combined with the amount of ads that I saw for it as a kid has clearly seared that domain name in my brain probably forever. Even though I don't think I've ever shopped on Overstock.com. So maybe Elon can really pull off this whole X.com, X app thing, especially if he does actually manage to turn it into an everything app like WeChat, which he says is his plan. But until now, it still works like Twitter, so I'm gonna keep calling it Twitter. Just doing my part to add a little bit more chaos into this crazy social media world that we find ourselves in.