It’s a pet peeve of mine when people still call it Twitter (or variants like Xitter). The exact phrasing “Twitter (I refuse to call it X)” isn’t even a callout to a specific person since I’ve seen that exact text string multiple times by multiple writers.
I’m not opposed to appellation activism—I try to always get #ChangeTheName in there if I have to refer to Apache or GIMP. I wish the ill-fated Glimpse project had only been an Icecat-like rename branch. That would still have been an enormous undertaking but with slightly easier merges. Glimpse would’ve been a great name for this image editor. I was not onboard with their UI changes. And I liked it when people on Masto took to calling Twitter “Birdsite” (in the pre-Musk era).
But what I see when I see “Twitter (I refuse to call it X)” is “I think Twitter pre-Musk was acceptable”, and that’s the messaging I’m not onboard with. As if it weren’t a silo site, a harassment vector, and part of what was driving the Earth straight of the cliff and putting MAGA tyranny on the throne and having shallow discourse that was disproportionately respected and credited in mainstream media reporting (compared to how few people were actually on there) and with gov’t agencies using it and lending it infrastructure-level credibility.
X under Musk is so much worse than Twitter ever was but Twitter was already a net force for evil. For us long-time Twitter-haters, Musk changing the name and literally destroying the brand as he was already destroying the site was such a tee-up, such a free lunch, such a jumping-off opportunity. It makes me a li’l sad every time I see someone trying to retroactively glorify what Twitter was, is all.
Now, let’s put things in perspective here: A pet peeve is just that, a pet peeve. It’s not a thought crime. The people I’ve seen writing “Twitter (I refuse to call it X)”, I’ve seen it because I’m a fan of their writing otherwise. It’s not bad guys doing this, it’s well-intentioned folk. (The actual bad guys are on X, I guess.) This li’l essay you just read is absolutely not license to go out and try to “correct” people who are doing this. Yeah, yeah, if you who read this have occasionally been doing the “Twitter (I refuse to call it X)” thing, feel free to reconsider that since it does bug me a lot, but it’s really no big deal compared to the real problems we’re dealing with right now.😭