Comment by blfr

6 hours ago

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

  • 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'm even cooler. I never used it.

    Also, I don't watch TV and only smoke menthols. I mean vape. Or whatever.

> 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.

> 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.

  • 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.

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 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.

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  • Recently found textlog.cc here on HN. At times it felt (the content especially) like the early days of twitter.