Discussion

ronsor: I think people sitting on a handle for 10-20 years without active use is annoying, so I'm fine with them taking them from dormant accounts. I think the selling is sketchy though.

arcfour: It's less sketchy than third party underground sites, though, which is the alternative.

surround: Your posts: https://twiiit.com/hac2020 - "Ping"2021 - "Pong"2023 - "Boop."2023 - "Bleep"2023 - "will inventing new technology be the solution to our problems?"

arcfour: I can't believe X would take back the account of such an active and valued member of the community who is clearly not squatting on the name or anything.

steve_adams_86: It's a drag for sure, but, what were you doing/going to do with it? You almost never posted, and when you did, it didn't contribute to anything.If I owned a site like X, I'd want some way to reclaim user names in cases like these. I don't doubt X is sneaky or gross about it, but it's a reasonable need too.Putting the name on a marketplace is weird. I'd simply free it up if it was my platform, and send a note to the original owner explaining what happened. Though I'd send warnings as well.Something like 'Hey, you haven't [met an engagement metric] for [n period of time]. We're going to shut down your account to make space for other people'. People could game this, sure, but I suspect it would be better than what happened to you.

foogazi: > but it's a reasonable need too. > Putting the name on a marketplace is weird.These two ideas are in direct contradiction to each other.Why would a site care about vanity handles if not to monetize them ?

conception: People can use Twitter actively and not post. That’s not really a reason to take someone’s handle away.

bccdee: Squatting is something you do to someone else's property. It implies that there is someone else out there with a more legitimate claim to the @hac handle, which there isn't. It's not as if we're talking about @google or something.If I stole your house and sold it because I didn't think you were using it properly, that would clearly be illegitimate. I don't see why the rules change when we talk about someone's twitter handle. Nobody needs @hac. X merely wants it and has the power to take it.

arcfour: But you don't own it. X does. It's their service, they are free to apportion handles as they see fit. It is nothing like a house where you have an actual ownership claim through the deed.

applfanboysbgon: can we please not play stupid. obviously you don't legally own it. but there's something of a grand social contract that keeps the concept of accounts on websites working, that literally all of the global internet has followed for decades. it is absolutely insane to normalize yanking people's accounts. why would you ever want to use a website where you can lose access to everything you have? for public figures, imagine how much brand damage can be done by letting some rando have access to your account? i think reclamation of years-old handles is one thing and maybe fair game, especially for things lower-importance and with less longetivity than twitter, but selling them goes beyond the pale and incentivizes perverse and destructive behaviour from the "owners" of your accountthen i'm sure we'll get to the trite "just don't use twitter" argument, but for anyone with a presence online (artists, open-source developers, game studios, journalists, any kind of business at all, etc. etc.) that's essentially playing life with a handicap. twitter is a piece of infrastructure used by a thousand millions of people, with a compounding network effect that makes it impossible for alternatives to gain real traction because viewers go where the content is and content goes where the viewers are. it should, ideally, not be allowed to be enshittified to this degree. after achieving a certain degree of global monopolization, "just use something else" fails to be a working solution

segmondy: I see lots of people defending this. What if the owner doesn't post, but reads and uses DM? What if they post the delete their posts when it gets old? Like Michael Burry?

seydor: use another handle. It's not really something worth defending, but are twitter handles even precious? some of the biggest institutions have cryptic/unrecognizable handles

xboxnolifes: But why should they have to use another handle just because someone wants it?

pupppet: So if you sign-up just to be able to read Twitter's gate-kept content you should assume they can pull the rug out from under you?

delichon: > but are twitter handles even precious?>>> From what I can tell, they will wait for some time and then auction the handle for around $100k.

pohl: The vast majority of users on every forum in Internet history, from Usenet to slashdot to Twitter and beyond, have always been lurkers: people who almost exclusively read. They are essential to the vitality of the forums but they are invisible, proverbial dark matter. They do not deserve to be treated as less than. But I don’t exactly want to stop X from shooting themselves in the foot for the umteenth time.

Retr0id: If OP had known his handle was going to be taken away, maybe he'd have tried selling it himself instead.