In recent years I didn't sign in frequently, then last week I saw my handle show up on the new X Handles marketplace.
It seems the account now belongs to X, and because I had a "rare handle" I can't even buy it back. From what I can tell, they will wait for some time and then auction the handle for around $100k.
Losing your account is frustrating. Having it sold to someone else doesn't feel right.
Of course, there is no warning when it happens. All you can do to prevent it is sign in every 30 days and read all changes to the TOS.
2020 - "Ping"
2021 - "Pong"
2023 - "Boop."
2023 - "Bleep"
2023 - "will inventing new technology be the solution to our problems?"
Since rare handles can generate high prices and are returned to auction once the buyer fails to meet their obligations, Twitter has a strong incentive to increase the number of handles in its auction pool.
The relevant product manager has probably ranked existing attractive handles according to their expected mobilisation/outrage potential and started confiscating handles from the bottom of that list.
This is probably also why you won't be notified about their auction of your handle, even though you'll receive email alerts for irrelevant stuff all the time. The process looks designed to be stealthy.
Money really is the trivial Occam's razor explanation here.
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.
I mean: ping and then a year later pong? Priceless.
Selling I have an issue with, especially the arbitrary selling of “rare” handles. This leaves normal users stuck with junk names and encourages Twitter to be even more of a place for corporate communication above all else.
What about this scenario:
If you register a domain name, a bot registers a related handle/name/brand pretty quick if you do not.
So, you register a twitter handle to preserve your brand identity right after registering a new domain.
You don't check it for 6 months.
Is it OK for Twitter to sell that handle?
Can you even imagine?
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.
Why?
User names are for all practical purposes infinite: merely allowing 10 character alphanumeric usernames already gets you into the quadrillions, nearly enough for every person on the planet to claim a million unique usernames.
The username in question, while short, doesn't seem to have any inherent value, as it does not appear to be a valid word in any language, and the most common acronym expansion for it (Home Access Center) is too generic to be particularly useful as an identifier such that anyone but the original user would fight for its use.
I don't like this stuff. I suppose you can anonymize this data easily, but it inevitably requires a degree of spying on users. I know tracking usage like this wouldn't be anywhere near the top of the list in terms of creepy egregious stuff these platforms do, but I don't like the idea of it. Everything has become so invasive.
These two ideas are in direct contradiction to each other.
Why would a site care about vanity handles if not to monetize them ?
I wish Elon would give me a way to sell it before they steal it.
Just put it online. Maybe use an escrow service. What's stopping you?
Your keys == Your account
It is about time to stop having identities tied to companies.
Other than that it is really great to build apps on top of NOSTR relays. My personal goal is to turn each user phone on a relay so we can walk with our own data on the pockets while still sharing with other relays as we wish.
Of course, they can literally do whatever they like, it is their platform.
But it would be nice if everyone considered what it would be like for a platform to just arbitrarily nuke their account one way or another.
There's probably a lot of "well they wouldn't do that, I don't have a valuable named account, and I'm a user in good standing" but in reality they can do it for whatever reason they like and there's no actual guardrails--so anyone's account is equally at risk if they decide to.
I’m not going to be called improbable_coaster_2740 just because some fool decided it was a good use of his time to register a bunch of usernames.
- the user @hac has existed since 2008
- since then, it has posted 5 tweets totalling 14 words
- it does not follow any accounts
Is this your account, or is this a different account that recently took over the @hac username?
Is the goal to get as many users as possible and also kickoff as many users? Must be two teams competing for different goals.
One day I decided to start being more 'social online'.
Head to X. I was unable to log in with my password. No error. Just redirected me back to the log in screen.
I tried password reset. It asked me my last login date.
I couldn't be sure. Still mentioned a possible date.
I added that this is the same email listed on the X/Twitter account.
You can just send me a password reset mail to this email.
They rejected. Tried that a couple of times, then stopped.
----
Started an account on Threads. Quite fun, less crowded and almost no politics on my feed.
----
I decided to create my Blog and write content there.
Will probably create other accounts to post my blog posts to the socials.
But I am not giving a platform the power to cut me out of my account.
----
Videos can be an issue.
Youtube is still the only decent host for Video content.
It's how it works.
it's not my computer i suppose. a whole bunch of computers, all not mine.
now imagine hinging your entire marketing philosophy off 3-4 platforms like this.
Wake up and can't even post one of those cool hospital selfies because Elon really needed that $100K...
Nit: smells like LLM
This is what excited me about distributed technologies but fighting capitalism is hard.
