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.
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?
If I signed up for a free social media account hosted by another company and neither logged in or posted on it for a year then it got autodeleted for inactivity, I wouldn't really feel I had a particularly strong claim to it.
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.
then 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
no there's not. this is complete and utter fiction. the things that keep it working are ads and normal users putting their eye in front of them, and the tos to make any silly claims of "social contracts" legally and absolutely moot.
It wouldn't have been so successful if everybody be called "Anonymous" meaning that they wouldn't be able to make money with it.
They've started to take this away now. Today it's some account with obviously few words. Tomorrow it might be one with wrong words. What you counted as value is nothing. It might be lost tomorrow, so why bother?
Of course, if you advocate for a system with no equivalent to eminent domain you'll quickly discover why the rule exists.
I mean: ping and then a year later pong? Priceless.
- 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?
Can you even imagine?
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?
Of course, I'm only saying this for active accounts. If you've been inactive for a reasonable amount of time, sure, let someone else have it.
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.
These two ideas are in direct contradiction to each other.
Why would a site care about vanity handles if not to monetize them ?
Is the goal to get as many users as possible and also kickoff as many users? Must be two teams competing for different goals.
Nit: smells like LLM
I find this revolting. Tech always had its weirdos, but mostly they were kind of idealistic, naive, or had some quirks or otherwise were maybe a bit unique, but they weren't into that kind of flat out evil ideology.
Your keys == Your account
It is about time to stop having identities tied to companies.
This is what excited me about distributed technologies but fighting capitalism is hard.
Wake up and can't even post one of those cool hospital selfies because Elon really needed that $100K...