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.
Domain names are usually treated as leased assets with a clear renewal cycle. Social media handles, on the other hand, often feel more like identity markers, especially when someone has used them for years.
When platforms reclaim dormant handles and then auction them, the model shifts from “resource management” to “asset monetization”. That changes user expectations quite a bit.
If a platform wants to recycle dormant identifiers, a transparent policy with predictable timelines and clear notices would probably feel more legitimate than quietly moving them into a marketplace.
Because it's not yours. Neither is a handle, or a domain.
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.
But it's your identity. It's the way you've been putting yourself into the world and telling people they can reach you there. It used to be that if someone sent a message to that address, or tried to navigate to that address, they would reach you; but now, they'll be taken to somewhere else, and they perhaps won't even realize what's happened.
And for the ownership issue, sheesh. Yes X, in a literal sense, owns all the usernames. We're talking about whether it's morally right for them to do, not about whether it's illegal. If they had held back these short "valuable" usernames from the beginning, no one would care; it's the act of taking away someone's established identity that is problematic.
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?
Hmmm who is playing stupid?
Internet monolithic social services are run by private companies with TOS that no one reads and change, services that barely anyone pays for (except through their data).
We should definitely normalize this so that people see what the internet actually is for the vast majority of people.
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.
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?
Precious enough to be sold for $100k as can be read above.
You can't have it both ways, if a handle is worthless then why take it away from someone?
If it's really worth $100k, then why on earth shouldn't OP get that $100k if it's going to be taken away from them?
edit: tempted to clarify with /s but that would defeat the point of the response..
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.
Twitter has 2 levels of verification tag that's what usually verifies users, as there are so many impersonators. Even when twitter removes the verification (like they did for iran's foreign minister) , people use other channels to point to the real one.
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?
But at least one poster says they're reusing addresses.
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 ?
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.
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.
I think you're right, and 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. Or at least not openly, because there was a sense of shame around that kind of ideology.
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.
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.
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.
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