X is selling existing users' handles

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340754

by hac • 4 months ago

197 81 4 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

I've been on Twitter since 2007 as @hac.

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.

stephenr• 4 months ago

Or congratulate yourself on being divested long enough that they don't think you're coming back?

ronsor• 4 months ago

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.

arcfour3• 4 months ago

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

quirk• 4 months ago

Came here to say this.

Retr0id• 4 months ago

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

imglorp• 4 months ago

Hey it's a revenue stream. I guess it's like selling domain names? Better than more ads maybe? Better than selling your data? Who are we kidding, they'll do all of the above.

mingus88• 4 months ago

You’d probably feel differently if you paid $44 Billion for the platform

Can you even imagine?

rahimnathwani• 4 months ago

According to the X app:

- 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?

al_borland2• 4 months ago

Dormant account reuse should be ok, assuming proper notice is given. Though 30 days is far too strict. A life event could leave someone offline for a month.

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.

dmix2• 4 months ago

I'd imagine the 30 days just the TOS, if they sell a username that has been active (posting, replying) in the past 6 months then it'd be a big deal for sure. It's not clear when OP last used his account but I'd imagine the people doing auctions look to see if they post or interact at all, not just login once in a while. X should probably clarify this.

consumer4512• 4 months ago

if they sell a username that has been active (posting, replying) in the past 6 months then it'd be a big deal for sure.

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?

wrs• 4 months ago

You're gonna be really unhappy with how domain name registrars work, then.

al_borland2• 4 months ago

I am very unhappy with domain name registrars for the same reasons. This is where most of my options on the topic were born.

addandsubtract• 4 months ago

Heroku just gave me a 30 day warning for being inactive and threatened to delete all my data if I don't log in within the next 30 days.

collingreen• 4 months ago

Will they sell your projects to a account holder after that?

Molitor5901• 4 months ago

I think that dormant accounts, where someone has not logged in for, say, 2 years, does not post, does not engage, should be repurposed - with given notice. It's kind of the equivalent of cybersquatting. Also, technically, a platform is within its right to do this. I think the better course of action is to utilize the account. Gmail has made this clear that if you don't log into an account after some time they will repurpose it.

sunnybeetroot3• 4 months ago

I disagree, there are security implications if an account was previously linked to someone but then it’s repurposed allowing for fraudulent social engineering use to occur. It’s like as if Gmail gave your email to someone else after a while. They don’t because it’s a bad idea.

Invictus0• 4 months ago

Are you aware that domains can be exchanged? And emails can be sent from domains?

zeratax• 4 months ago

both of you used gmail as an example to make opposing arguments

gdulli2• 4 months ago

It gets lost in the distracting partisan bickering over Musk/etc, but Twitter has gotten hostile and crappy in many ways like this that have nothing to do with politics. Imagine how much more hostile this action would have seemed in 2010. But now, people put up with it.

Hamuko• 4 months ago

Not really sure how much people really even put up with it. I just went to Bluesky once I got an invite, and I've generally noticed my cohorts migrating there over time too. Sure, some content isn't there, but a smaller social media better than beating your head against the wall.

davidw2• 4 months ago

As a 50 year old, I can recall a lengthy stretch of time in the US when lamenting the lack of a "white homeland" would not be considered "partisan", but extremely fringe speech that the mainstream would mostly shun.

gdulli2• 4 months ago

Twitter is certainly terrible for those reasons as well. Terrible people are excusing apolitical enshittification because they're thankful the Overton window has been pushed down to where they live in the bottom of the barrel. You just can't say the latter part too loudly here because there's sufficient sympathy and affinity for it.

surround• 4 months ago

Your posts: https://twiiit.com/hac

2020 - "Ping"

2021 - "Pong"

2023 - "Boop."

2023 - "Bleep"

2023 - "will inventing new technology be the solution to our problems?"

jauco• 4 months ago

I think that account is a work of art and should have been kept as digital heritage.

I mean: ping and then a year later pong? Priceless.

arcfour3• 4 months ago

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.

bccdee2• 4 months ago

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.

darth_avocado• 4 months ago

People have accounts and never post. Since X makes it mandatory to be signed in to read anything on the site meaningfully, there would be millions of such accounts with limited post history. And that doesn’t even include the fact that people sometimes go away from a platform for months for a variety of reasons.

conception• 4 months ago

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

fwn• 4 months ago

The obvious reason is, of course, money.

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.

lm28469• 4 months ago

This is unironically deeper than 90% of what's expressed on this platform

pupppet• 4 months ago

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?

throwa356262• 4 months ago

Imagine this: you are hit by a car, spend 4 weeks in coma.

Wake up and can't even post one of those cool hospital selfies because Elon really needed that $100K...

ChrisArchitect2• 4 months ago

https://handles.x.com/

lanewinfield• 4 months ago

who wants to screenshot what's on the other side because I sure as hell am not paying to see it!

ChrisArchitect2• 4 months ago

Alt: https://help.x.com/en/using-x/x-handle-marketplace

steve_adams_862• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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 ?

atmavatar• 4 months ago

but it's a reasonable need too.

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.

pohl• 4 months ago

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.

steve_adams_862• 4 months ago

That's a great point. I guess the key thing to determine is if a person is even reading content, or lurking so to speak.

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.

nunobrito2• 4 months ago

That is what I like about NOSTR.

Your keys == Your account

It is about time to stop having identities tied to companies.

Cider9986• 4 months ago

I like the idea of nostr, I don't like the experience of nostr.

nunobrito2• 4 months ago

Can't complain. Primal works great for browsers and Amethyst is my choice on mobile.

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.

segmondy• 4 months ago

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?

anonymousiam• 4 months ago

I was an early adopter on many platforms, and used the same three letter handle on each. I've had the same thing happen to me, even with an account that was being actively used. There's nothing that you can do about it. It's their platform and they can grab your handle if they want it.

lamontcg• 4 months ago

Really kind of weird with all these people who think it is just fine for services to take over accounts of people.

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.

cdrnsf• 4 months ago

It's someone else's (a terrible someone's) platform. Nobody owns their handles.

xrd2• 4 months ago

My 3 letter handle (xrd) is a cryptocurrency. I get all kinds of @ spam where people shilling a cryptocurrency tag me, assuming I'm associated. I really wish I could move the markets and make a quick buck somehow.

I wish Elon would give me a way to sell it before they steal it.

throwawayq34232• 4 months ago

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?

xrd2• 4 months ago

I just did a search, and the second link is escrotrust.com. But, the SSL cert is bad. This all looks a bit shady to me.

puppycodes• 4 months ago

Yeah if only we could really own anything online, unfortunately its basically all rented.

This is what excited me about distributed technologies but fighting capitalism is hard.

ipaddr• 4 months ago

Why go through all of the effort of forcing people to signup to read something but also delete accounts after 30 days.

Is the goal to get as many users as possible and also kickoff as many users? Must be two teams competing for different goals.

pfannkuchen• 4 months ago

Losing your account is frustrating. Having it sold to someone else doesn't feel right.

Nit: smells like LLM

krapp• 4 months ago

This is why even though I've "left" Twitter (I still refuse to call it X) I keep my handle active. It isn't worth anything to anyone but I'd still prefer not to have a bot use it.

wtfHN26• 4 months ago

I have a 6 letter handle that's my first name.

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.

renewiltord• 4 months ago

I think it’s fine. Someone squatted one of my names on GitHub. No activity. Nothing. I emailed them because I wanted it. They gave it to me.

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.

johnisgood• 4 months ago

In this case they will not give it to you if they bought it for 100k USD though.

breve• 4 months ago

They sell everything you do on X. The product is you. Always has been, always will be.

It's how it works.

shats_personal• 4 months ago

Its all about money in X now, earlier times were good

Gud• 4 months ago

Excuse me, but you can also refrain from using these services run by psychos

timnetworks• 4 months ago

mine wasn't even that rare, no followers, and twitter still took it away. now it has a blue badge.

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.

X is selling existing users' handles

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