Why I Brought 12 Square Feet of Cake to Twitter HQ last Friday | Hacker News Reader

Why I Brought 12 Square Feet of Cake to Twitter HQ last Friday

tynan.com

24 pointstynan24 comments

Soon enough one guy gave me instructions on how to file a ticket

which is all he really needed to do to get the username.

i got @jcs the same way a couple months ago: open a ticket, ignore the auto-reply email telling you twitter doesn't free up unused names, reply again saying you want the username looked into for inactivity. in a couple days they'll email back letting you know whether the account is inactive enough for deletion. if so, they'll delete it and you'll have to quickly change your username to the new one (since they won't directly hand over an account except in the case of trademark infringement).

Probably true... but who doesn't love cake? It's a heck of a way to show appreciation for the service if nothing else.

When it comes down to it, this is just attention whoring, isn't it? He did this because it fits his narrative of being the wacky, unconventional guy, who can also advise you on how to pick up women you used to consider out of your league. Barf.

I did it because emailing a few times didn't work, I wanted to do something nice in return (preemptively, I guess), and I think doing stuff like this is fun.

http://i.imgur.com/mHyMB.png

Stop signing your posts, you're only proving his point.

We can move on to doing this kind of analysis with your site if you'd like to persist in pretending you're not one of 1,000 other people on the internet with the same personality blog about how OH SO RANDOM and INTERESTING you are.

Why so rude?

It's a habit from writing email all day, not some sinister plot to get people to see my name a lot. I removed the ultra-offensive signature from my post.

I'm not inclined to get into an argument about how original or interesting I am... my ego is big, but not big enough for that. I'm content to gauge those things by the responses of my readers.

Call it a personality conflict, but I value quiet, dedicated productivity over relentless self-promotion with nary a sign of some kind of project or productive venture.

Two books written, another on the way, 1000 words per day of blog posts written, one multivariate testing software package written from the ground up and sold, another php project in the works, three non-fiction books read per week.

On the other hand, two or three of my 100 yearly posts submitted to HN, about the same to Reddit.

The only thing I care about out of that is the testing software package. What happened to that? Why haven't I heard of it?

Patrick managed to make and give away A/Bingo to the community while working on BCC.

What's the other PHP project?

I don't care about anything else you've mentioned.

Nobody cares what you read or what you have to say. The books are a tilt too. The only people who care about your blog of personality thing you have going is because they aspire to make money off of their 'personality' and otherwise not being productive.

Typical anti-work/productivity culture really. This kind of nonsense is the mainstream, not your OH SO RANDOM 'antics'.

I can't reply to your last one for some reason, which may be for the best. The multivariate software was called Conversion Doubler, but was renamed (and improved) by the buyer. I'm keeping the new project under wraps for now.

I consider it a personality flaw that I'm compelled to respond to (what I consider to be) unconstructive criticism like this. I'm done responding publicly, but will continue by email if you like.

Sent

Damnit, now you've got me all self conscious.

My email address has my name on it, but I still close it with -matt. I was going to post a comment to our work order system, which stamps my name on it, but I'm still inclined to close it with -matt. Same with Basecamp. Why? It feels more personal.

Does this really grind people's gears that hard? If so, where's it appropriate? Inappropriate? I respect the opinion of the HN community, so looking for honest feedback.

It really only bothers me in public fora like hackerne.ws where your handle is already right in your face.

I don't mind it at all in basecamp which lacks structure or email where it's traditional and signing off is a way to make it friendly. That said, I don't use automatic signatures, I write a personal benediction/have-a-good-day type thing for each email.

If it's not worth signing personally, it's not worth writing the email.

The short rule is, if it's occurred to you that it might be douchey, you're probably safe because you actually care.

Think of it as a Dunning-Kruger for douchebags.

A...Douching-Kruger if you will.

Back when I first signed up, I had @jarin. Then later on (like an idiot), I changed it to @jarinudom when I was trying to unify all of my logins. I later realized the error of my ways, only to find out that someone got @jarin, tweeted once, and abandoned it.

About a year of filing tickets later (about once a month, explaining that I used to have the name that I wanted and that it was no longer active), I saw an article on TechCrunch about Twitter deleting the inactive @ericschmidt account so that Eric Schmidt could have it. So I filed one last ticket, linking to the TechCrunch article and saying "Hey, I'm the head of a company too (albeit a much smaller one)!" and things like that, and 5 minutes later I had it.

I had a similar experience, except I sent a friendly snail mail letter instead of a cake. A couple days later a Twitter employee transferred the username to me and responded to my support ticket thanking me for the letter.

While I love your blog tynan, I have a question for twitter: Since when did it become ok to get someone else's twitter handle just due to inactivity? And if the change occurred in only five minutes, was there any warning to the existing user?

Domain names operate on a principle where you pay for your name every year, and get several warning emails that you will lose your account if you fail to pay.

Edit: read JCS's post, makes sense as long as they clearly state how inactive you must be. That said, could you get kicked off of twitter if you merely use it to "lurk" your friend's protected tweets?

See Twitter's inactive account policy here:

http://support.twitter.com/groups/33-report-a-violation/topi...

In general though it looks like they would like you to have a serious claim to the mark (ie US or Intl registered trademark) before they'll hand it over.

thanks!

They actually told me specifically that they'd check to make sure he wasn't just logging in and reading other tweets with the account.

My friend Christophe, who offered to video everything, was there, as was Jerry from The Cake Gallery, a local business that specializes in penis cakes.

Wait, what?

Penis cakes?

http://thecakegallerysf.com/

3-D Cakes 3-Dimensional cakes are popular whether it’s a simple Barbie Cake or an elaborate Wedding Cake. Adults Only, X-Rated Cakes or our most provocative creations are adult in nature. Our X-Rated themes range from male and female body parts to any sexual depiction your demented mind can create.

Nice.

Pretty funny coincidence that he'd have yet another thing in common with the Larry David/Curb Your Enthusiasm situation he found himself in. There's a whole episode of CYE about penis cakes (Meet The Blacks).

I don't understand why these cakes were bought by someone who goes on at length about why sugar is bad for you.

I know, it's ironic. I chose cakes because everyone besides me likes cake.

This blog looks like a MySpace page.

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