Prince Harry and Meghan took my Instagram name
bbc.com
bbc.com
> Instagram confirmed to Newsbeat that Kevin's handle had been changed in line with its policy.
> It allows it to make changes to an account if it's been inactive for a certain amount of time.
I tried going to the guy's new Instagram [1], but couldn't see any posts there at all. I visited his Twitter [2] instead, and except for a few posts he made from the exciting run in the last 24 hours, he hadn't tweeted since 2013.
I don't think they did a bad thing here — it's their platform, and they have some incentive to encourage a more lively and current community. Although it seems minor, one facet of this might be to help big users reclaim better names from the huge pool of defunct ones out there, especially given that Instagram has gotten so big that finding anything that's not a conflict is difficult.
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Ahh yes, nothing more lively and current than watching senior citizens coo over monarchs.
In all seriousness, this is just another step towards instagram being another bland reflection of the media fun house in which we all live: famous people get air time to pimp products and movements.
???
Instagram is a mainstream everything-is-an-ad site and has been since I've first heard of it.
Nobody in this situation is a monarch or ever likely to be a monarch.
You underestimate the reach here. When it comes to Prince Harry and Meghan, it's like saying only senior citizens care about the Kardashians.
In fact, Instagram basically encourages this type of account use. Any time you try to browse the site they try to get you to sign-up, even if you have zero intention of making your own posts.
It sounds like the guy would have given the account name over either way, so why couldn't they have simply contacted him first and asked?
Is 10x worse than "we have changed your account name". If you're going to do something and there aren't any alternatives don't act like it's a question unless an extremely high ratio will say yes.
This story pretty much sounds like “All animals are equals but some are more equals than others”[1] to me.
[1]Georges Orwell Animal Farm (his best book IMO)
[1] (and Instagram is owned byt a majority of American citizens)
While that is clearly true, a surprising number of US citizens do, in my experience, recognize the celebrity of British royals.
The number of times I've been asked about Prince William's children is, quite frankly, astonishing. To such an extent that I even Googled their names so I did't appear too much like I couldn't give a crap.
> they even ratified a text saying “that all men are created equal”.
Right, but those Founding Fathers were pretty good at words. They were very careful to not say that everyone is equal. Largely because most of them didn't actually believe that. What they were most concerned about was someone not lording it over them. They were entirely relaxed about lording it over others, for example.
Your assumption that Instagram can grab anything they want just shows the normalcy of this type of behavior. Maybe we, as the consumers of these products, should step up and say that is not cool? If you do it to that person, what is to stop you from doing it to another in the future, to me?
I think it should also be a signal to any one that creates a brand, a business, on Instagram. Instagram can instantly snatch your livelihood without even contacting you.
I'm proposing people being human and remembering that just because a URL path might be a technical creation, there is still a human being behind that and we should treat people as we want to be treated.
Sure will you give up all my data, metadata and shadow profile? Oh and don’t forget to forward me all funds you have made selling my data and or serving me Ads to date.
I’d really like ICANN to take away the Instagram domain and reassign it to some royals at their request while we are at it.
I don't understand online services' obsession with making sure public-facing identifiers are unique. This is not close to true in any other area. How many British guys can be named Harry?
If there could be two World of Warcraft toons named Joe, maybe there wouldn't be so many xX_KillStealr69_Xx-es running around.
How else could this be accomplished, especially when we are talking about URL structures that need to be somewhat short in length?
There is no need to have the public-facing identifier be the unique identifier, nor is there a good reason to do it. ICQ got this right, way back at the beginning. But somehow everyone forgot.
Needless to say, the most prominent and memorable identifier being non-unique has all sorts of uses for trolls and spambots too.
Sure, but it has more uses for people who would like to have a reasonable name. This is just the "knives can be used to kill people" argument.
Of course with unique identifiers you probably don't get to call yourself elonmusk, POTUS or amazon
Since there are a limited number of memorable names available, anyone late to the party gets stuck with non-memorable names. Why not even the playing field?
As another person said further down, it's why we have domain names rather than IP addresses. Sure, the way in which they're distributed might be suboptimal, but not nearly as suboptimal as making everyone have to remember the IP address or rely entirely upon a search function that returns ever-changing results.
But in this particular case, they weren't the early adopters...
The real "early adopter" was robbed of his name, for a (imho) is a lame excuse.
Yeah, there is: it's a major UX improvement, because the URLs at issue are entry-point URLs, which need friendly names for the same reason domains for public-facing services (which are key components of entry-point URLs) do.
It's true that in the general case objects don't necessarily need a URL component that matches their friendly name, but this is not the general case.
I know I personally very rarely type a direct URL. Either it's already bookmarked, or I google it.
Instagram accounts (and similar social media IDs) are often communicated in print, and parsing and accurately transcribing things that work like natural language is a lot easier than something like an arbitrary base36-encoded identifier.
They are also sometimes communicated via orally or via radio, where being able to hear and remember is even more affected by the using natural language.
I tend to like the approach Valve takes with Steam, which is to completely separate the "account name" (unique, unchangeable) from the "display name" (non-unique, change more or less as often as you want).
I have uh personal reasons for having done this and I know of others who have as well.
I’m not sure why they don’t roll it out more wisely - though I can say it did cause a couple of bugs until I signed out and back in on every steam device.
Each steam account does have atleast 3 internal unchangable account numbers that are exposed through APIs for developers to integrate with and use for things such as enforcing bans etc.
It's opted in to the problem by deciding that display names need to be unique. It's not right or wrong, it's apparently just been decided that that's desirable for the product.
He mentioned that he was able to keep his twitter handle and that's most likely because Twitter doesn't pull this sort of shit. I remember a few years back Israel wanted to the twitter handle "@israel" for their official twitter account, asked twitter and they would not hand it over from the original user. I think they ended up paying the original user something like $500k for the handle, which IMO was a damn good deal for the user.
I've always wondered such deals could just be bait for a user to violate the Twitter terms of service, and therefore free the username up for others to use.
EDIT: further explanation of the gTLD registry agreement
In the case of "entities with enough power and influence", I don't think any of the ICANN RA requirements make gTLDs any less likely to being seized than any ccTLDs.
Heck, I own a .sg domain, and I don't trust the Singapore government to not overreact if I published anything politically sensitive on it.
Good luck trying to argue in a court that your Instagram path is your legal asset and not Instagrams.
That account had value and this is a poor business practice. Courts award value and the damages are to make a point that its a bad practice if the judge/regulator finds it disturbing. Assuming that the judge / consumer regulator will say "well but you clicked I agree" is a bad assumption, ESPECIALLY when European countries are involved. the company is just as likely to axe that contract logic and just lean on their severability clause to keep the rest of the contract without self-granting the ability to reassign accounts.
Instagram would be in a better place if it generally brokered and escrowed account trading on its platform, and took a fee from that.
in other instances the follower and engagement to the userID is valuable
in other instances a combination of all three is valuable
Certainly not a 100% fail-safe solution – I see people already listing domains that were seized for various inexcusable reasons – but the Nissan.com case [0] (Nissan the car company vs. Mr. Nissan the run-of-the-mill computer sales guy) comes to mind as a classic (and fascinating) counterexample.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_vs._Nissan_Compu...
https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2000/d200...
...but I am often told I'm too optimistic.
>[...] In the Sting decision there was evidence that the Respondent had made bona fide use of the name Sting prior to obtaining the domain name registration and there was no indication that he was seeking to trade on the good will of the well-known singer.
>Because the evidence shows a deliberate attempt by Respondent to trade on Complainant's fame for commercial purposes, we find that Complainant has satisfied the requirements of Paragraph 4(a)(iii) of the Policy.
She got the domain because he couldn't bring up a single non-Madonna-the-Singer reason for plopping $20,000 down to buy the domain.
> All registered domains must be set in use within one year, otherwise the .AL Registry has the right to suspend them.
My account was 10 years old, no published repos, but consistent other activity. I don't have the desire nor the connections stir up a twitrage, but I'll certainly make their behavior known on HN.
These companies point to "inactivity", yet there is never any attempt to contact beforehand. The policy is merely a thin justification to do whatever the heck they want to suit corporate or personal employee whims.
That's SaaS (Surveillance as a Sharecropper) for ya.
Thanks a lot Josh Williams you thief: http://instagram.com/jw
I had a couple tumblr employees following me, cool people. I even had the founder “like” a couple of my posts. My sense was that there wasn’t an avenue open to poach a day-one user like me. This was all pre-yahoo.
Eventually, when I was done with the site more or less, I put out a feeler for a buyer and made a quick buck. That buyer I think tried to sell it themselves and it ended up shuttered.
Good times. Tumblr had a fun niche art community at the time and my “tumblr fame” helped me network with some interesting people.
Not doing something like this leads to stupid stuff like having POTUS' handle be "real donald trump" (yes, I know choosing that handle predates his being POTUS, but you get the idea).
So yes, I think they should have at least asked first and tried to resolve it amicably.
I actually find this a charming reminder of the old days of the web. there's a certain populist quality to the idea that no one is important enough to snatch a particular username that some commoner took first. I agree situations like @realdonaldtrump are kind of silly, but it doesn't hurt anyone. anyone who actually has a large audience has a verified account so there's little doubt regarding who actually controls it.
that said, we really do need a responsible way to reclaim truly inactive accounts without enabling "reset my password via email" type attacks.
No one should be able to get something any more than any one else. Of course that’ll never be the case. But why excuse the behavior and even encourage it?
> An account is determined to be inactive based on a number of things, including the date the account was created and whether the account has been sharing photos, commenting on photos, liking photos and logging in.
https://help.instagram.com/397846020286683?helpref=related&r...
From the article:
> Kevin admits that he didn't have that many followers and didn't post often - but he would use it to like and follow other people's posts.
For all we know, he hadn't logged in or posted anything for a year.
But, still, Instagram should be a good landlord here and at least inform the user before just yanking their account handle.
> Kevin admits [...] he would use it to like and follow other people's posts.
If we are to believe him, then his account was not inactive by Instagram's own definition of inactivity.
When rich and famous people want your handle.
"When rich and famous people want your handle bad enough to shell-out money to a PR firm who has spent a boatload on Twitter ads to establish a very favorable business relationship that allows them to procure already-in-use accounts for their clients with a simple request to their account manager at Twitter."
I saw this happen for a small startup I worked at some years back who hired a PR firm and instantly were able to take control of a twitter account that we'd been denied access to for _years_. It was inactive with like 8 porn posts and nothing in the last 5 years, and we sent in formal verification of our trademark, and I also reached out through back channel tech contacts who put in internal requests, and we still got denied 3 times over about a year period. We hired a PR firm to run a marketing campaign for something unrelated to Twitter, and on like day 2 of the relationship, they reached out and basically just off hand said "oh yeah btw we reached out to Twitter and got control of this account for you, I think it matches your company name more directly if you want it!" We hadn't even asked them about it.
It’s Instagram’s responsibility either way. They could have said “pick another name or we can nicely ask the current owner for that one.”
Never got an email about it or any form of contact. They just up and gave my account to the machinima.com company.
They could have at least explained the situation to that person and allow them to choose a new handle. I would be furious if my handle suddenly had "_" as prefix and suffix. What next, "@xXxsussexroyalxXx"?
sussexroyals (there are two of them after all) thesussexroyals (more grammatically correct) thesussexes (as they are commonly referred to in the press) harryandmeghan (has only posted once since Dec 2017) meghanandharry (ladies first!)
and so on...
Instagram people were probably star struck, and salivating at the idea of _millions_ of eyeballs and media interest on the site, that they pretty much waived anything through.
I'd imagine a lot of the top brass at companies would do anything for a slice of celebrity/royal action, it's a gold mine and worth a lot more to them than some peon from Reading who just lurks.
In the 90s, Mr. Nissan was able to fight and keep nissan.com. That feels like a thousand years ago. Now everything is governed by private "policies" that amount to "we can do anything we want".
I don't like the new world at all.
Distrokid email: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8tw90s0n8urj9j3/distro-email.png?d...
My reply: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ym9oxvwprkqm9ph/distro-reply.png?d...
Good luck with that, Twitter has a long history of taking handles on behalf of brands and celebrities...
This seems like a poorly handled extension of that power.
But- truly just an example of how your use, data, name, etc on these services is really just at their whim.
Or does that old instinct of defering to power make you want to give in to the presumptuous request of a large entity?
"2.5 Does putting my trademark in the Clearinghouse mean that I automatically get my trademark as a domain name in all new gTLDs?
No. The Clearinghouse verifies and maintains information from many jurisdictions and classes of goods or services, and many parties may have legitimate rights in the same trademark. Allocation of domain names in a particular TLD occurs according to the registry policies for that TLD."
1: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4806:9gr...
2: https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/about/trademark-clearinghouse/...
The apple growers association of america?
What you are talking about is essentially moral relativism. Most people see that as dubious.
Just because one entity sees something as right does not make it objectively right.
Can Instagram do this? Yes. Should everyone be okay with it in virtue of that ability? That comes down to personal opinion.