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Comment by lhnz | Hacker News Reader

If the usernames free up, I wonder if this going to lead to something synonymous to domain squatting?

A solution could be to make the usernames available after a random period of time (for up to a year), so popular usernames aren't released all at once to be grabbed by a squatter. With a staggered release this at least allows the chance for someone legitimate to stumble upon the username before a squatter arrives.

If squatting Twitter names becomes even marginally profitable you can be sure that squatters will be setting up bots that will monitor the availability of deactivated usernames that were popular in the past and that as soon as these are released they will be taken. A delay of the kind you suggested will not stop the bot writers.

Yes better to put the account names up for auction and bring in some revenue.

Donate the revenue to some charity, if the auction would be a PR problem otherwise.

Eg https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html

Terrible idea.

On the other hand, my username (arp242) is already "squatted" by an account that never tweeted or had any other apparently activity. I don't use Twitter much, but people have erroneously "mentioned" this account on a few occasions.

They already have this problem now. This may actually be one of the few positive things that come with this change

I doubt they'd free up the usernames. Username reuse has problems with reputation hijacking, either for paid likes, spam, or making it look like the user said something they didn't. It also creates a bad experience with historic @users in tweets, and no one wants that bad PR tweets pretending to be from someone deceased.

What you said is true, but they will free up old usernames

FTA- "previously unavailable usernames will start coming up for grabs after the 11 December cut-off"

Color me incorrect. I wish them luck with that.

Twitter handles are worth a lot of money and hackers have spent much effort to steal them. See

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/how-i...

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/twitt...

Amazing if Twitter is just going to release valuable namespaces worth millions all on the same day.

I imagine they want to free up accounts that never did anything. You should be able to safely make a handle available after deleting an account if it has never tweeted, has not been tweeted at, and hasn’t logged in in a long time.

They could rewrite @mention urls on recycled accounts to a /recycled page that explains this.

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