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Comment by bfirsh | Hacker News Reader

This is actually useful for me. The name of my new company is taken by a 10 year old account that has never tweeted, and I haven’t managed to find somebody at Twitter who can get the name for me.

Does anybody know what’s going to happen to the names? Are they going to become available to register on 11th Dec? I hope somebody isn’t waiting there with a dictionary to squat them all...

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Yeah honestly I understand all of the negative effects people are saying but I’ll be so glad if the username I want is released from the user that signed up, tweeted once, got hit by a spam virus in 2011, never tweeted again.

I’ve even got a few reminders in my calendar to check on the username availability on the 11th and 12th. Really hoping it’s a full on user delete rather than just making them inactive

There are lots of permanently suspended accounts that have basically been squatting on a useless name for a decade.

There's zero downside to releasing those, since their old tweets are already gone.

> previously unavailable usernames will start coming up for grabs after the 11 December cut-off - though Twitter said it would be a gradual process, beginning with users outside of the US.

Conversely, it's problematic for me - my Twitter account is up for grabs and someone might impersonate me, assisted by several mentions of the account on old pages.

Why is your account up for grabs? Are you unable to login and confirm you're active?

I'm not active and haven't been for several years ever since Twitter started asking for phone numbers obnoxiously.

Yeah, seems like they have a habit of suspending accounts and asking for numbers. I've been lucky until now.

Seems like you can contact support to get it active again without having to give out your phone, but I understand if you'd rather not use the platform at all.

I’m in a similar situation.

Does anyone know of a service that can be made to automatically pick up a Twitter name as it becomes available?

Same situation here. I've emailed them several times about it with no success. Hoping this pans out.

You just gave out the idea to someone to do just that

I mean domain squatting has been a thing since the inception of the net. Not too far off to think this will happen over and over again.

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