I definitely feel like they could compromise and at least delete those blatantly unused ones.
Assuming of course that the account is truly idle and not being used to read without every interacting.
The inactive accounts that people are worried about losing are the ones that used to be active, or which were significant enough to make a lot of people follow them. However, the bulk of inactive accounts probably have very few (<10) statuses posted or followers, and deleting those is likely to be uncontroversial.
If I choose to squat the now freed up @foobar handle and not do anything with it, next year they can move my inactive version to @inactive:2020:foobar and free up @foobar again for the next person interested in using it.
Any way they solve this, there is a danger of people using bots to mass-squat liberated names to offer them for sale. I don't see any very good way around this. Possibly to give first pick to users with long-standing accounts that share a nontrivial common substring with the liberated handle. For example, if my current Twitter name is @firstname_lastname, and I really want @firstname, I think it might make sense to prioritize me over @random_bot_204safhq23.
(my relatives also didnt tweet very often but when they did they were amazing)
In the era of cloud computing, how expensive would it be to make an account readonly and store the paltry data it created in a cached location somewhere?
All of their tech decisions feel really reactive nowadays
The real cost of doing something like this is doing user research to figure out the set of human behaviors around the memorialization process, deciding where in the product to make the functionality available, training material for how it escalates up to human support teams, and what other things are on the team's plate at the same time.
Personally the permanence of internet content is terrifying and by far the worst aspect of it. Potentially there are people like me who would be at the table whenever "what to do with accounts of dead people" is discussed, strongly advocating for deletion. Lacking clear consensus they just left the decision until it had to be made.
I created a Twitter account in 2012 and it was immediately put in “private mode” because I didn’t want to post anything; ±7 years later the account is still empty, no posts, no followers, nada. The only reason I created that account was to prevent cybersquatting over my short-and-simple username (which I have to clarify is not “guessmyname”). I’ve done the same thing in other popular websites which I also never use, aside from signing in once in a while to keep the account “active”.
Can you imagine if I release my Twitter account, after almost a decade of constant cultivation of my other professional profiles (GitHub, GitLab, LinkedIn, etc) and then someone starts posting malicious messages to make my username look bad? People will quickly associate these messages with other accounts on the Internet with the same name. I don’t want to take that risk, and I guess other people with inactive Twitter/Facebook/Gmail/etc accounts are the same.
EDIT: 1'. Twitter has rules and procedures against impersonation: https://help.twitter.com/forms/impersonation though I don't know how effective they are if you are not going by a real name but by an Internet handle that you claim is unique.
2. If you have such an important personal brand to protect, your Twitter account should not be in private mode. It should be public, with a public tweet explaining that you are really you but are choosing not to use Twitter, and where to find you instead.
3. If you have such an important personal brand to protect, you presumably have something interesting to say. Twitter is not a bad platform to say it.
All in all, if they take away your squatted Twitter handle, I wouldn't feel bad for you. Certainly not without a lot more information about why your brand is so special. And, well, if you can keep them from doing it by logging in once every six months, it seems that that is something you can shoulder to protect your brand.
the odds of, at a minimum, any given twitter profile being at least wildly off-brand for your namespace colliding persona are still very high. this looks like a legitimate edge case anxiety to me.
This isn’t that big of a deal at all.
Plus all you have to do is login once in a while to keep it active as far as Twitter is concerned. I think 6 months is way too aggressive though.
Sorry, but do you actually believe this? In my experience, nearly everyone who talks about their "personal brand" is some variation of a dull-as-dishwater marketing drone. Be a human, not a brand.
I believe it to the extent that if the person "cultivates" GitHub and GitLab profiles, presumably they at least have new releases of interesting features to announce, for whatever software they develop there.
As for Twitter’s enforcement, it doesn’t shut down Elon Musk bitcoin scammers but it does shut down women complaining about the revolting DMs they get from men.
That's kinda easy, you create a real account and verify it/link it in all your other profiles.
Real class move btw, I hope GPs account gets deleted soon. (And then the flood of people having nothing better to do than destroy some nobody's reputation on social media comes in I guess...)
> Can you imagine if I release my Twitter account, after almost a decade of constant cultivation of my other professional profiles (GitHub, GitLab, LinkedIn, etc) and then someone starts posting malicious messages to make my username look bad?
I thought they'd linked their Twitter account on their other professional profiles.
That's just what you want us to think!
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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.
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Btw this is not at stake in this situation anyway, since you would just need to log into your account and accept the new ToS.
Even if your wildest dreams came true and someone started posting crap using your alias on twitter, still no one would care.
That said, should there be some sort of central internet registry where we all registered our unique usernames which will be the same and reserved on every platform?
This reminds me of the days of EFNet where you would fight to have a username. If you stopped using it/disconnected, it was fair game.
I don't think someone would start posting malicious messages to make you look bad. They would just use it for themselves, with their own profile pic and would be obvious it's not you.
After that, make a links/contact section on your website to list all your accounts. Post a note that anything not on the list is an imposter or someone coincidentally using the same name as you (which does happen, especially when you naively pick a four-letter name.)
Anyone still conflating a false account with you with one step to verify it as a fake will be acting in bad faith regardless.
Congratulations, you _are_ the very cybersquatter you feared so much.
we use online names as public certificates. we're doomed to this race.
You aren't entitled to a certain username on every service simply because you happened to be the first to register it on one service.
It has been an issue for several decades.
Oh no, you'll be just like everyone else under the sun who has to use different names in different places. You aren't special and no-one really cares.
Come on now.
If someone uses the same username in multiple places, and another site has a user with the same name, it’s easy to assume they are the same person. If there is a risk of impersonation or confusion with another account, it’s fair to try to protect your reputation by registering an account in that name and not posting, especially if you are well-known in some internet circles.
Easy, sure, but you’re probably wrong.
No, no it is not. Not at all... You are one of the lucky people who managed to get your chosen handle on those sites.
My preferred handle (givennamesurname) got registered in 2008 on twitter and hasn't done anything since (no tweets, no profile, etc).
On instagram, both (givennamesurname) and (givenname_surname) are taken, so I went with (surname_givenname).
The only real way to get around this is to just list your social media / accounts on your personal website. Then prove that you own it on keybase with gpg or whatever.
> it’s fair to try to protect your reputation by registering an account in that name and not posting,
If you stay on top of / are aware of every new service. I was 12 in 2008 and wasn't concerned about name squatting.
If you want an easily defended but unique identity, pick something that isn't short-and-simple, and you'll have less competition.
As a firstname user, life isn't easy when it comes to notification spam b/c people think that putting a space between first and lastname still gets sent to the correct user. I've basically stopped checking them.
(And all that because Github and Gitlab are both case-insensitive when matching @mentions.)
It sat like that for several years until lo and behold, they do release usernames under the right circumstances (see @sequoia now). I just want to know what made them release the name to @sequoia and not me (don't answer that :p).
The user has no tweets, has followed nothing and done nothing since registering 2013.
I hope they end up doing it.
If nothing this has stopped me from again creating accounts on these platforms couple of times I was tempted to.
Deleting accounts with lots of content and followers, only because there was no tweet for a few month, is just dumb.
Twitter said many times that the removals would not free up the namespace, those names would still be unavailable for use