How I Lost My $50k Twitter Username (2014) | Hacker News Reader

How I Lost My $50k Twitter Username (2014)

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26 pointsbehnamoh11 comments

I used to have @paulg on Twitter. One day, a Twitter founder re-assigned it to pg. I never even got to use it :)

I registered it when I arrived to Startup School 2007. All of us had never seen or heard PG speak online or video, but just essays. The nerdy idea was, what if there's a blog or twitter account that sounds like PG's essays but about mundane topics?

I could have transferred it myself, years earlier, but I forgot I even did that until an article came out.

I also registered "docs" when Facebook allowed apps to have custom usernames. It was re-assigned to Microsoft the next day.

Still pays to contact PayPal to insert a note into your account NOT TO RELEASE ANY DETAILS to this day.

Not using them seems a good option. But at some point you need to trust someone.

[2014]

Opening twitter.com/n, it's still/back under his control and he's tweeted as recently as June 10.

If I cared I'd try to find his follow-up post.

No follow-up blog post, but these tweets show a brief progression:

https://mobile.twitter.com/N/status/428356597622902784 https://mobile.twitter.com/N/status/428679789491138560 https://mobile.twitter.com/N/status/428751111298621441 https://mobile.twitter.com/N/status/438426408721735680

The last one seems to be from the day he got his account name back, about a month after the original blog post.

> Opening twitter.com/n, it's still/back under his control and he's tweeted as recently as June 10.

> If I cared I'd try to find his follow-up post.

you cared a bit more then me...

Looks like he has different problems now

https://mobile.twitter.com/N/status/1535265460165390340

GoDaddy is a terrible company, I have a policy of not using them because they are also known for shutting down domains due to pressure from Twitter mobs

good that the nic of my domain has more strigent rules for changing owners of the domain.

I like hover.com because it’s from Tucows who I fondly remember from the 90s

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