Twitter commandeers X username from man who had it since 2007 | Hacker News Reader

Twitter commandeers X username from man who had it since 2007

arstechnica.com

46 pointsLinuxBender16 comments

Ars Staff comment:

> Just a random bit of trivia, Gene has a photo credit on Ars. We're casual friends who know each other through pinball. We'd run into each other at shows where he was always shooting photographs. He kindly let me use some of his photos when I wrote up my piece on the Museum of Pinball.

> Very nice guy, very chill, it's super lame that he had the name he's used for so long just outright stolen over a billionaire's ego. I had at least hoped he'd get paid off

It was a dormant account. He was squatting on it.

Doesn't matter. Once he started posting to the account, the UserAccount==Identity in todays world. And Elon being a child, simply wanted another toy, no other reason.

What if he had been in the hospital and couldn't log in? What if he was taking a year off social media? None of that justifies stealing an account. What about all the previous tags and replies, do they all now point to random Twitter support posts?

Another example of why social media users are content slaves, or at best, sharecroppers, on the lord's platform.

Reddit recently accused subreddit mods of being landed gentry, so yeah that pretty much makes the users serfs.

They are double slaves, one for the platform, the others for the corps/ngo/etc. they shill their products/ideology/etc.

Yet here we are…

I guess he should have asked for the @twitter handle. Seems only fair.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36879737

Will mention that the TOS can say one thing but that doesn't mean there is not a viable legal option that the previous owner has. The fact is the previous owners simply doesn't want to have aggravation or maybe doesn't know who to contact to try to get compensated appropriately is more or less what is going on here.

And these big companies will keep abusing people because there are no better alternatives (from what I know, please link better alternatives to this garbage called X).

Musk doesn’t pay because he can get away with it. It’s a power play by him

Also twitter can't even pay its offices landlord or google.

You believe they shouldnt do that?

It would be a nice thing to negotiate some solution or compensation, or maybe think about such issues before starting the manic rebranding.

Of course technically the emperor can do whatever he wants, but this breaks established norms, and looks hamfisted.

Just barging in to say that, in that particular case, no, they shouldn't have commandeered the handle. It's pretty well established now that this hasty rebanding is going sideways in more ways than one. Like, actually imagine being so dim as to reband to something already trademarked by your largest competitor. This ongoing Elon-saga really goes to show that, no, billionaires aren't actually the best and brightest. Anyway, all they've done here is strip a longstanding user of their handle that they've had and used for years, and Twitter will be forced to rebrand away from X soon anyway. They've just publicly alienated one of their own users for all to see.

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