Twitter, now X, took over the x handle without warning or compensating its owner | Hacker News Reader

Twitter, now X, took over the x handle without warning or compensating its owner

techcrunch.com

28 pointsalphabettsy12 comments

They took the handle @x from him and moved all of his stuff to @x12345678998765

I’m not sure what would be more angering, losing @x or the fact that they gave him a 16 character handle 15 of which is nonsense.

It’s also just a weird new handle, it’s not even like they tried to replace it with something good, just a jira ticket that says “give him something new, it can start with x but should be clear it’s not associated with us” and someone just rolled over the number keys.

As soon as the prior holder of the handle can produce a contract that allows him un-revokable use of the handle I'm sure Elon will give it back or compensate him.

That’s really not the point as far as I’m concerned.

It makes sense they would control it and it’s their platform, but in my opinion it was mishandled.

Taking an account without prior notice when this was supposedly planned seems like an obvious misstep.

Just one misstep in the 100s that have already occurred. At this point what was the point in buying Twitter to begin with? Whatever Musk had originally bought is no longer of any value. 44 Billion would have given a brand new startup a very long runway. 1 billion would have been plenty.

"An obvious misstep"... yeah, it doesn't look good from a certain PR point of view. But it could also be considered able-ist biggotry to judge Elon by the standards of someone without Asperger's, no?

It's also possible X/Twitter reached out to the handle holder who told them to pound sand so they exercised admin authority and he's telling a different story. Like so many things online the truth is difficult to discover but we all know how we feel about people and brands are willing to shoot from the lip without proof.

How do you know the person you might accuse of ableist bigotry doesn't also have Aspergers? You can't hold them accountable if you don't know that.

> it could also be considered able-ist biggotry to judge Elon by the standards of someone without Asperger's, no?

Elon may not have realized it is a misstep, and may have good reason for not realizing it, but that doesn't make it any less of a misstep.

Edited to add: it's also very probable that this is not a detail Elon personally had a hand in.

> It's also possible X/Twitter reached out to the handle holder who told them to pound sand

Techcrunch has a quote from the handle owner, you have a theory.

Yeah and narcissism should also be a protected class I suppose..

Legally, is twitter allowed to unilaterally reassign usernames? Probably.

Is it a dick move to do so without communication or compensation?

Yes. Without question.

The point is not that they did something illegal, but that they pulled a dick move

Just because an action is legal doesn't mean you aren't an asshole for doing it

I don't think legally they will win. Only from the consumer perspective this is misleading, they are taking advantage of a position of power to harm a user.

Commonly we see posts here detailing how Google suspended people’s accounts, thus losing all their email/contacts/files/etc, and it’s usually met with a unanimous “that’s terrible Google can’t just do that without reason” response. This is just one example.

But when it’s a company owned by Elon there’s always victim blamers like yourself. I wonder why that is?

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