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Comment by constantly | Hacker News Reader

I do think this is philosophically unjust, but in no way should anyone have built any brand on Twitter, particularly a generic like “music”, and not expected something like this would happen. Twitter in particular has a long and storied history of this sort of thing.

I think the move should have been, if one were going to start on Twitter, to slowly funnel the largest possible portion of their 11M followers to their own external site, or collaborated with I don’t know Spotify to funnel people there for cash.

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Wildly ahistorical take. 16 years ago nobody had “Diamond mine trust fund baby takes over Twitter and yoinks handles” on their bingo card for 16 years into the fucking future.

In 2007, the housing market hadn’t crashed. George W Goddamn Bush was President. The Web seemed wide open for the taking, and scrappy startups seemed like fun places to share your life or your words or whatever. Vine was still more than half a decade away from being invented. Apple’s market cap was $151B.

The downside risk you’re protecting against isn’t “billionaire buys company and steals your account” but is instead the much more general, “I lose access to my account,” which you will agree is a much more likely thing to happen, particularly given that it has happened on Twitter, so it’s not exactly speculative.

Exactly, when your business relies entirely on another business, you are taking a huge risk that the other businesses blocks you on a whim. There could be many reason such as randomly being flagged by some "spam" algorithms, or because add a feature that competes with your business, or they just don't like you.

That's true for anything that relies on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, ...

You should always have a plan: what's the risk that X company terminates our account, what would the consequences be, and what do we do in that case.

every investment and activity has tail risks that you have to factor into your decision making, there are always things that can happen outside of your control

In 2007, social media was still the "Wild West" and having expectations one way or another was not a sensible, it was not something you should have gotten involved in if you wanted low tail risks

I don’t understand the relevance or any of those things, nor does the prediction need to include emerald mines.

What should have been on the bingo card is “this company with whom I have no formal agreement might change its terms on a whim and destroy my project”. Even by 2008 you could probably have looked at Facebook apps as an example. I remember some startup for music sharing became the most popular service on there then one day FB changed some integration detail and their business died overnight.

He didn’t wake up 16 years later to finally realize how Twitter operates. Sure at the very start it’s hard to predict this. But through the years/decade seeing how Twitter do this many times, he should have implemented other options a long time ago.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...

At what point should a username be expected to be qualified with conditions beyond first come first serve?

We manage non-unique names in a lot of domains. It'd be a shit-show if given names had to be unique. It'd be acceptable to have an ID in the background that helped regain specificity. (Kind of like social security numbers in the US, though those also notably are not unique.)

You're talking brands. I bet @music was thinking platforms.

At first Twitter seemed to want to be a platform - something for others to build on.

Twitter clearly does not want to be a platform. It wants large corporate customers, lots of consumers, and spambots.

You are not wrong. I had many ideas, but I've been working too much (excuse, yeah) since then to do you things you suggested.

I know the danger of building on another's platform. But it still sucks.

Their account, musicfan, has ~500k the new music is a rename from some twittermusic handle I think

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