X is reportedly selling inactive usernames for $50k
pcmag.com
pcmag.com
It would be fine if they charged a flat rate universally like domain names but the moment they determine trademarked names are more valuable, they open themselves up to civil suits.
Haven't used your money in a while? Poof! Someone else would make better use of them.
Real estate too. Taxes ain't enough - confiscate vacant property, and sell it at a flat rate at an ~open~ secret auction.
And cars too, of course. Didn't drive it on public roadways in a year? Clearly you don't need it.
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The first analogy is the closest one. People keep money in the bank for convenience, and that's what allows banks to operate.
Social networks use users' posts in the same way. It's their currency. Without it, they are nothing.
This is very different from gaming accounts, where a user profile is little more than the username. People cherish their post and comment history. It's their deposits into the social network.
Of course, I sincerely welcome this move by X. I wouldn't be able to come up with such a great way to shoot oneself in the foot.
The old account just gets renamed. All of the contents still exists. Even old links to posts would continue to work since the username in a URL does not actually matter.
Same for real estate: specific conditions need to be met, but solely having the land at your name isn't enough to guarantee you keep owning the property.
On cars, I assume you keep paying for the license plate even if you don't drive, or it's revoked and reattributed ?
Basically, reality has a bias against permanent passive ownership.
And with this move, the level of discourse on X is one step closer to that on Xbox .
This will have interesting consequences if, for example a reporter who no longer uses X, gets their username sold. The person who buys it of course will appear authenticated, and then the fraudulent news begins.
This is literally facilitating impersonation. I don't see how anyone could consider it ethical, and surely there are legal ramifications.
As long as they keep finding things to tell me in "private" I have a good reminder process for logging in often enough to keep my account from being sold by the X protection racket for $50k.
interesting. wonder how quickly it'll result in a lawsuit.
Pay-to-play public square—Musk's ultimate dream.
If you want to send tweets as @Microsoft after they leave the platform, you’re going to run into Trademark law among other issues.
Re: @Microsoft. I am not convinced that’s the case. If I build a public website with user handles it doesn’t automatically give all trademark owners the right to the matching handle.
That's not how the Supreme Court works. The Supreme Court only agrees to consider a small number of cases every year, which are usually cases that could have a significant impact on constitutional law. If the Supreme Court refuses to hear a case, the decision of the lower court (federal appeals court) would stand.
But I’m not sure that’s a good analogy for a Twitter/reddit/discord handle. A better one though not great is the domain name dispute resolution process. If JS owned and used Jama.com, I think they’d survive the domain dispute resolution process if they were serious about defending it.
A better analogy still might be Reddit. If they were using Jama as their official Reddit account, they’d likely be in a good defensible position legally so long as they billed themselves openly as the software org and took other steps to surface their branding to make it obvious that there was no association with the journal.
Again, legally, but Reddit the org is a different matter. Let’s say JAMA approaches Reddit and says they want the Jama username because they think the current user is creating confusion amongst customers, etc. There’s a slight undertone of taking action against Reddit if it doesn’t get resolved. Now Reddit has an interest in telling you, look - we got this asshole saying he wants ur username because trademark. Can you give it up or do you think you have a valid reason to keep it? Reddit will probably stay involved for exactly two rounds of back and forth before they make a summary decision turning on politics, commerce, and risk mitigation (do I want to piss off Amazon the corp or Beavis McMurdle in Iowa who has u/Amazon? Is it good to have Amazon corp engaged on my platform? What benefit does Beavis bring?). If the decision isn’t easy, I imagine Reddit will try to redirect the parties to work directly with each other (leave me out of it) or they’d give it to whichever party offers them solid indemnification (okay Amazon I’ll give you the username but send me a letter saying you believe you have legal claim to it and that you’ll pay all legal costs arising from Beavis McMurdle suing us).
It’s slightly more interesting if Beavis paid $20k to Reddit for the u/Amazon username. Is Reddit going to indemnify Beavis against any and all trademark claims as part of the sale? Absolutely not! Guaranteed part of that sales agreement will be something to the effect of the buyer attesting that they have a legal right to use the name, will indemnify Reddit(!) against any and all claims, and to not do so will be considered breech whereupon buyer forfeits purchase cost, etc., etc.
Reddit would likewise attempt to bind other parties (Amazon corp) by saying that as a condition of using the platform they’d agree to this dispute resolution policy, leave Reddit out of it where possible, etc. It would be pretty weak sauce, however, because Amazon mega corp could certainly bring a claim in court against Reddit claiming that they were aiding in trademark infringement, especially if Beavis started selling books with that username.
So it’s a pain threshold issue. How long will Reddit tiny corp go to bat for Beavis against Amazon mega corp? Not long. Their primary defense is some judo to redirect Amazon and Beavis to resolve their issues directly and leave Reddit out of it.
Elon of course is a different matter. Elon may go to the mat for some rando user cuz he likes to slay dragons - didn’t he say he would cover legal costs of users who get fired for a tweet or some such?? — but he may as quickly decide that having mega corp Z engaged on the platform is in X’s best interest. He has the money to stand up to mega corp plaintiff, but you can see with a private org how much the outcome is really just up to their pain tolerance. Ordinarily all orgs will operate in their own financial interest at end of day.
Twitter will certainly prioritize the sale of short handles, single word handles, common name handles, and not something like @apple (just because of the volume of squatted and unused handles that can be easily monetized). If they seize and sell @apple, and the new account will impersonate the company Apple - that's a totally different legal situation. If the sold account will just post pics of apples, I don't think the crime of impersonation would be relevant.
Sometimes legal opinions are referred to as case law, they are not making new laws.
I've never used twitter but its ability to survive this X phase is fascinating me, and i want to understand how it has proven this resiliant.
The numerous competing platforms that want to replace it are all competing for users, which prevents a migration to a single alternative platform.
And that buys time for X to improve, which IMO it is. I may be wrong but I think long term it’s going to come out on top. At this point it’s getting tough to bet against Musk.
Twitter isn't dead yet, but it's no longer the universal town square, and the longer Musk controls it, the further away from that it will get.
Not to sound like a gatekeeper, but it feels Twitter is still appealing for the /r/startups crowd, "indiehackers" influencers and wannabes. The center of "real" tech talk has moved away from twitter.
And I don't even consider myself a conservative. I just like my information uncensored.
Examples:
- Donald Trump.
- Milo Yiannopoulos.
- Paul Joseph Watson.
- Laura Loomer.
- Alex Jones.
On the other hand, pg, the creator of this site, was banned under the new management at Twitter. Ditto many other people whose only transgressions were saying words like “cis” or relaying publicly-available information.
Free speech indeed.
I mean, literal Nazis post hateful shit every day and don’t get banned. So the takeaway is that as long as you don’t anger the toddler-in-chief you’re good to go. Free speech!!
Before Musk, Twitter's full compliance rate hovered around 50%; since the takeover, it is over 80%.
These countries include China [2] and India [3].
[1] https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...
[2] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/twitte...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/twitter-accuse...
So you can't argue that X cares more about free speech than Twitter when they aren't willing to fight those laws through the judicial system. As always judge people on their actions not their words.
He censors. He just censors the things he doesn’t like. Can you give an example of anything you can say on Twitter that you can’t say on, say, Mastadon or even Facebook?
Taibbi is still on Twitter and is posting like every hour:
> Can you give an example of anything you can say on Twitter that you can’t say on, say, Mastadon or even Facebook?
Ask Trump.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...
Twitter claimed it was biased towards rightwing politicians and news outlets, while refusing to release the data that it claimed would show this.
> The idea that Twitter was "censoring conservatives" was always a lie, because they tended to break the rules more often.
Were those rules neutral? Even more importantly, were the people determining whether those rules were broken or not?
No, this is a lie. The rules were applied in a very one-sided manner. A left-leaning poster would not even get a warning, while a right-leaning one would get insta-banned forever for the smallest infraction.
I have a friend who thinks X and Elon are great, and yet he misses the possibility of no platform at all to interfere in your communications.
Many Twitter accounts have been locked post Elon, so it's curious to me how anyone can consider it truly uncensored or free speech in any capacity.
As a centrist Australia, it was clearly leftist.
I much prefer it now, I can actually see post from both sides.
(That being said, yes, I agree that Elon is doing everything he can to ruin that)
What's left are your friends, and for those I had a mixed strategy: help them set up accounts on Mastodon and still follow their twitter mirror. The ones that stayed on Mastodon, I can interact directly. The ones that dropped out, I follow their mirror and I ping them on im/email/phone when something they posted is a good hook for a conversation.
I have yet to find another social media site that brings all of that together in a nice, "streaming" kind of way. Reddit (where I'm subscribed to ~1k subreddits) is _almost_ as good but visiting Reddit is only really interesting once or twice a day because of the nature of their algorithm. TikTok is honestly pretty close to having a mix of art and programming, but the video format isn't as information dense as text.
Twitter keeps me coming back somehow.
The big change since he took over is that now I have to block a dozen or so people every day who are just on the opposite end of who I would ever want to interact with. Not just politically, but people actively seeking to be harmful to others in one way or another. Before that, I went 14 years of using Twitter daily and had only blocked a few spam accounts.
Compared to what? Pebble (T2) [0] that tried (and failed) to challenge this alongside the string of other alternatives that have failed to over take Twitter / X's active user base.
Twitter's network effect is reason why these alternatives have mostly failed at being an alternative even after marketing as such.
Network effects really should not be under estimated.
I have bsky accounts and plenty of invites, but it’s just a boring, joyless network full of the miserable people who left twitter sharing the same opinions back at each other, a feedback loop is how I’d describe it. I’m guessing that’s who it attracts, similar to how I assume places like Gab also attracted miserable people from the other side. I’d kinda describe that place as all the worst parts of 2020/21 twitter.
There’s also threads I guess, but it just seems like a network of celebrities and brands trying to seem hip.
As someone who has never used _any_ of these... that pretty much sums up my impression of them all. Just makes all the "but _my_ network of celebrities and brands is better!" all the more amusing.
https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-daily-active-users-dr...
I think that was before it was revealed that Musk sabotaged a major US-backed military strike in Russia.
I don't pay for anything; not really worth it to me as a casual user. I follow a few hundred accounts and maybe a couple dozen have announced their departure. I find new people to follow often before and after. Seems there's a bit more spam lately. But it's not something I'm super invested in so the changes don't bother me enough to justify spending the time to curate a new list of followers on a new platform that might die in a year or two itself. Who knows what X holds for the future but if I had to leave I wouldn't stress over it either.
I feel like this stated-as-fact assumption is actually the real question.
Sure there was a lot of loud fleeing in the months after the takeover, and motivated media outlets relish at reporting any figures that can be presented to suggest that this is a continuing trend.
Plenty of those who loudly fled have quietly come back, so many prominent voices are still there.
About a year ago I started a new account, keeping my follow list to about 100 people (mostly friends and people I like in tech/startups/sports/music/personal-growth) and avoided following anyone who is heavily politically partisan/vocal, and I find it to be fine.
I've seen countless accounts that have pinned post saying they quit the site but have about 10-20 posts/day, every day.
I mean, I get to read translated tweets from both Bibi and the Ayatollah, which is a depth of exposure I’d not see in MSM. I like that about X. I don’t think you get that kind of thing on Threads. You can choose who you follow and interact with on X, there’s no shortage of fascinating people and personalities, and ultimately you make it what you want. Some of the new features, like Community Notes, are appreciated.
All else being equal, I prefer less government/NGO/employee censorship collusion, so that’s a big change compared to old Twitter. I like to see contrarian viewpoints. It also differentiates the platform from Facebook and YouTube. I realize some people think differently, and I guess that’s what Threads is for. But Twitter/X seems like a more vibrant place to me than it did before.
There’s still no shortage of left-leaning shit posting and there’s probably more right-leaning shit posting than was allowed before. Tune out the noise. The idea that clearing the leftist and establishment filters has made the place an abandoned and barren hellscape is quite the opposite of reality, IME.