X is selling existing users' handles | Hacker News Reader

X is selling existing users' handles

197 pointshac91 comments

I've been on Twitter since 2007 as @hac.

In recent years I didn't sign in frequently, then last week I saw my handle show up on the new X Handles marketplace.

It seems the account now belongs to X, and because I had a "rare handle" I can't even buy it back. From what I can tell, they will wait for some time and then auction the handle for around $100k.

Losing your account is frustrating. Having it sold to someone else doesn't feel right.

Of course, there is no warning when it happens. All you can do to prevent it is sign in every 30 days and read all changes to the TOS.

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Dormant account reuse should be ok, assuming proper notice is given. Though 30 days is far too strict. A life event could leave someone offline for a month.

Selling I have an issue with, especially the arbitrary selling of “rare” handles. This leaves normal users stuck with junk names and encourages Twitter to be even more of a place for corporate communication above all else.

I'd imagine the 30 days just the TOS, if they sell a username that has been active (posting, replying) in the past 6 months then it'd be a big deal for sure. It's not clear when OP last used his account but I'd imagine the people doing auctions look to see if they post or interact at all, not just login once in a while. X should probably clarify this.

> if they sell a username that has been active (posting, replying) in the past 6 months then it'd be a big deal for sure.

What about this scenario:

If you register a domain name, a bot registers a related handle/name/brand pretty quick if you do not.

So, you register a twitter handle to preserve your brand identity right after registering a new domain.

You don't check it for 6 months.

Is it OK for Twitter to sell that handle?

If you don't pay for a domain name you could lose it too.

If I signed up for a free social media account hosted by another company and neither logged in or posted on it for a year then it got autodeleted for inactivity, I wouldn't really feel I had a particularly strong claim to it.

One thing that makes handle markets uncomfortable is that social media identifiers sit in a strange space between identity and platform resource.

Domain names are usually treated as leased assets with a clear renewal cycle. Social media handles, on the other hand, often feel more like identity markers, especially when someone has used them for years.

When platforms reclaim dormant handles and then auction them, the model shifts from “resource management” to “asset monetization”. That changes user expectations quite a bit.

If a platform wants to recycle dormant identifiers, a transparent policy with predictable timelines and clear notices would probably feel more legitimate than quietly moving them into a marketplace.

If your domain is used as a brand identity, you should register it as a trademark and sue anyone who uses your brand identity as a twitter handle.

I'm thinking more like solo founder territory here. And apparently, it can be as short as 30 days?

You're gonna be really unhappy with how domain name registrars work, then.

I am very unhappy with domain name registrars for the same reasons. This is where most of my options on the topic were born.

Heroku just gave me a 30 day warning for being inactive and threatened to delete all my data if I don't log in within the next 30 days.

Will they sell your projects to a account holder after that?

They'll sell your space on their machines.

Because it's not yours. Neither is a handle, or a domain.

What if your handle is your name? Who owns that?

Does everyone with the same name get an equal claim?

I don’t know if you’ll see this after a week, but my thought experiment was something like “what if HN took my username and gave it to someone else”? It wouldn’t just be handing off my username, it would be handing off an implied identity, even if they deleted comment history and such.

I’m not sure what the appropriate outcome is but I think it’s fair to say that it’s not straightforward.

Your posts: https://twiiit.com/hac

2020 - "Ping"

2021 - "Pong"

2023 - "Boop."

2023 - "Bleep"

2023 - "will inventing new technology be the solution to our problems?"

People can use Twitter actively and not post. That’s not really a reason to take someone’s handle away.

The obvious reason is, of course, money.

Since rare handles can generate high prices and are returned to auction once the buyer fails to meet their obligations, Twitter has a strong incentive to increase the number of handles in its auction pool.

The relevant product manager has probably ranked existing attractive handles according to their expected mobilisation/outrage potential and started confiscating handles from the bottom of that list.

This is probably also why you won't be notified about their auction of your handle, even though you'll receive email alerts for irrelevant stuff all the time. The process looks designed to be stealthy.

Money really is the trivial Occam's razor explanation here.

I can't believe X would take back the account of such an active and valued member of the community who is clearly not squatting on the name or anything.

Squatting is something you do to someone else's property. It implies that there is someone else out there with a more legitimate claim to the @hac handle, which there isn't. It's not as if we're talking about @google or something.

If I stole your house and sold it because I didn't think you were using it properly, that would clearly be illegitimate. I don't see why the rules change when we talk about someone's twitter handle. Nobody needs @hac. X merely wants it and has the power to take it.

But you don't own it. X does. It's their service, they are free to apportion handles as they see fit. It is nothing like a house where you have an actual ownership claim through the deed.

It's less like having the house taken away, and more like having your house's street address reassigned to someone else's house. Sure, no one's taken your land. Your deed gives you ownership of parcel #530453080, not of the identifier "123 Vine Street", so nothing you legally own has been taken from you.

But it's your identity. It's the way you've been putting yourself into the world and telling people they can reach you there. It used to be that if someone sent a message to that address, or tried to navigate to that address, they would reach you; but now, they'll be taken to somewhere else, and they perhaps won't even realize what's happened.

And for the ownership issue, sheesh. Yes X, in a literal sense, owns all the usernames. We're talking about whether it's morally right for them to do, not about whether it's illegal. If they had held back these short "valuable" usernames from the beginning, no one would care; it's the act of taking away someone's established identity that is problematic.

This "ownership" or rather "identification" is a significant part of the service though.

It wouldn't have been so successful if everybody be called "Anonymous" meaning that they wouldn't be able to make money with it.

They've started to take this away now. Today it's some account with obviously few words. Tomorrow it might be one with wrong words. What you counted as value is nothing. It might be lost tomorrow, so why bother?

Since when do you "own" social media handles? Maybe you should, but that's not reflected in the laws of our countries or the policies of these platforms. They own your presence, your content, and your reach. This is our "solution" to self-publishing. Do you want change? Advocate for it.

Of course, if you advocate for a system with no equivalent to eminent domain you'll quickly discover why the rule exists.

X already owned it.

Yeah well Google owns my Gmail address, but they'd sure ruin my life if they gave it to someone else. It's not acceptable.

People have accounts and never post. Since X makes it mandatory to be signed in to read anything on the site meaningfully, there would be millions of such accounts with limited post history. And that doesn’t even include the fact that people sometimes go away from a platform for months for a variety of reasons.

So if you sign-up just to be able to read Twitter's gate-kept content you should assume they can pull the rug out from under you?

I think that account is a work of art and should have been kept as digital heritage.

I mean: ping and then a year later pong? Priceless.

This is unironically deeper than 90% of what's expressed on this platform

According to the X app:

- the user @hac has existed since 2008

- since then, it has posted 5 tweets totalling 14 words

- it does not follow any accounts

Is this your account, or is this a different account that recently took over the @hac username?

I see lots of people defending this. What if the owner doesn't post, but reads and uses DM? What if they post the delete their posts when it gets old? Like Michael Burry?

I think people sitting on a handle for 10-20 years without active use is annoying, so I'm fine with them taking them from dormant accounts. I think the selling is sketchy though.

It's less sketchy than third party underground sites, though, which is the alternative.

If OP had known his handle was going to be taken away, maybe he'd have tried selling it himself instead.

Came here to say this.

You’d probably feel differently if you paid $44 Billion for the platform

Can you even imagine?

Hey it's a revenue stream. I guess it's like selling domain names? Better than more ads maybe? Better than selling your data? Who are we kidding, they'll do all of the above.

My 3 letter handle (xrd) is a cryptocurrency. I get all kinds of @ spam where people shilling a cryptocurrency tag me, assuming I'm associated. I really wish I could move the markets and make a quick buck somehow.

I wish Elon would give me a way to sell it before they steal it.

> I wish Elon would give me a way to sell it before they steal it.

Just put it online. Maybe use an escrow service. What's stopping you?

I just did a search, and the second link is escrotrust.com. But, the SSL cert is bad. This all looks a bit shady to me.

There has to be a marketplace for domains or other goods that require escrow or a trusted third party.

I think that dormant accounts, where someone has not logged in for, say, 2 years, does not post, does not engage, should be repurposed - with given notice. It's kind of the equivalent of cybersquatting. Also, technically, a platform is within its right to do this. I think the better course of action is to utilize the account. Gmail has made this clear that if you don't log into an account after some time they will repurpose it.

I disagree, there are security implications if an account was previously linked to someone but then it’s repurposed allowing for fraudulent social engineering use to occur. It’s like as if Gmail gave your email to someone else after a while. They don’t because it’s a bad idea.

Are you aware that domains can be exchanged? And emails can be sent from domains?

Yes, that’s why I don’t recommend people use a custom domain when signing up for accounts given they can eventually be used by someone else. Use email providers that don’t allow your email address to be reused ie gmail, apple

both of you used gmail as an example to make opposing arguments

I'm confused about that. I was pretty sure that Google's policy was that, while they'll delete inactive accounts, the addresses don't become available for use. I thought those addresses were basically dead.

But at least one poster says they're reusing addresses.

Yes, the other person is mistaken, Google does not repurpose accounts.

I was an early adopter on many platforms, and used the same three letter handle on each. I've had the same thing happen to me, even with an account that was being actively used. There's nothing that you can do about it. It's their platform and they can grab your handle if they want it.

Really kind of weird with all these people who think it is just fine for services to take over accounts of people.

Of course, they can literally do whatever they like, it is their platform.

But it would be nice if everyone considered what it would be like for a platform to just arbitrarily nuke their account one way or another.

There's probably a lot of "well they wouldn't do that, I don't have a valuable named account, and I'm a user in good standing" but in reality they can do it for whatever reason they like and there's no actual guardrails--so anyone's account is equally at risk if they decide to.

It's a drag for sure, but, what were you doing/going to do with it? You almost never posted, and when you did, it didn't contribute to anything.

If I owned a site like X, I'd want some way to reclaim user names in cases like these. I don't doubt X is sneaky or gross about it, but it's a reasonable need too.

Putting the name on a marketplace is weird. I'd simply free it up if it was my platform, and send a note to the original owner explaining what happened. Though I'd send warnings as well.

Something like 'Hey, you haven't [met an engagement metric] for [n period of time]. We're going to shut down your account to make space for other people'. People could game this, sure, but I suspect it would be better than what happened to you.

> but it's a reasonable need too.

Why?

User names are for all practical purposes infinite: merely allowing 10 character alphanumeric usernames already gets you into the quadrillions, nearly enough for every person on the planet to claim a million unique usernames.

The username in question, while short, doesn't seem to have any inherent value, as it does not appear to be a valid word in any language, and the most common acronym expansion for it (Home Access Center) is too generic to be particularly useful as an identifier such that anyone but the original user would fight for its use.

The vast majority of users on every forum in Internet history, from Usenet to slashdot to Twitter and beyond, have always been lurkers: people who almost exclusively read. They are essential to the vitality of the forums but they are invisible, proverbial dark matter. They do not deserve to be treated as less than. But I don’t exactly want to stop X from shooting themselves in the foot for the umteenth time.

That's a great point. I guess the key thing to determine is if a person is even reading content, or lurking so to speak.

I don't like this stuff. I suppose you can anonymize this data easily, but it inevitably requires a degree of spying on users. I know tracking usage like this wouldn't be anywhere near the top of the list in terms of creepy egregious stuff these platforms do, but I don't like the idea of it. Everything has become so invasive.

> but it's a reasonable need too. > Putting the name on a marketplace is weird.

These two ideas are in direct contradiction to each other.

Why would a site care about vanity handles if not to monetize them ?

Why go through all of the effort of forcing people to signup to read something but also delete accounts after 30 days.

Is the goal to get as many users as possible and also kickoff as many users? Must be two teams competing for different goals.

https://handles.x.com/

who wants to screenshot what's on the other side because I sure as hell am not paying to see it!

Alt: https://help.x.com/en/using-x/x-handle-marketplace

It gets lost in the distracting partisan bickering over Musk/etc, but Twitter has gotten hostile and crappy in many ways like this that have nothing to do with politics. Imagine how much more hostile this action would have seemed in 2010. But now, people put up with it.

As a 50 year old, I can recall a lengthy stretch of time in the US when lamenting the lack of a "white homeland" would not be considered "partisan", but extremely fringe speech that the mainstream would mostly shun.

Twitter is certainly terrible for those reasons as well. Terrible people are excusing apolitical enshittification because they're thankful the Overton window has been pushed down to where they live in the bottom of the barrel. You just can't say the latter part too loudly here because there's sufficient sympathy and affinity for it.

> You just can't say the latter part too loudly here because there's sufficient sympathy and affinity for it.

I think you're right, and I find this revolting. Tech always had its weirdos, but mostly they were kind of idealistic, naive, or had some quirks or otherwise were maybe a bit unique, but they weren't into that kind of flat out evil ideology. Or at least not openly, because there was a sense of shame around that kind of ideology.

Not really sure how much people really even put up with it. I just went to Bluesky once I got an invite, and I've generally noticed my cohorts migrating there over time too. Sure, some content isn't there, but a smaller social media better than beating your head against the wall.

I have a 6 letter handle that's my first name.

One day I decided to start being more 'social online'.

Head to X. I was unable to log in with my password. No error. Just redirected me back to the log in screen.

I tried password reset. It asked me my last login date.

I couldn't be sure. Still mentioned a possible date.

I added that this is the same email listed on the X/Twitter account.

You can just send me a password reset mail to this email.

They rejected. Tried that a couple of times, then stopped.

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Started an account on Threads. Quite fun, less crowded and almost no politics on my feed.

----

I decided to create my Blog and write content there.

Will probably create other accounts to post my blog posts to the socials.

But I am not giving a platform the power to cut me out of my account.

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Videos can be an issue.

Youtube is still the only decent host for Video content.

That is what I like about NOSTR.

Your keys == Your account

It is about time to stop having identities tied to companies.

I like the idea of nostr, I don't like the experience of nostr.

Can't complain. Primal works great for browsers and Amethyst is my choice on mobile.

Other than that it is really great to build apps on top of NOSTR relays. My personal goal is to turn each user phone on a relay so we can walk with our own data on the pockets while still sharing with other relays as we wish.

Or congratulate yourself on being divested long enough that they don't think you're coming back?

I think it’s fine. Someone squatted one of my names on GitHub. No activity. Nothing. I emailed them because I wanted it. They gave it to me.

I’m not going to be called improbable_coaster_2740 just because some fool decided it was a good use of his time to register a bunch of usernames.

In this case they will not give it to you if they bought it for 100k USD though.

They sell everything you do on X. The product is you. Always has been, always will be.

It's how it works.

Excuse me, but you can also refrain from using these services run by psychos

This is why even though I've "left" Twitter (I still refuse to call it X) I keep my handle active. It isn't worth anything to anyone but I'd still prefer not to have a bot use it.

mine wasn't even that rare, no followers, and twitter still took it away. now it has a blue badge.

it's not my computer i suppose. a whole bunch of computers, all not mine.

now imagine hinging your entire marketing philosophy off 3-4 platforms like this.

Imagine this: you are hit by a car, spend 4 weeks in coma.

Wake up and can't even post one of those cool hospital selfies because Elon really needed that $100K...

Its all about money in X now, earlier times were good

> Losing your account is frustrating. Having it sold to someone else doesn't feel right.

Nit: smells like LLM

Yeah if only we could really own anything online, unfortunately its basically all rented.

This is what excited me about distributed technologies but fighting capitalism is hard.

It's someone else's (a terrible someone's) platform. Nobody owns their handles.

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