They say “nothing will change”
medium.com
medium.com
One might argue that a thing such as an Instagram account is just a service provided by a business and the business can do as it likes, but this isn't the case. A social media account is a vehicle for the user to interact with the entire world, and it shouldn't be able to be unilaterally revoked, especially if the only reason is to give it to a"more deserving" insider. We need a system of due process for situations like this.
I actually wrote in to Digital Ocean about this incident, twice, over the course of the last year.
The first time I wrote in, I received a bullshit response from some support peon saying exactly the wrong thing "we support our CTO, blah blah blah."
The second time I wrote, curious about their offerings once more, saying how perverse I thought his actions were and asking how I could trust such a company...
then, to my surprise, I had one of their co-founders write me back saying that such a thing would never happen again and that it was more or less inappropriate abuse of power. A sufficient response. We've yet to switch to them, or try 'em out, but at least they're now in the running again.
The problem is that the equity holders that allowed this to happen in the first place now have capital to hire people who aren't shitheads, but they themselves set the culture and hired the early shitheads in the first place.
Doing business with people like that, even if their business isn't shitheads now, sends the message that "it's okay to have no moral compass whatsoever, as long as you win and raise money/become profitable, and then fix it before you are too large".
That's not acceptable.
I sincerely don't believe in that, and would encourage more of the world to forgive-- more. No changing the past, only the future...
I publically _hate_ on a lot of companies, at the semblance of a fuck up, but if they fix their shit-- I'm not going to continue hating.
Yeah he/they screwed up massively, like a lot of companies do, but I'm willing to forgive them should they actually change. I'm not going to post the full email here as I don't think it's appropriate, but I've gotten past it as the reply is sincere and addresses my concerns.
... that's not say we shouldn't tease 'em a bit down the road about it ;-) "remember that time your ass and your brain were the same thing?!" haha. ... Hopefully, the HN humor police don't come down on me...
And on that note, I'd like to post this video, of a man not so great with words-- except this one time where he's perfect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ux3DKxxFoM
So... maybe they'll fool me once, if they've outright lied to me, but they ain't gonna fool me again ;-)
If you think this status quo is unacceptable, then don't use these proprietary web services. Take control of your web presence and your "interactions with the entire world." Support projects like Diaspora and Pump.io, and run your own instance of their federated platforms. Your username cannot be taken away when you are the service provider.
That's all fine and good but there's no way to interoperate with the predominant (centralized) microblogging platform (Twitter) if one does this. It leaves you out of the conversation and puts you at a disadvantage - a non-starter.
Idealism like this is nice in theory, but fails hard in practice.
I'm not saying they are legally wrong, or violating anyone's legal rights, or that the government should do something. I'm saying that it's still wrong and unacceptable, and they deserve criticism.
The funniest part is another response to your comment, defending this simply because it's the status quo. Of course it's technically/legally possible, the status quo is after all a self-reenforcing system.
Due process is where I disagree. It would inevitability be too heavy handed, too much of a kangaroo court or possibly both. The root cause is the attitudes of the people perpetuating it, or those rationalizing them to others.
Or we need more, and better publicized, instances of people getting screwed for relying on privately-owned social media infrastructure.
In some ways this make me think of towns that improve the interaction of cars and pedestrians by reducing, rather than increasing, traffic signs and traffic control signals[0].
When people think their best interests are being provided for they tend to become lax and too trusting. When (in the case of street traffic) pedestrians and drivers realize that the onus is on them to make things right they are more mindful.
People using assorted profit-focused Web tools need more reminders that no one is looking out for them except to the extent it raises the bottom line for someone else.
They need reminders that they are the product, not the customer.
They need reminders that they have near zero claim on anything and have no reasonable expectation of fairness.
As it stands, sites like Twitter, Facebook, et al, have the best of both worlds. People use their sites as if it were forever their own personal property (and so become deeply invested in it) while the actual ownership remains with the site.
0: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/controlled-chaos...
Rendering someone's content inaccessible without any means to get it back is outrageously insidious. It violates the implied social contract you have with your users. It's gross.
This would be just about tolerable had they renamed it – preserving all of her social network links – and then told her about it. Frustrating and possibly even humiliating, but at least not actually destructive.
"A few months ago while tagging my wife “at”Kathleen on Instagram I noticed her username was no longer displaying as “@kathleen”, but rather “_____kathleen”."
Edit. Sorry again that wasn't you.
But this is a very steep legal hill to climb (and I'm simplifying the issues considerably, at that). It's not that I think Instagram's actions here are reasonable; it's a terrible policy in a lot of ways. But ultimately it's the consumer's choice to sign up with a service or not.
There's nothing new about this "class system." Instagram's servers are the property of Instagram (and therefore Facebook), so they can do essentially anything they like with them, including things that make them look really bad from the outside like this incident (assuming everything happened as was implied).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_faith_(law)
This (if it happened as described) would be a violation of this.
This doesn't cut it: "We encourage people to actively log in and use Instagram once they create an account."
How long can I go idle before Instagram takes my account back?
Also, as someone else stated in this thread the very least Instagram could have done was to email her and inform her that she was about to lose her account due to inactivity.
Lastly, it's important to note that Instagram didn't just "prune" her account, they renamed it and gave her original account name to an employee. If they were concerned with squatters or dormant accounts they would have actually nixed the account, not renamed it to something else.
Found it: http://business.time.com/2011/06/06/homeowner-forecloses-on-...
On a more serious note, what is the procedure to get one of these dormant accounts? Is at all automatic and on the day I sign up simply makes it available to me? or is there some kind of internal system, or "drop" (as with domains) where these newly renamed accounts are made available? Transparency from Instagram on this issue would be best.
Nyerges and Collier won, in court, reimbursement for their attorney fees and then had sheriff enforce the ruling who then proceeded with a foreclosure (which was on the furniture and not on the building).
It would be a no go.
> "Her account has been private for a long time. Only posts a few photos of our kids… BUT she often likes and comments and stays connected on her phone with it. In my opinion that’s not really inactive."
https://twitter.com/behoff/status/456501740385226752 https://twitter.com/behoff/status/456501841308569601
There are instagram accounts kathleen (displayed name Kathleen) and ___kathleen (displayed name kathleen).
> "We encourage people to actively log in and use Instagram once they create an account. To keep your account active, be sure to log in and share photos, as well as like and comment on photos. Accounts may be permanently removed due to prolonged inactivity, so please use your account once you sign up!"
Source: https://www.facebook.com/help/instagram/294919817276863
The wording is terribly obtuse and seems targeted more for username squatters.
Would be helpful if Instagram defined what a period of prolonged inactivity is. Shady nonetheless, considering they didn't even notify her informing her that her username was revoked due to inactivity.
If someone was really name squatting they would write a script to log in once a week. So if you genuinely want to release unused names an email to the person informing them would be the least you could do.
As it is, it looks like someone at facebook just took the name for their own.
If someone took my handle on instagram and thus I can no longer access any of my photos I would LOSE MY SHIT. It's totally unacceptable, especially for non techies who don't back up their stuff, to jut shut off access to your memories.
It's weird that they didn't just delete the account. Instead they renamed the account to "_____kathleen": https://twitter.com/kathleenw/status/448151516399276033
Another HN commenter had a similar experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7598567
[1] www.linkedin.com/in/dereklyang
Source: http://sarahwallace.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/how-to-request-...
The Facebook stuff is probably a red herring here. If there was activity on the account, I bet this would never have happened.
In either case, you are not the customer, since you are not paying them. In the absence of VC funding, however, companies are much more likely to be forced to charge their users, meaning they have a more vested interest in customer service.
There's a lot more of this kind of crap and it affects your life in a much more serious way than having your username changed.
Do you really think you 'own' your house? Might want to ask the residents of New London. Indeed when you get services like a school system for free, you are the product.
https://help.github.com/articles/name-squatting-policy
(And they should, I think.)
Since at least 2012 Instagram has had this in their terms:
> 4. We reserve the right to force forfeiture of any username that becomes inactive, violates trademark, or may mislead other users.
So whine about the policy if you don't like it, but don't whine that Instagram has materially changed.
Overall it's pretty painless, and the dormant users are thankful for the notification.
Shouldn't have been considered inactive.
In cases where an account does have repositories (user initiated renames) the old URLs/repos will redirect as long as another user doesn't take the old name and create repos with the same name[1].
[1] https://help.github.com/articles/what-happens-when-i-change-...
For both Gemfiles and submodules this is an extra reason to fork the original and reference your fork rather than directly link to the original (unless it is big and reliable and unlikely to to be replaced e.g. rails).
The update which came after your post says this however: "Our only guess is that she did not post as often as they might not have liked."
But he does say elsewhere that she used it often to rate images. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7599802
Just nabbed https://github.com/stephen was inactive since 2008.
Twitter does this as well and that's how I got my current username. There are a couple of things that are required before you could reclaim a handle (I forget the exact timespans, but it was close to this):
* Has not logged in for one year
* Has not tweeted in a year and half
* Does not any have applications linked to Twitter
I put in a request back in 2009 to free up the name and they told me the same thing that's still in their support document five years later: they're working to free up names but don't have a timeline. https://support.twitter.com/articles/15362-inactive-account-...
I left in 2012, so I don't have much context since then. The root problem is that you want to give handles to people who will genuinely use them. But if you open up any system for reclaiming handles, it's just going to be abused by people trying to snag and sell handles (just like domains). Since there was no obviously correct way to ensure only people who would use the handles got them, it was just done internally for people who requested it (and their friends).
A lot of people in the tech world are probably more known by things like their twitter handle than their real name.
With free services (and indeed perhaps with paid for) there's not a lot to stop a company changing the ToS to allow for usernames to be transferred as they like(assuming it's not already in the ToS).
Now if your chosen handle is pretty niche (no one who's not a fan of 90's ADnD settings is likely to want mine), it's probably not a big risk, but for other ones it seems plausible to suggest that a company might start seeing them as a valuable asset, to be monetized..
The solution is obviously to immediately litter all your social media accounts with such foul loathsome toxic content that no one else would want to touch them again for at least the next 1000 years.
"This morning I told her I Instagrammed a photo of our kids that she should see."
Instagram names are not domain names, and it sounds like she doesn't use the account. Most services have a clause that lets them reclaim inactive accounts after a set period of time.
I was an employee for a local social network with about ~10mil registered users (~5mil daily users). It was much smaller than Instagram, but despite that (or precisely because of that) things like this were completely forbidden.
As my own public name is two of the most common first names and one of the most common last names in the Anglophone world, I am not altogether unfamiliar with the disutility in using a common name.
Aside from that, in the real world, we have a host of disambiguators available to tell the difference between two individuals with similar names. There is no particular reason why a site's user handle would need to be unique. The data store should probably be keying everything on a serial ID number anyway. Just as the DNS exists to associate names with IP numbers, a handle resolver could use disambiguators as needed to minimize disruption of the user experience due to non-uniqueness.
If you log in from a new device with a new IP address, you might be asked "Which 'kathleen' are you?" once, and get a small "I'm a different 'kathleen'" link thereafter. If you're a giant like Facebook, there is probably more utility in allowing people to have short, non-unique user handles with an on-demand disambiguation system than in a system required to enforce user handle uniqueness.
I'm not going to identify the website because the person that made it is a nice guy in general and he restored my account right after I asked.
I know many who set out to register popular Twitter and Soundcloud names when those services launched just so they could sit on them and possibly make a buck. Those username policies are out there to combat this kind of behavior but it's crummy to see when those policies actually affect legitimate users.
Managing overlapping names among friends is something most people know how to do well enough already.
Phone service: random UID as you suggest, users put aliases in address book. Works great. Plays no favorites, unless you want 555-555-5555.
Internet DNS: restrictions on valid names (to certain TLDs) which are gradually lifted as our name needs increase. Expiration, which favors the needy. Cash market, which favors the rich and needy.
Email: Similar to DNS, but mandatory attachment to domains broadens set of available names. No expiration policy at high demand domains (i.e. gmail).
And if you're referencing me from your phone, you could alias me as @knowsnothing and change my icon to a koala if you wanted to. That offends me less than me having to come up with @awesome_sauce314 to use some photo sharing service, which I'd need to share among friends, coworkers, family, strangers, etc.
How will someone born today have any hope of any kind of usable identity in a system that allows only one instance of a name.
We should just name out children random hash strings.
Call FBI and see what happens.