Comment by _k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _k | Hacker News Reader

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I registered a few Twitter accounts as well. Approximately 10 or so. Here's what happened :

I used my accounts and Twitter kept growing and growing. I updated my personal account several times a month. Another one was updated on a daily basis. My other accounts usually got updated every few months.

Then one day I got a DM from someone asking me whether I was interested in selling the account he was sending a DM to. I told him I had no intention of selling. Thank you for asking.

I didn't even ask him to name a price cause I wanted to use the account on one of my projects. So whatever his price was going to be, I couldn't care less.

Fast forward a few months of inactivity and it turns out I can no longer access my account AND a big media company is using it.

I was shocked but I remembered the guy's name so I Googled it. It turns out he was the CEO of the media company who hacked my account !

I should clarify he probably didn't hack it. The password was just too difficult so he must have pulled a few strings in order to get it done.

On one hand it sucks you lost the accounts, on the other hand I'm glad to see the equivalent of domain squatting is at least somewhat solvable on twitter.

Twitter says that inactive accounts (six months with no activity) may be removed at any time, although their web site also says that they don't grant requests to take over inactive accounts (with an exception regarding trademarks).

My wife has a coveted three-letter username, and recently tweeted for the first time in almost five years. That's right: for almost five years the account was completely unused, and Twitter did nothing. I think that's the right way to handle things.

So Twitter may remove accounts, and I know this is anecdotal and one data point is meaningless, but from observing this and other accounts it seems they rarely remove accounts for no activity. Unless, of course, it's trademarked.

I don't think the name has a trademark because it's 2 generic words added together.

Doesn't cost much to register a trademark.

_k, did you try to raise an issue? Did you ask Twitter what happened?

Also, this is why Telegram's policy towards "desired username"[1] worries me:

  If your desired username is already taken, we will be happy to help you acquire it, provided that you have that same username on at least two of these services: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

No, you don't do that! If someone has taken "tom" and that also happens to be the ID of Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise - everywhere else, they should have come first, or you should have reserved all those famous uesernames hoping these celebrities will come to your service.

[1] https://telegram.org/faq#q-what-do-i-do-if-my-username-is-ta...

I may have tweeted what happened but I didn't raise an issue in an official way.

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