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Comment by niravshah | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is pretty good at "releasing" accounts that are unused for a period of time. A couple of users mention being "screwed over" or "hacked" when losing accounts, but if you don't use a Twitter handle, you run the risk of losing it if someone reaches out to Twitter about it.

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It seems a bit random whether they do it... I'd quite like to get my first name (@corin) which has one tweet, posted in July 2007, and no activity at all since. I appreciate their policy of not allowing you to request they kill a dormant account, but after 7.5 years you'd think it might have been released by now

it might have been used for private messages all this time, or for oauth logins.

Oauth logins possible didn't think of that, not direct messages though as isn't following anyone. After 7+ years I strongly suspect it isn't used for logins either, but could be wrong.

For OAuth purposes, surely the profile can be renamed.

I don't buy that story. I have had a Twitter account for years and it probably has fewer than 10 tweets, plus I go months at a time without logging in. But '@anigbrowl' is unique and meaningless enough that nobody else is likely to attempt to register it. I'm not at all worried about it being deactivated, whereas if I had '@databases' I would ensure it was hooked up to some software equivalent of a hamster wheel that would generate a steady stream of activity.

They used to be good about it. Now there are lot of old, inactive accounts that aren't removed.

What's the best way to go about getting them released to you?

Step 1) Be important and influential Step 2) Don't be unimportant and uninfluential

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