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.

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?

can we please not play stupid. obviously you don't legally own it. but there's something of a grand social contract that keeps the concept of accounts on websites working, that literally all of the global internet has followed for decades. it is absolutely insane to normalize yanking people's accounts. why would you ever want to use a website where you can lose access to everything you have because someone else decided they want your account? for public figures, imagine how much reputational damage can be done by letting some rando buy your account? i think reclamation of unused years-old handles is one thing and maybe fair game, especially for things lower-importance and with less longevity than twitter, but selling them goes beyond the pale and incentivizes perverse and destructive behaviour from the "owners" of your account

then i'm sure we'll get to the trite "just don't use twitter" argument, but for anyone with a presence online (artists, open-source developers, game studios, journalists, any kind of business at all, etc. etc.) that's essentially playing life with a handicap. twitter is a piece of infrastructure used by a thousand millions of people, with a compounding network effect that makes it impossible for alternatives to gain real traction because viewers go where the content is and content goes where the viewers are. it should, ideally, not be allowed to be enshittified to this degree. after achieving a certain degree of global monopolization, "just use something else" fails to be a working solution

> but there's something of a grand social contract that keeps the concept of accounts on websites working

no there's not. this is complete and utter fiction. the things that keep it working are ads and normal users putting their eye in front of them, and the tos to make any silly claims of "social contracts" legally and absolutely moot.

> can we please not play stupid.

Hmmm who is playing stupid?

Internet monolithic social services are run by private companies with TOS that no one reads and change, services that barely anyone pays for (except through their data).

We should definitely normalize this so that people see what the internet actually is for the vast majority of people.

It’s playing stupid to pretend that the theft of a hardly used handle has anything to do with an actual user account. I’m sure if @hac had a presence online, their handle wouldn’t have been sold from under them.

God, how I hate all those "well ackchyually" idiots who think TOS are the only contract there ever was ignoring social norms that were there for literally decades.

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.

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.

Found the X employee.

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

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.