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.