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