[Sendotsh]

I understand why some people are upset about it (Eg due to accounts of deceased people), but I was really REALLY hoping to snap my first name which was registered by a European person 10 years ago, has 0 followers, and has never posted.

I definitely feel like they could compromise and at least delete those blatantly unused ones.

[lilyball]

They haven't scrapped their plans for this. They said they'll put it on pause until they've come up with a tool for memorializing accounts. So presumably accounts that are legitimately not going used will still eventually free up.

Assuming of course that the account is truly idle and not being used to read without every interacting.

[duskwuff]

A simple fix would be to make an exception for accounts with >X statuses posted or >Y followers.

The inactive accounts that people are worried about losing are the ones that used to be active, or which were significant enough to make a lot of people follow them. However, the bulk of inactive accounts probably have very few (<10) statuses posted or followers, and deleting those is likely to be uncontroversial.

[tom_mellior]

A simple fix would be to pick a character that can not otherwise occur in Twitter handles, like ':'. Then move every inactive @foobar user to @inactive:2019:foobar. If a follower of the original account complains, change "inactive" to "memorialized" or whatever, possibly adjusting the year backwards.

If I choose to squat the now freed up @foobar handle and not do anything with it, next year they can move my inactive version to @inactive:2020:foobar and free up @foobar again for the next person interested in using it.

Any way they solve this, there is a danger of people using bots to mass-squat liberated names to offer them for sale. I don't see any very good way around this. Possibly to give first pick to users with long-standing accounts that share a nontrivial common substring with the liberated handle. For example, if my current Twitter name is @firstname_lastname, and I really want @firstname, I think it might make sense to prioritize me over @random_bot_204safhq23.

[lilyball]

Twitter's in a good position to detect most bots. If someone uses a bot that's good enough to evade detection, I think it's ok to let them keep the handle.

[teddyuk]

My relatives who died have fewer followers than your relatives who died so yours stay and mine go? Doesn't sound fair!

(my relatives also didnt tweet very often but when they did they were amazing)

[kkarakk]

I can understand not making a tool to memorialize users in first 3 years of creation but once twitter became a household name they really SHOULD have already updated their roadmap.

In the era of cloud computing, how expensive would it be to make an account readonly and store the paltry data it created in a cached location somewhere?

All of their tech decisions feel really reactive nowadays

[L_Rahman]

With roadmap decisions like these, the compute or storage cost for the data is an insignificant part of the product decision making.

The real cost of doing something like this is doing user research to figure out the set of human behaviors around the memorialization process, deciding where in the product to make the functionality available, training material for how it escalates up to human support teams, and what other things are on the team's plate at the same time.

[austhrow743]

Why does it have to be specifically the tech holding them back from doing it?

Personally the permanence of internet content is terrifying and by far the worst aspect of it. Potentially there are people like me who would be at the table whenever "what to do with accounts of dead people" is discussed, strongly advocating for deletion. Lacking clear consensus they just left the decision until it had to be made.

[guessmyname]

> … but I was really REALLY hoping to snap my first name which was registered by a European person 10 years ago, has 0 followers, and has never posted.

I created a Twitter account in 2012 and it was immediately put in “private mode” because I didn’t want to post anything; ±7 years later the account is still empty, no posts, no followers, nada. The only reason I created that account was to prevent cybersquatting over my short-and-simple username (which I have to clarify is not “guessmyname”). I’ve done the same thing in other popular websites which I also never use, aside from signing in once in a while to keep the account “active”.

Can you imagine if I release my Twitter account, after almost a decade of constant cultivation of my other professional profiles (GitHub, GitLab, LinkedIn, etc) and then someone starts posting malicious messages to make my username look bad? People will quickly associate these messages with other accounts on the Internet with the same name. I don’t want to take that risk, and I guess other people with inactive Twitter/Facebook/Gmail/etc accounts are the same.

[tom_mellior]

1. Most Twitter users are not malicious in the way you suggest.

EDIT: 1'. Twitter has rules and procedures against impersonation: https://help.twitter.com/forms/impersonation though I don't know how effective they are if you are not going by a real name but by an Internet handle that you claim is unique.

2. If you have such an important personal brand to protect, your Twitter account should not be in private mode. It should be public, with a public tweet explaining that you are really you but are choosing not to use Twitter, and where to find you instead.

3. If you have such an important personal brand to protect, you presumably have something interesting to say. Twitter is not a bad platform to say it.

All in all, if they take away your squatted Twitter handle, I wouldn't feel bad for you. Certainly not without a lot more information about why your brand is so special. And, well, if you can keep them from doing it by logging in once every six months, it seems that that is something you can shoulder to protect your brand.

[lonelappde]

What is a "real name" if not the name someone goes by? There is no Earth Name Authority

[tom_mellior]

I get what you're saying. But in the context of this discussion, a "real name" would just be whatever Twitter thinks it is. They use the term a lot in their docs (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22real+name%22+site%3Ahelp.twitte...) but I don't know if they ever define it in a way that would make you happy.

[blondin]

yea. i get the deceased people argument. but this name / brand protection thing is total bollocks. if you are not going to use the precious @firstname or @first.lastname maybe someone who has something important to say would? not fair to be name squatting.

[exit]

> 1. Most Twitter users are not malicious in the way you suggest.

the odds of, at a minimum, any given twitter profile being at least wildly off-brand for your namespace colliding persona are still very high. this looks like a legitimate edge case anxiety to me.

[dmix]

Regardless anyone seeing it will quickly realize it’s not you. From the bio/location/topics etc.

This isn’t that big of a deal at all.

Plus all you have to do is login once in a while to keep it active as far as Twitter is concerned. I think 6 months is way too aggressive though.

[dillonmckay]

We have known instances of people’s twitter accounts being hacked, and then fired from their job, after ‘their’ twitter feed posted objectionable content.

[manicdee]

1. is irrelevant because it only takes one malicious person to ruin your life

As for Twitter’s enforcement, it doesn’t shut down Elon Musk bitcoin scammers but it does shut down women complaining about the revolting DMs they get from men.

[Simon_says]

Regarding 3, Twitter is a bad platform to say anything interesting.

[valerij]

2. is a very sound advice, thank you

[ForHackernews]

> If you have such an important personal brand to protect, you presumably have something interesting to say

Sorry, but do you actually believe this? In my experience, nearly everyone who talks about their "personal brand" is some variation of a dull-as-dishwater marketing drone. Be a human, not a brand.

[tom_mellior]

> Sorry, but do you actually believe this?

I believe it to the extent that if the person "cultivates" GitHub and GitLab profiles, presumably they at least have new releases of interesting features to announce, for whatever software they develop there.

[byteshock]

Do you really think people will draw their concussions about you based on a Twitter account they found with the same username?

[dillonmckay]

It depends on the severity of head injury.

[carc1n0gen]

> The only reason I created that account was to prevent cybersquatting over my short-and-simple username

Congratulations, you _are_ the very cybersquatter you feared so much.

[digitalsushi]

they dont fear the squatting, they fear the ultimate use of masquerading as them with easy, failed brand recognition.

we use online names as public certificates. we're doomed to this race.

[koboll]

If you use a "short, simple" string as a username across various services, the price you pay is that various others are going to be using that same name on other services.

You aren't entitled to a certain username on every service simply because you happened to be the first to register it on one service.

[outadoc]

That's literally the definition of name squatting. If you want to link to your Twitter account, maybe use it, before complaining someone else has made something useful out of it.

Btw this is not at stake in this situation anyway, since you would just need to log into your account and accept the new ToS.

[teddyuk]

You are being selfish, no one cares about your personal brand.

Even if your wildest dreams came true and someone started posting crap using your alias on twitter, still no one would care.

[saiya-jin]

some people are weird, and to add a twist they believe the others are weird (or some variation of this)... proof #6342

[jiqiren]

Burden is on you to simply login. That’s all twitter is asking - login to show you still want the username.

[Cthulhu_]

And agree to their new terms and conditions - THAT is the real reason why they're doing this. I'm sure the new T&C's grant Twitter the right to do more with existing accounts / tweets.

[snowwrestler]

I think it’s far more likely that requiring human agreement to the new T&Cs is a convenient excuse to cull a ton of bots.

[byuu]

You can't be the first to register on every platform out there. If you ever become successful enough, people are going to impersonate and false flag you anyway. You have to balance putting your beliefs out there, so people know an obvious fake; with not over sharing to the point you annoy people with differences from you, which I can tell you first-hand is hard to recover from.

After that, make a links/contact section on your website to list all your accounts. Post a note that anything not on the list is an imposter or someone coincidentally using the same name as you (which does happen, especially when you naively pick a four-letter name.)

Anyone still conflating a false account with you with one step to verify it as a fake will be acting in bad faith regardless.

[mapcars]

>and then someone starts posting malicious messages to make my username look bad

That's kinda easy, you create a real account and verify it/link it in all your other profiles.

[FeepingCreature]

That's literally what they did.

[Joe-Z]

To me it didn't sound like they linked this dead account anywhere. They literally just squatted a name to never use for anything.

Real class move btw, I hope GPs account gets deleted soon. (And then the flood of people having nothing better to do than destroy some nobody's reputation on social media comes in I guess...)

[manderley]

It's a Twitter account name. Let's not act like this is some huge imposition.

[Joe-Z]

It's ego-centric behaviour which leaves everbody worse off. Thank god it's only a Twitter account name! (...and not global politics governed by old farts out of touch with reality, which is another area where this behaviour is rampant)

[FeepingCreature]

They literally said they referenced it on other sites.

[Joe-Z]

Well if they literally said that, then I'm sure you can copy + paste said portion. Because even upon re-reading the comment, I can't find this statement.

[dalore]

So you claim/reserve a private good, with no intention to use it. Just so others can't use it?

That said, should there be some sort of central internet registry where we all registered our unique usernames which will be the same and reserved on every platform?

This reminds me of the days of EFNet where you would fight to have a username. If you stopped using it/disconnected, it was fair game.

I don't think someone would start posting malicious messages to make you look bad. They would just use it for themselves, with their own profile pic and would be obvious it's not you.

[dillonmckay]

Heh. Learned this lesson in college when a friend started registering all of our acquaintances names on AOL instant messenger, and impersonating a large number of people.

It has been an issue for several decades.

[WalterBright]

> which I have to clarify is not “guessmyname”

That's just what you want us to think!

[emiliovesprini]

What if there was someone with the same name as you who did want to tweet? They would say you are the one squatting.

[glenstein]

I think yours is an extremely idiosyncratic special case, and there are always going to be one-off special cases. You can't reasonably expect policy for the other 330 million users to grind to a halt to solve something that you could solve yourself by logging in once every six months.

[squiggleblaz]

> Can you imagine if I release my Twitter account, after almost a decade of constant cultivation of my other professional profiles (GitHub, GitLab, LinkedIn, etc) and then someone starts posting malicious messages to make my username look bad?

Oh no, you'll be just like everyone else under the sun who has to use different names in different places. You aren't special and no-one really cares.

[dang]

Whoa. Posting like this will get you banned here. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site to heart? Basically: yes to thoughtful and curious conversation, no to being a jerk and snark.

[rsnor]

> You aren’t special and no-one really cares.

Come on now.

If someone uses the same username in multiple places, and another site has a user with the same name, it’s easy to assume they are the same person. If there is a risk of impersonation or confusion with another account, it’s fair to try to protect your reputation by registering an account in that name and not posting, especially if you are well-known in some internet circles.

[munmaek]

> and another site has a user with the same name, it’s easy to assume they are the same person.

No, no it is not. Not at all... You are one of the lucky people who managed to get your chosen handle on those sites.

My preferred handle (givennamesurname) got registered in 2008 on twitter and hasn't done anything since (no tweets, no profile, etc).

On instagram, both (givennamesurname) and (givenname_surname) are taken, so I went with (surname_givenname).

The only real way to get around this is to just list your social media / accounts on your personal website. Then prove that you own it on keybase with gpg or whatever.

> it’s fair to try to protect your reputation by registering an account in that name and not posting,

If you stay on top of / are aware of every new service. I was 12 in 2008 and wasn't concerned about name squatting.

[semiotagonal]

If you want a short-and-simple username, you need to do what it takes to defend it, even if that means logging into twitter once in a while. Even registered trademarks require active defense, or they lapse[0]. Why should it be as easy as just grabbing it first, especially if that pollutes the platform in a way that hurts the platform company?

If you want an easily defended but unique identity, pick something that isn't short-and-simple, and you'll have less competition.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity)

[StuffedParrot]

> it’s easy to assume they are the same person.

Easy, sure, but you’re probably wrong.

[dghughes]

I've noticed there is a "schedule tweet" option maybe you could schedule some tweets to keep your account active. A Happy New year here, a St. Patrick's Day there, maybe a few others. I know you don't want to tweet but at least this keeps you in the active category.

[trianglem]

I would assume the way Twitter is doing this is deleting inactive accounts and permanently retiring those deleted account names, right?

[nvrspyx]

They plan on releasing the usernames of the deleted accounts for users.

____

previously unavailable usernames will start coming up for grabs after the 11 December cut-off - though Twitter said it would be a gradual process, beginning with users outside of the US.

____

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50567751

[marban]

Even 10 years ago you were 3 years late...

As a firstname user, life isn't easy when it comes to notification spam b/c people think that putting a space between first and lastname still gets sent to the correct user. I've basically stopped checking them.

[TeMPOraL]

I have a similar issue on Github and Gitlab.com - my handle there (same as here) overlaps with a certain annotation from Java's Hibernate, so I get a lot of @mentions from random repos.

(And all that because Github and Gitlab are both case-insensitive when matching @mentions.)

[koolba]

I’d blame that on users not using backticks / code blocks.

[TeMPOraL]

A lot of this is automatic - someone uses the proper @Annotation in a commit messages or pull request name, and I get an e-mail that I was just mentioned in some random repo.

[ghaff]

My college email forwarding is just my first name. (We got to choose our username and I got in early.) It doesn't really happen any longer but back in the day when a lot of people were not terribly familiar with the new-fangled email thing, I would get fairly regular emails--including some that were probably at least a bit sensitive--addressed to my first name by people who just assumed the email would somehow get to some other person with the same first name.

[sequoia]

Ha, yeah. Imagine how I feel, sharing a name with a major VC firm! @sequoia was squatted for years, I asked for it back in 2011 or so along with verification that I am in fact Sequoia (github.com/sequoia etc.), they said they "don't release usernames."

It sat like that for several years until lo and behold, they do release usernames under the right circumstances (see @sequoia now). I just want to know what made them release the name to @sequoia and not me (don't answer that :p).

[cryptoz]

Not posting on twitter doesn't mean the account is unused. Lots of people make accounts and follow people and are DAU but never post.

[manigandham]

Activity isn't based on posting. You have to at least login in the past 6 months.

[jdnenej]

Twitter always bans my accounts if I dont post or interact.

[kkarakk]

You must not be interacting with it in ANY way at all. I periodically use twitter to sign up for stuff at max and worst i've gotten is a compulsory password reset

[gonehome]

Yep - I was looking forward to getting my name username too.

The user has no tweets, has followed nothing and done nothing since registering 2013.

I hope they end up doing it.

[balladeer]

My first name usernames are taken up by other people on Facebook and Instagram after I deleted my accounts there years ago.

If nothing this has stopped me from again creating accounts on these platforms couple of times I was tempted to.

[C14L]

And that should be the cutoff for account deletion: Unused for years, no content, no followers.

Deleting accounts with lots of content and followers, only because there was no tweet for a few month, is just dumb.

[syshum]

Even if they removed the accounts you still would not be able to.

Twitter said many times that the removals would not free up the namespace, those names would still be unavailable for use

[throwaway122378]

Those attributes don’t necessarily mean the handle would be available. If that user logged in once in the last 6 months you’d be out of luck.

[simion314]

I don't post, why should someone like you take my account ? I did not post on FB in a long time either but I still want my account.