[asciident]

While they do have power over users on their platform, they're voluntary applications that people choose to give control to for convenience and publicity. Unlike credit bureaus who actually ruin peoples' lives with their carelessness and you can't even opt out, social media apps are purely opt-in, and you don't get your wages garnished or bank accounts emptied or lose your ability to drive because of them.

And while I hope danny gets his username back, and it's ridiculous what happened, the value of the user account handle that danny had was created by Instagram's efforts. You don't have property rights to it the same way you own actual property or a domain name registered under your name.

[koboll]

>While they do have power over users on their platform, they're voluntary applications that people choose to give control to for convenience and publicity.

It's true a username isn't property, but there are some instances where merely conferring a certain status has such an enormous impact on people's lives that there are certain legal protections around it. Your job, for example.

One could argue that digital identity codes like domains and social media usernames have become similarly important. Entire businesses, extremely profitable ones sometimes, can be tied to a single username.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

I’m with you to a degree, but if most anyone’s email account vanished, or worse was stolen, I’d be pretty confident guessing that they’re screwed.

For more typical social media, losing a decade of pictures is pretty harmful. It’s not about the value of the @danny handle, it’s also about the account being gone. And the privacy issues if the new person got all the DMs and private info.

[asciident]

You're right that these things are devastating when they happen, but pre- social media, they happened all the time. Every year, half the people born in [year-21] lose their university email accounts (including their google drive, etc.) and eventually transfer to another email just fine. Before online identity, people lost their phone numbers and had to inform friends that they switched to a new one. You'd get the previous owner's texts, and have to tell them you just got that number. Or if you moved addresses and you would get the previous owner's mail, and the same would happen to you due to postal errors. People lost their pictures because of disk failure, fires, and other means, and would continue living happy and productive lives.

Post- social media, if people are backing up their data, then the problem is pretty much nil (chances that your social media account and your local storage both go kaput at the same time are pretty small).

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

Of course email isn’t new and neither are phones. Things like 2FA are new, as are other things assuming you still have the phone and email you signed up with. The problem isn’t the thing, it’s the services that rely on the assumption that you still have the thing.

[krebs_liebhaber]

> social media apps are purely opt-in, and you don't get your wages garnished or bank accounts emptied or lose your ability to drive because of them.

... Until you say something verboten, that is.

[bergstromm466]

> they're voluntary applications

...in an unfree economic system (patents and IP give monopolies) with a black box money system (money is an enclosed protocol). Cooperative Open Value Networks are the future. [1]

[1] http://mikorizal.org/

[krebs_liebhaber]

Here's a prediction for the future: This will be the first and last time I hear about "Cooperative Open Value Networks".