[ValentineC]

My @valentine got changed to @valentine_ without my consent.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150822195811/twitter.com/valen...

https://twitter.com/valentine_

(If any lawyers read this and feel up for taking this on contingency, I don't think I'm difficult to contact.)

[alasano]

Wow and it's not even used. I guess they took it to resell on their handle marketplace?

[croddin]

Was likely for a grok avatar named valentine (https://grok.com/valentine) but they used https://x.com/v instead which only ever made two posts all in October 2025

[c-linkage]

He probably had plans to use it for some sort of Ender's Game crap but then realized that grok wasn't smart enough to do it.

[XargonEnder]

The word Grok comes from the novel Stranger in a Strange Land where the main character is Valentine.

[mcintyre1994]

More likely is that they took a bunch of good usernames to sell - if you pay for their most expensive subscription one of the features is that you can rent a better username now.

[ETH_start]

It's extremely unlikely Musk was personally involved in any way in the decision on the username.

[petesergeant]

In a normal business? Sure. When it comes to Musk and Twitter? Less sure.

[mghackerlady]

Add grok to that list, it's pretty much his pet project

[handfuloflight]

Did you actually own it though, per their TOS? What title was granted, if so? Also, and no offense intended truly, I think your having a grand total of 2 followers after 19 years was apart of their risk calculus in this seizure.

[tart-lemonade]

Twitter's official position is that accounts/usernames are not assets of their users (this isn't an Elon-era argument, from what I understand). I found this out when they argued in Alex Jones' bankruptcy hearings that his account should not be repossessed/auctioned off, an argument Alex supported since that's where he's been moving his audience over to to keep the cash rolling in no matter what happens.

https://fortune.com/2024/11/27/x-twitter-elon-musk-account-o...

[Forgeties79]

It can’t be that hard for you to think of something digital that you (don’t) own and how you would feel if a comparable situation happened to you.

A TOS isn’t some magical shield from legitimate complaints and scrutiny any more than “it’s the law” makes something morally right.

[handfuloflight]

One should know what contracts one is entering into.

[ornornor]

But of course, one reads all of the ToS of every service one uses. It’s just something one does.

[handfuloflight]

No, but one should definitely do it for those services where one is investing their time and resources into in a significant manner such that any disruption would be painful.

[Forgeties79]

These responses strike me as unserious and flippant. You’d never accept these responses if it happened to you with something you care about.

Also, comparing a TOS to a formal contract by two parties is a bit disingenuous. A classic “yes it’s technically true” situation. TOS’s are not treated the same way as a signed and dated formal contract. Not even by companies putting them up. They are lower stakes and often pages and pages of legalese that you also skip over at times.

[handfuloflight]

Unpacking the legal framework someone is operating in isn't the same as endorsing it morally, those are two separate questions worth keeping distinct.

[ValentineC]

> Also, and no offense intended truly, I think your having a grand total of 2 followers after 19 years was apart of their risk calculus in this seizure.

My account was hijacked via domain/DNS takeover around the time it was acquired by fElon (due to both Crazy Domains and Twitter support's incompetence — both parties removed 2FA from my accounts, even despite me telling Crazy Domains specifically never to do so). I managed to recover both accounts after kicking up a fuss, but the hijacker was midway through an 3rd party account wiping script, and I'd lost all my followers because of that.

I had 33,300+ tweets in 2015, and a lot of that was private interaction with friends.

[ilikehurdles]

couldn't your name have been changed by your hijacker and sold?

[4gotunameagain]

Turns out that when you are using some oligarch's platform, you don't own jack.

This is digital feudalism, and the billionaires have seized the means of communication.

[pembrook]

Billionaires have always owned the means of communication (just look at the Salzbergers, Murdochs, etc).

Digital decentralized protocols (smtp, http, etc) were the first time this wasn’t true. But you [we] voluntarily moved your communication off of open internet protocols onto private ad-based platforms.

Of course you don’t own anything there, you never did. The billionaires didn’t “seize” anything. You happily sold yourself out for a few clicks of less friction and an easier shot at digital fame by going “viral” on social media company land.

If this isn’t a much bigger indictment of the collective (who after decades still could not agree on a non-elitist, human understandable protocol that didn’t require a CS degree to use) than it is of the entrepreneurs who solved all the problems the collective refused to, I don’t know how else to get though to you.

[mghackerlady]

they didn't ever own radio, as evident by AM radio still being crazy and ham still being around

[pelotron]

One of the reasons why I got my HAM license this year was specifically to have a means of communication that required no infrastructure. The HAM community is also very similar to the OSS community in many respects w/r/t constantly developing new free ways to use their spectrum.

[mghackerlady]

I want to get a HAM license (it seems like a nerd rite of passage) but don't really want to get one if I'm never going to use it, which seems like it could end up the case since the HAM community seems to be comprised of mostly middle aged men, which tend not to have the greatest opinions about me (a young transgender woman) and aren't afraid to expect me to agree with them. Also in the current political climate it seems like a bad idea to dox myself

[Culonavirus]

> lawyers

Best I can do is pretend to be a lawyer and forward all of ur stuff to ChatGPT Free. U down?