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Twitter account deletions on 'pause' after outcry

bbc.com

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Re: Twitter account deletions on 'pause' after outcry

#151

Post by semiotagonal »

rsnor wrote: post #141
squiggleblaz wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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 i…

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)

Re: Twitter account deletions on 'pause' after outcry

#152

Post by dghughes »

guessmyname wrote: post #51
Sendotsh wrote: post #15

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.

> … 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…

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.

Re: Twitter account deletions on 'pause' after outcry

#153

Post by dang »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #127
guessmyname wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> … 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…

> 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.

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.

Re: Twitter account deletions on 'pause' after outcry

#154

Post by clairity »

Moyamo wrote: post #142
emiliovesprini wrote: post #134

As far as I can tell, there are two systems for meaningful names (as opposed to "arbitrary" ones like phone numbers or 4chan IDs): 1. A first-come-first-serve system like Twitter. I'd list drawbacks but this comment section is full of them. 2. A lease system like domain names, whose drawbacks are best explained in this tweet by @devonzuegel: > Domain names really hold you hostage. As soon as you've shared a link > fr…

A refinement of (1) would be Harberger Taxes[0]. 1. When a person registers a name they declare a price they are willing to sell the name for. They can update their price at any time. 2. They pay an annual tax (about 1% to 5%) for the right to keep the name. 3. If someone is willing to buy the name for the declared price they are forced to sell the name to them. This system has the advantage that the person who value…

that's an economic solution (and a neat one at that) to a sociopolitical problem. societies use names to address, differentiate, and even affiliate each other.

economics concerns itself with the best allocation of productive resources. names don't really fall into that category (even if there is some marginal utility in the economic domain for edge cases like celebrities' names).

Re: Twitter account deletions on 'pause' after outcry

#155

Post by K0SM0S »

freeflight wrote: post #110
K0SM0S wrote: post #91

This makes me realize that from now on, most human beings will probably increasingly be "memorialized" online. I can't help but see in this a new form of modernized, digitalized mortuary ritual, comparable to all the things we humans have been doing with our deads for millennia. Egyptian tombs sought to preserve the body; now with big-tech tombs we seek to preserve the mind, what's left of it, what has been revealed…

That's very idealized, right now we still struggle with having big tech even acknowledge its actually our data [0] and not completely and only theirs the moment we give it to them willingly or often enough unwillingly. At our current trajectory, it looks much more like we are heading into a cyberpunk Esque dystopia in which people are not just only commoditized through their labor, but also their data value. So inste…

> That's very idealized

Agreed, as we speak.

This is why I generally think we ought to take control back of our data, massively, as citizens. And devs and the tech community in general are front and center to lead the charge, obviously.

It's a long road. Years, decades probably. But eventually we must get there. We may have sacrificed the first generations in that regard because we honestly build as we go, we can't anticipate everything. But now that we're here, that we see that we know, it's time to stop deploring what is, and start building what should be.

IMHO... This isn't 'holier-than-thou' at all but very humbly calling for all of us to wake up and start creating tomorrow's solutions to these problems.

Re: Twitter account deletions on 'pause' after outcry

#156

Post by lilyball »

tom_mellior wrote: post #53
duskwuff wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Twitter account deletions on 'pause' after outcry

#157

Post by manicdee »

tom_mellior wrote: post #55
guessmyname wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> … 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…

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…

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.

Re: Twitter account deletions on 'pause' after outcry

#159

Post by emiliovesprini »

reaperducer wrote: post #136
legohead wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what do you mean by meaningful? you can just allow people to choose whatever username they want, that's a system...that nobody seems to allow for whatever reason. people have the same names in real life and we've learned to deal with it. twitter already has a verified system to deal with imposters for high profile accounts where it would matter. blizzard (battlenet) lets you choose any username but tags on a number f…

Or drop the alpha chars altogether and just go numeric. It worked for CompuServe. Everyone's ID was an octal number. 72167,4531 for example. That way there is no overlap, and nobody is slighted when they find out that their name is taken.

Yeah, I like that the arbitrary nature of non-meaningful names frees us from all these drawbacks and compromises. A simple system. But outside of strictly pseudonymous places like 4chan it erodes the concept of a unique username altogether. If you're always gonna type a display name and choose from a dropdown, why even display the numbers?

Plus, now that the identifier carries no meaning, you can't type "@realdonaldtrump ..." and expect people to know who it refers to, you'd have to type "@aae0450, Donald Trump ...".

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