Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jeremy Vaught spent 16 years to build @music on Twitter, then X took it away

syzito.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 241 posts

Re: Jeremy Vaught spent 16 years to build @music on Twitter, then X took it away

#81

Post by nullfield »

This is the consequence of lack of self-sovereignty, along with the lack of an agreed universal naming system.

That said, I’m not sure that first-come-first-wins is simultaneously fair, in such a universal environment. Nor, really, do I want it to be a “whoever can pay most gets the desirable names”, like DNS works.

I don’t have a better solution right now, but acknowledge that there’s a problem with the combination/intersection of “rarity” and “ownership” and such.

Are there any solutions that are even close to … some kind of fairness, or even approximation of a system that respects… anything?

Re: Jeremy Vaught spent 16 years to build @music on Twitter, then X took it away

#82

Post by zmmmmm »

JJMcJ wrote: post #32
sneak wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, Uber and Instagram and WhatsApp should not have been started, as the iOS App Store is unequivocally "someone else's land", and these services could only exist as native apps.

At this point it's all but inconceivable that those would be removed from the app servers, iOS or Android. In the early days if something had gone wrong, it might have been a different story. Though I suspect that companies with good VC connections might have side channels into Apple or Google to clear up problems. Not like little guys who can wake up one morning to discover their $20K/month business is no more.

See Epic games / fortnite

Re: Jeremy Vaught spent 16 years to build @music on Twitter, then X took it away

#83

Post by isykt »

constantly wrote: post #6

I do think this is philosophically unjust, but in no way should anyone have built any brand on Twitter, particularly a generic like “music”, and not expected something like this would happen. Twitter in particular has a long and storied history of this sort of thing. I think the move should have been, if one were going to start on Twitter, to slowly funnel the largest possible portion of their 11M followers to their…

Wildly ahistorical take. 16 years ago nobody had “Diamond mine trust fund baby takes over Twitter and yoinks handles” on their bingo card for 16 years into the fucking future.

In 2007, the housing market hadn’t crashed. George W Goddamn Bush was President. The Web seemed wide open for the taking, and scrappy startups seemed like fun places to share your life or your words or whatever. Vine was still more than half a decade away from being invented. Apple’s market cap was $151B.

Re: Jeremy Vaught spent 16 years to build @music on Twitter, then X took it away

#84

Post by shrubble »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #51

When this was initially announced I saw multiple people posting on Twitter how the the non-Musk version of the company would also occasionally take over short name accounts and give them to government officials and large corporations. Some of the replies when @x and @music got transferred were also complaining about not being compensated monetarily, which honestly seems like a bizarre expectation. Elon paid $44 billi…

@AOC comes to mind. Very likely that Twitter curried favor with that.

Re: Jeremy Vaught spent 16 years to build @music on Twitter, then X took it away

#85

Post by rglullis »

morkalork wrote: post #79
rglullis wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are TWitter handles overseen by ICANN and IANA? Are they bound by any type of international agreement? The problem in your example is that the people behind TPB work with the principle that any domain name might be taken away from them at any moment, unlike Mr. @music, who was naive enough to think he was immune to any takeover just because he called dibs on the name.

Still sounds like someone else's land, just with more faith in their behaviour.

To go back: the problem with your analogy is that it's not about the land, it's about the house.

ThePirateBay didn't build their solution on the premise that they would have an irrevocable right to their domain name. If the land owner decided to take back the land (like they did, many times) TPB could simply take their things and move elsewhere (like they did, many times).

I don't think I ever saw someone from TPB saying "oh, they took our domain, it's so unfair!", instead what I hear them saying is "we are building magnet-links and a bunch of redundant proxies so that our service continues to exist even if we lose all the domains we have.

Re: Jeremy Vaught spent 16 years to build @music on Twitter, then X took it away

#86

Post by ovao »

threatofrain wrote: post #63
ovao wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a good excuse to not build anything, but quite a good excuse to not build on what others own in such a way that you’re entirely reliant on them. Yes, unless you’re self-hosting your product on a solar-powered server via community-owned networks, you’re going to be beholden to someone , and often that’s multiple parties. But that’s not the same as being completely beholden.

Many businesses start with single points of failure. The goal is to get enough money to where this is not true, but they all start this way. Ultimately the goal is managing risk, and that often means not building out your own data center as the first thing you do.

This, more increasingly, doesn’t mean building out your own data center. Often this just means you can deploy services to multiple platforms without a dramatic or upending burden of effort. I don’t think startups should necessarily burn capital on federation, but startups can at least make engineering decisions and trade-offs to ensure a future livelihood not contingent on single points of failure.

Unless you’re Apple or Google, you’ll have some single points of failure. But that’s not the same as the livelihood of what you’re setting out to do being reliant on a single vendor for over a decade.

Re: Jeremy Vaught spent 16 years to build @music on Twitter, then X took it away

#87

Post by pessimizer »

PaulHoule wrote: post #61
okprod wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's similar to some users believing they have a right to privacy or a right to "their" data on platforms like Facebook. Use at your own risk because they're not free services; they have a profit motive by nature of what they are.

People gotta quit bitchin' about Twitter and just move to Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads or whatever. Bankruptcy is the one language that Elon Musk will understand and it's absolutely necessary because his behavior is contagious. Donald Trump set a precedent for him and Scott Adams, only their destruction will send a message this behavior is just not cool.

There's no relationship between Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Scott Adams other than that they're people you don't like.

Re: Jeremy Vaught spent 16 years to build @music on Twitter, then X took it away

#89

Post by mackatap »

JJMcJ wrote: post #35
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #12

Meh. I think it's fine for them to take it, but they should have left a link up to his new account, and publicly thanked him for keeping an eye on this url for so long. Maybe throw in a 16 year credit towards free service or something. This just seems like a super easy opportunity to make fans. It reminds me of how Microsoft messed up with Mike Rowe soft at first.

Thought experiment: Your business is located at 420 West 69th Street. Along comes X and takes that address away from you? Would you like that?

If x owned the entire entire street than yes. It isn't even remotely a good comparison.

Re: Jeremy Vaught spent 16 years to build @music on Twitter, then X took it away

#90

Post by rglullis »

threatofrain wrote: post #63
ovao wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a good excuse to not build anything, but quite a good excuse to not build on what others own in such a way that you’re entirely reliant on them. Yes, unless you’re self-hosting your product on a solar-powered server via community-owned networks, you’re going to be beholden to someone , and often that’s multiple parties. But that’s not the same as being completely beholden.

Many businesses start with single points of failure. The goal is to get enough money to where this is not true, but they all start this way. Ultimately the goal is managing risk, and that often means not building out your own data center as the first thing you do.

There is quite a lot between "building your own data center" and "building your tech stack in a way where you are not locked to one specific vendor".
Post reply on HN