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Yeah, zero posts and doesn’t even have a profile pic. It’s a dead account, I don’t have much of an issue with Instagram’s policy to “steal” handles on accounts like this.
Or maybe he just likes photos and follows his nephews or something.
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It is kind of weird that the account name is unchangeable since it's really only visible to the account holder and not tied to anything else. I agree that it should be unique since it's a sign-on credential but it really ought to be a label for the account number.
Just because it’s relevent... although steam officially states that the account name is unchangeable; if you contact support with a good reason and get the right person they can and do change your account name to another free one of your choice. I have uh personal reasons for having done this and I know of others who have as well. I’m not sure why they don’t roll it out more wisely - though I can say it did cause a c…
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I'm pretty sure there are many real world examples of domain names being taken.
One of the more famous examples was Mike Rowe's domain. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_v._MikeRoweSoft
A while back, an Instagram employee stole the handle from my buddy’s wife. The only reason he got it back was because he had enough clout in the design community that he was able to get some press about it: https://medium.com/@behoff/they-say-nothing-will-change-5c54...
I had a couple tumblr employees following me, cool people. I even had the founder “like” a couple of my posts. My sense was that there wasn’t an avenue open to poach a day-one user like me. This was all pre-yahoo.
Eventually, when I was done with the site more or less, I put out a feeler for a buyer and made a quick buck. That buyer I think tried to sell it themselves and it ended up shuttered.
Good times. Tumblr had a fun niche art community at the time and my “tumblr fame” helped me network with some interesting people.
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What about "would you give up your account name" "No" "Ok fine, I'll have to find a new name. Have a nice day sir.". This story pretty much sounds like “All animals are equals but some are more equals than others”[1] to me. [1]Georges Orwell Animal Farm (his best book IMO)
Isn't the whole premise of royalty that we are explicitly not equal?
[1] (and Instagram is owned byt a majority of American citizens)
We may not have the full story here, but it doesn't seem like Instagram is disputing that they simply took it. I don't see anyone suggesting that they even attempted to contact the guy first. Outrageously poor way to handle things. Also, at what point does an Instagram account become "inactive"?
And what were they going to tell the guy? It's not like they were going to give him a choice, or offer him restitution. Not doing something like this leads to stupid stuff like having POTUS' handle be "real donald trump" (yes, I know choosing that handle predates his being POTUS, but you get the idea).
No one should be able to get something any more than any one else. Of course that’ll never be the case. But why excuse the behavior and even encourage it?
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Is this even that negative PR? They're probably going to get more people going "oooh Prince Harry and Meghan are on Instagram I should follow them" than being outraged and quitting
I don’t think it will fall on them, nor should it, they probably had no idea this was going to happen. It’s Instagram’s responsibility either way. They could have said “pick another name or we can nicely ask the current owner for that one.”
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Is this even that negative PR? They're probably going to get more people going "oooh Prince Harry and Meghan are on Instagram I should follow them" than being outraged and quitting
I guess what I'm saying is if they aren't worried about the optics of it or don't consider this bad PR, why not take a better name?
You own nothing. You are nothing. In the 90s, Mr. Nissan was able to fight and keep nissan.com. That feels like a thousand years ago. Now everything is governed by private "policies" that amount to "we can do anything we want". I don't like the new world at all.
> What I'm trying to do is keep tweeting therefore they can't take it if it's active. Good luck with that, Twitter has a long history of taking handles on behalf of brands and celebrities...