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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 register

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.

cryptoz 7y ago
Not posting on twitter doesn't mean the account is unused. Lots of people make accounts and follow people and are DAU but never post.
- jdnenej 7y ago
  Twitter always bans my accounts if I dont post or interact.
  - kkarakk 7y ago
    You must not be interacting with it in ANY way at all. I periodically use twitter to sign up for stuff at max and worst i've gotten is a compulsory password reset
- manigandham 7y ago
  Activity isn't based on posting. You have to at least login in the past 6 months.
fossuser 7y ago
Yep - I was looking forward to getting my name username too. The user has no tweets, has followed nothing and done nothing since registering 2013. I hope they end up doing it.
lilyball 7y ago
They haven't scrapped their plans for this. They said they'll put it on pause until they've come up with a tool for memorializing accounts. So presumably accounts that are legitimately not going used will still eventually free up. Assuming of course that the account is truly idle and not being used to read without every interacting.
- duskwuff 7y ago
  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.
  - tom_mellior 7y ago
    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 version to @inactive:2020:foobar and free up @foobar again for the next person interested in using it. Any way they solve this, there is a danger of people using bots to mass-squat liberated names to offer them for sale. I don't see any very good way around this. Possibly to give first pick to users with long-standing accounts that share a nontrivial common substring with the liberated handle. For example, if my current Twitter name is @firstname_lastname, and I really want @firstname, I think it might make sense to prioritize me over @random_bot_204safhq23.
    - lilyball 7y ago
      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.
  - teddyuk 7y ago
    My relatives who died have fewer followers than your relatives who died so yours stay and mine go? Doesn't sound fair! (my relatives also didnt tweet very often but when they did they were amazing)
- kkarakk 7y ago
marban 7y ago
Even 10 years ago you were 3 years late... As a firstname user, life isn't easy when it comes to notification spam b/c people think that putting a space between first and lastname still gets sent to the correct user. I've basically stopped checking them.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I have a similar issue on Github and Gitlab.com - my handle there (same as here) overlaps with a certain annotation from Java's Hibernate, so I get a lot of @mentions from random repos. (And all that because Github and Gitlab are both case-insensitive when matching @mentions.)
  - koolba 7y ago
    I’d blame that on users not using backticks / code blocks.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      A lot of this is automatic - someone uses the proper @Annotation in a commit messages or pull request name, and I get an e-mail that I was just mentioned in some random repo.
- ghaff 7y ago
  My college email forwarding is just my first name. (We got to choose our username and I got in early.) It doesn't really happen any longer but back in the day when a lot of people were not terribly familiar with the new-fangled email thing, I would get fairly regular emails--including some that were probably at least a bit sensitive--addressed to my first name by people who just assumed the email would somehow get to some other person with the same first name.
guessmyname 7y ago
> … 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 my short-and-simple username (which I have to clarify is not “guessmyname”). I’ve done the same thing in other popular websites which I also never use, aside from signing in once in a while to keep the account “active”. 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? People will quickly associate these messages with other accounts on the Internet with the same name. I don’t want to take that risk, and I guess other people with inactive Twitter/Facebook/Gmail/etc accounts are the same.
- tom_mellior 7y ago
  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 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 should be public, with a public tweet explaining that you are really you but are choosing not to use Twitter, and where to find you instead. 3. If you have such an important personal brand to protect, you presumably have something interesting to say. Twitter is not a bad platform to say it. All in all, if they take away your squatted Twitter handle, I wouldn't feel bad for you. Certainly not without a lot more information about why your brand is so special. And, well, if you can keep them from doing it by logging in once every six months, it seems that that is something you can shoulder to protect your brand.
  - exit 7y ago
    > 1. Most Twitter users are not malicious in the way you suggest. the odds of, at a minimum, any given twitter profile being at least wildly off-brand for your namespace colliding persona are still very high. this looks like a legitimate edge case anxiety to me.
balladeer 7y ago
My first name usernames are taken up by other people on Facebook and Instagram after I deleted my accounts there years ago. If nothing this has stopped me from again creating accounts on these platforms couple of times I was tempted to.
throwaway122378 7y ago
Those attributes don’t necessarily mean the handle would be available. If that user logged in once in the last 6 months you’d be out of luck.
C14L 7y ago
And that should be the cutoff for account deletion: Unused for years, no content, no followers. Deleting accounts with lots of content and followers, only because there was no tweet for a few month, is just dumb.
syshum 7y ago
Even if they removed the accounts you still would not be able to. Twitter said many times that the removals would not free up the namespace, those names would still be unavailable for use
sequoia 7y ago
Ha, yeah. Imagine how I feel, sharing a name with a major VC firm! @sequoia was squatted for years, I asked for it back in 2011 or so along with verification that I am in fact Sequoia (github.com/sequoia etc.), they said they "don't release usernames." It sat like that for several years until lo and behold, they do release usernames under the right circumstances (see @sequoia now). I just want to know what made them release the name to @sequoia and not me (don't answer that :p).
simion314 7y ago
I don't post, why should someone like you take my account ? I did not post on FB in a long time either but I still want my account.

cryptoz 7y ago

Not posting on twitter doesn't mean the account is unused. Lots of people make accounts and follow people and are DAU but never post.

jdnenej 7y ago
Twitter always bans my accounts if I dont post or interact.
- kkarakk 7y ago
  You must not be interacting with it in ANY way at all. I periodically use twitter to sign up for stuff at max and worst i've gotten is a compulsory password reset
manigandham 7y ago
Activity isn't based on posting. You have to at least login in the past 6 months.

fossuser 7y ago

Yep - I was looking forward to getting my name username too. The user has no tweets, has followed nothing and done nothing since registering 2013. I hope they end up doing it.

lilyball 7y ago

They haven't scrapped their plans for this. They said they'll put it on pause until they've come up with a tool for memorializing accounts. So presumably accounts that are legitimately not going used will still eventually free up. Assuming of course that the account is truly idle and not being used to read without every interacting.

duskwuff 7y ago
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.
- tom_mellior 7y ago
  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 version to @inactive:2020:foobar and free up @foobar again for the next person interested in using it. Any way they solve this, there is a danger of people using bots to mass-squat liberated names to offer them for sale. I don't see any very good way around this. Possibly to give first pick to users with long-standing accounts that share a nontrivial common substring with the liberated handle. For example, if my current Twitter name is @firstname_lastname, and I really want @firstname, I think it might make sense to prioritize me over @random_bot_204safhq23.
  - lilyball 7y ago
    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.
- teddyuk 7y ago
  My relatives who died have fewer followers than your relatives who died so yours stay and mine go? Doesn't sound fair! (my relatives also didnt tweet very often but when they did they were amazing)
kkarakk 7y ago

marban 7y ago

Even 10 years ago you were 3 years late... As a firstname user, life isn't easy when it comes to notification spam b/c people think that putting a space between first and lastname still gets sent to the correct user. I've basically stopped checking them.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
I have a similar issue on Github and Gitlab.com - my handle there (same as here) overlaps with a certain annotation from Java's Hibernate, so I get a lot of @mentions from random repos. (And all that because Github and Gitlab are both case-insensitive when matching @mentions.)
- koolba 7y ago
  I’d blame that on users not using backticks / code blocks.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    A lot of this is automatic - someone uses the proper @Annotation in a commit messages or pull request name, and I get an e-mail that I was just mentioned in some random repo.
ghaff 7y ago
My college email forwarding is just my first name. (We got to choose our username and I got in early.) It doesn't really happen any longer but back in the day when a lot of people were not terribly familiar with the new-fangled email thing, I would get fairly regular emails--including some that were probably at least a bit sensitive--addressed to my first name by people who just assumed the email would somehow get to some other person with the same first name.

guessmyname 7y ago

> … 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 my short-and-simple username (which I have to clarify is not “guessmyname”). I’ve done the same thing in other popular websites which I also never use, aside from signing in once in a while to keep the account “active”. 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? People will quickly associate these messages with other accounts on the Internet with the same name. I don’t want to take that risk, and I guess other people with inactive Twitter/Facebook/Gmail/etc accounts are the same.

tom_mellior 7y ago
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 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 should be public, with a public tweet explaining that you are really you but are choosing not to use Twitter, and where to find you instead. 3. If you have such an important personal brand to protect, you presumably have something interesting to say. Twitter is not a bad platform to say it. All in all, if they take away your squatted Twitter handle, I wouldn't feel bad for you. Certainly not without a lot more information about why your brand is so special. And, well, if you can keep them from doing it by logging in once every six months, it seems that that is something you can shoulder to protect your brand.
- exit 7y ago
  > 1. Most Twitter users are not malicious in the way you suggest. the odds of, at a minimum, any given twitter profile being at least wildly off-brand for your namespace colliding persona are still very high. this looks like a legitimate edge case anxiety to me.

balladeer 7y ago

My first name usernames are taken up by other people on Facebook and Instagram after I deleted my accounts there years ago. If nothing this has stopped me from again creating accounts on these platforms couple of times I was tempted to.

throwaway122378 7y ago

Those attributes don’t necessarily mean the handle would be available. If that user logged in once in the last 6 months you’d be out of luck.

C14L 7y ago

And that should be the cutoff for account deletion: Unused for years, no content, no followers. Deleting accounts with lots of content and followers, only because there was no tweet for a few month, is just dumb.

syshum 7y ago

Even if they removed the accounts you still would not be able to. Twitter said many times that the removals would not free up the namespace, those names would still be unavailable for use

sequoia 7y ago

Ha, yeah. Imagine how I feel, sharing a name with a major VC firm! @sequoia was squatted for years, I asked for it back in 2011 or so along with verification that I am in fact Sequoia (github.com/sequoia etc.), they said they "don't release usernames." It sat like that for several years until lo and behold, they do release usernames under the right circumstances (see @sequoia now). I just want to know what made them release the name to @sequoia and not me (don't answer that :p).

simion314 7y ago

I don't post, why should someone like you take my account ? I did not post on FB in a long time either but I still want my account.