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Jeremy Vaught spent 16 years to build @music on Twitter, then X took it away
- s5300 3y ago[dead]
- maximinus_thrax 3y agoFrom another article [0]: > Vaught is mostly a Musk fan, as he's interested in Musk's electric cars and space developments. He said that this experience with X hasn't tainted his opinion of Musk or his relationship too much with X as a platform. He's holding out hope that Musk has a long-term plan for where Musk is taking X, but like many users, he's struggling to adjust to the rebranding. Vaught still refers to the platform by its original name. I love the smell of 'cult of personality' [0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/x-user-super-pissed-that-musk-ordered-takeover-of-his-music-account/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/x-user-super-pis...
- mixmastamyk 3y agoI exploit you, still you love me I tell you one and one makes three Oh, I'm… the… cult of personality
- ksr 3y agoLiving Colour, my favorites!
- vic-traill 3y agoSpelled 'Colour' correctly as the band would have it, too. w00t!
- lowbloodsugar 3y agoHe only hits me when I deserve it.
- femiagbabiaka 3y agoAll hail Loviatar.
- atkailash 3y agoIt’s almost like Stockholm syndrome.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- andrepd 3y agoFucking hell, I hate this word with a passion and how it's used as a cheap insult, but really "cuck" is the only thing that springs to mind. Someone takes a dump all over you but not even that makes you less eager to say panegyrics about them? Very strange.
- labster 3y agoCuck is a good word for this case, but perhaps “addict” is better?
- the-printer 3y agoMaybe he just doesn't care that much. Inconvenienced, evidently, but to stake a personal dislike towards a human being for this seems unwarranted.
- mvdtnz 3y agoDid you even read the article? In his own tweet he says he's "super pissed", how could you possibly conclude that "maybe he doesn't care that much"?
- the-printer 3y agoBecause I can differentiate between being upset over something, especially something that is a minor inconvenience relative to other things that can occur in a man's life, but not being upset to the extent where I dislike those responsible for it. I mean seriously, stop for a moment and think if "I don't dislike the guy who runs the company that inconvenienced me and I think things may turn out okay" warrants the association that the person who feels like this would be sexually gratified by his wife sleeping with another man.
- mvdtnz 3y agoJust admit that you didn't read the linked article.
- 3y ago
- Jibbedeyeah 3y agoYou say "cult of personality". I say "Great Founder Theory". https://samoburja.com/gft/ https://samoburja.com/gft/
- klabb3 3y agoThey’re the same picture
- SkyMarshal 3y agoCult of personality-induced Stockholm Syndrome.
- Seanambers 3y agoPlease, wtf, thats just idiotic. Can't say I agree with X's style of appropriating tags but just the assumption that everything comes as an edict from EM himself is kinda sick.
- afavour 3y ago“sick” is pretty exaggerated language. And he runs the company, all of the companies decisions are ultimately attributable to him, especially when it demonstrates a change in policy from before he bought the company.
- bandyaboot 3y ago> Just now, Twitter/X just ripped it away. Super pissed. Who’s going to tell him that Twitter/X is controlled by a person who’s name is Elon Musk?
- Aeolun 3y agoSelective memory
- jbigelow76 3y agoReading stuff like this makes me think we are seeing Gen-X's version of Donald Trump, and it worries me.
- romwell 3y agoNot just Gen X, sadly
- worrycue 3y agoYou are. I mean the similarities are uncanny. Both are publicity hounds who flip out at any perceived slight. Both are vain, petty, vindictive, and in general, seem to show all the signs of narcissistic personality disorder. Both have gone through countless wives. Both have a habit of not paying people because they can get away with it - as it’s too expensive to sue them for nonpayment; they can drag it out in court and bankrupt you. I never got caught up in the Musk hype and the more I learn about him the more wary of him I became. I have seen the amount of damage to society a narcissist can do in the form of the 45th.
- MarcoZavala 3y ago[dead]
- jbigelow76 3y agoBoth are also serial liars. The small mercy with Musk vis-a-vis Trump is that his nationality and shifting demographics of the United States (Republican efforts at voter suppression not withstanding) should ensure he doesn't have a shot at becoming president of the United States.
- CamperBob2 3y agoIt should worry you if you do business with any Musk-owned company. I'd consider buying a Tesla, for instance, but its resale value could easily drop by five digits based on a single Tweet from Musk.
- kanbara 3y agoi’m not surprised this happened. with @x, it sort-of makes sense. but to randomly pull handles the company wants like this is a bit beyond the pale of fostering a friendly community.
- anigbrowl 3y agoOn the one hand, it's unsurprising that platforms would do this, users sign up for TOS with terrible policies and realize too late that they're the product. Too, a handle like '@music' was also an opportunistic bet on hub status of one's own. On the other hand, the sense of arrogance and entitlement on display here marks an impressive new nadir in fuck-you capitalism. Contractual arguments are sort of meaningless since most user agreements are extremely one-sided contracts of adhesion and the judicial establishment often rejects equitable arguments in favor of narrow technical ones, notwithstanding the vast asymmetries between user and service provider. All the legal, economic, and (increasingly) social incentives favor abusive behavior. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-made-this https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-made-this
- numpad0 3y agoAre TOS even real? I can't immediately recall high profile cases that actually had to do with TOS. My impression is that TOS had disconnected from actual internal operations sometimes during past 20 years, and are now just filler texts for posthoc justification for internal code behaviors and manager ramblings.
- dredmorbius 3y agoOn top of all those ToS criticisms, the terms can be changed unilaterally at any time. So the terms into which you enter a relationship aren't the terms which will govern that relationship. This is ... becoming untenable. (The more so as ToS often have strong legal sanction, or as Cory Doctorow calls it, "criminal contempt of business model".)
- corndoge 3y agoI hope they keep doing it, maybe it will lead to users understanding that they do not control or own the platform. Unfortunately the odds of that seem slim. Even when users get fed up and move, they tend to just move to another proprietary platform, without consideration or forward thought that maybe it's worthwhile to use support a platform where this cannot happen.
- flykespice 3y agoI hope the bank claim the money back from your account since you don't control or own their "platform".
- numpad0 3y agoI hope more people realize that self chosen username as public ID is untenable. That's the core of the problem. Unique IDs has to be for internal use only and anything self chosen should not bear unique/primary key constraint by design.
- hackernewds 3y agoI hope this is also done to any website or URLs you "own" so a lesson can be learned as well. How about the corndoge Hews account to start?
- dec0dedab0de 3y agoMeh. 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.
- smcl 3y ago[flagged]
- mlindner 3y agoCan we not keep spreading obvious propaganda about “child porn”? It’s completely and very obviously illegal to post such things. If anyone was posting it anywhere, on or off Twitter, they’re going to prison. Twitter deletes any such material, and always has, and reports people to the police. So there aren’t any known non-anonymous people out there publicly posting child porn to Twitter that lasts longer than an instant before it’s deleted, banned and reported to the police.
- extr 3y agoSorry, but this did happen very recently (though context is important). A huge account, Dom Lucre, posted CSAM, ostensibly as a "check out how bad this shit is", but pretty fucked up nonetheless. He got the tweets deleted but Elon himself allowed him his account back. Probably because Dom Lucre drives a lot of traffic. Pretty shameful situation all around.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smcl 3y agoHere is the guy in question - a non-anonymous person publicly posting child porn to Twitter who then got suspended. Then Elon Musk took a personal interest in the situation, removed the tweet and restored the account. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/27/twitter-csam-dom-lucre-elon-musk/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/27/twitter... I guess we will see if there’s any further action against the guy who tweeted it. But we are in a pretty bizarre situation now where accounts like @elonjet (the account that tweeted when his jet took off and landed anywhere) and Chad Loder (journalist covering the far right) are suspended and someone posting child porn gets a pass. Again, it’s entirely up to Elon what he does with Twitter/X as he owns it. It’s just really fucking weird what he thinks is OK to have there and what he disagrees with. I am curious what happens to this “Dom Lucre” - he’s not unknown even if I personally don’t know his real name - and no matter his intent he seems to have broken a couple of really serious laws. @dang can we get my original comment unflagged? It’s a bit odd to have my comment (which is reasonable and accurate) hidden but this reply (which is uninformed and incorrect) to be visible.
- charcircuit 3y agoAs pointed out in the comments he didn't have 11M followers. @music was renamed to @musicfan and @twittermusic was renamed to @music. Both accounts kept all of their followers.
- timeon 3y agoSo it is completely ok?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HenryBemis 3y agoAs any father says in any Hollywood movie: my house, my rules. So... the 'thermostat' is theirs and theirs alone. You are just allowed to eat/sleep in your parents house. You're not entitled to anything in it. Perhaps the $8 per month may give you some 'rights' but I'm sure the T&C give them the upper hand.
- twelve40 3y agono, it seems pretty dumb, but they don't have to lie and exaggerate it either
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pessimizer 3y agoIt's pretty awful to look at people who point out dishonesty on your side and see a supporter of the enemy. Without that premise, directing your question at somebody who pointed out an error/deception that you did not bother to dispute would be a non-sequitur. Why do you think that somebody who points out dishonesty would think what happened is "completely ok"?
- twelve40 3y agoso the op dude embellished what happened to score some righteous hatred points. I suspected as much.
- zapdrive 3y agoSomething something free market.
- constantly 3y agoI 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 own external site, or collaborated with I don’t know Spotify to funnel people there for cash.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- isykt 3y agoWildly 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.
- constantly 3y agoThe downside risk you’re protecting against isn’t “billionaire buys company and steals your account” but is instead the much more general, “I lose access to my account,” which you will agree is a much more likely thing to happen, particularly given that it has happened on Twitter, so it’s not exactly speculative.
- jenadine 3y agoExactly, when your business relies entirely on another business, you are taking a huge risk that the other businesses blocks you on a whim. There could be many reason such as randomly being flagged by some "spam" algorithms, or because add a feature that competes with your business, or they just don't like you. That's true for anything that relies on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, ... You should always have a plan: what's the risk that X company terminates our account, what would the consequences be, and what do we do in that case.
- XorNot 3y agoKeep in mind that Musk's stated ambition with X is to make it "the everything app". Imagine if Google started grabbing Gmail addresses it wanted for products.
- pard68 3y agoGoogle doesn't use @gmail though I know what you mean. X/Twitter should do like Google and use another designation for their own "handles"/services. "@" is pedestrian because everyone on that platform is "@something". A different pattern for official accounts would make sense to me. Just as Google doens't use "@gmail.com" for their own product emails.
- mackatap 3y agoYou mean like youtube owning gaming, music etc?
- gilli 3y agoThis is why I like how Bluesky handles it, you can use your own domain name. So I simply got @gilli.is, no reason for anyone ever to take that away from me.
- rglullis 3y agoSame thing applies to Email, XMPP, Matrix, SIP, ActivityPub servers... nothing special about bluesky.
- tredre3 3y agoWhat is special about bluesky is that you don't have to host the service yourself (or pay a third party) for it to work.
- rglullis 3y agoSomeone, somehow is paying for bluesky's servers and data. TANSTAAFL. Google was running my email server with custom domain for years, free of charge. I think that it is still grandfathered in for those that signed for Google Apps early on. IT doesn't mean that the "email is free".
- Timshel 3y agoBut can you host it ? (Can't find much on federation). I use fastmail and a custom domain for my email. If I'm unhappy with the service I can migrate or host it. If you can't leave having your own domain is not much help. Note: I believe webfinger are supported by Mastodon too, so not so special of a feature.
- orbz 3y agoAnd then some guy took the AWS S3 domain: https://chaos.social/@jonty/110307532009155432 https://chaos.social/@jonty/110307532009155432
- numpad0 3y agoThat's just mildly exploiting the fact that social engineering on DNS infra is not yet popular. Once everyone starts doing that, the black hats just move onto the DNS platform and we will all be worse off.
- internet2000 3y agoHow do you spend 16 years building a username?
- HenryBemis 3y agoI assume he means "building the following by posting good content, etc. etc. for 16 years". This @music is a nice OG.. too bad they ruined it for him.
- valianteffort 3y agoFact of the matter is using twitter for 16 years provides no additional value to the company than someone using it for a day. No one cares how old your facebook is for example. Platforms that wanted to provide user pages at the top level were always gonna have this issue. Nobody would want a user to name himself "support" or "customerservice".
- Aachen 3y agoHow long you've been doing something for matter a lot and it appears in lots of places. If I work somewhere for years, I can't be let go from one day to the next. If I rent a place for a decade, I can't just be thrown out with the three months' notice that are enough if I lived there for only a year. When the government updated the privacy law, even if you should never have been tracked without consent based on the 1995 law as well as article 8 of the human rights convention, businesses were still given two years to update their processes (2016–2018), during which time they could only get warnings. "Things always used to be this way" matters a lot. And as I understand it, they didn't impersonate support and cause harm in that way, or pretend to be official in any other way, as in your example of calling yourself @customerservice. I don't think either of these arguments work, especially because you did in fact draw customers to the website for 16 years so you did provide them value (your content in between their ads)
- pessimizer 3y ago> If I work somewhere for years, I can't be let go from one day to the next. What country is this? In the US this is absolutely not true. > If I rent a place for a decade, I can't just be thrown out with the three months' notice that are enough if I lived there for only a year. What country is this? In the US this is absolutely not true. By the mention of the HRC, I'm assuming the UK or Europe? Your experience of employment and renter's rights is not generalizable.
- rglullis 3y ago*Never build your house on someone else's land". Episode 237.
- morkalork 3y agoKind of tired of this low effort canned reply. Unless you are the literal embodiment of a state, it's always someone else's land. You're just renting it as long as you pay taxes on it. Same goes digitally. Hosting is someone else's land. Domain name registration is someone else's land. Do you say the same thing when a piracy site loses it's domain and moves yet again to another obscure tld?
- rglullis 3y ago> Do you say the same thing when a piracy site loses it's domain and moves yet again to another obscure tld? Are the people on the piratebay "pissed at ICANN" when they lose a domain? No, they learned that the domain name is worthless by itself.
- morkalork 3y agoHow is a twitter handle different?
- rglullis 3y agoAre 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.
- morkalork 3y agoStill sounds like someone else's land, just with more faith in their behaviour.
- khaledh 3y agoPeople should start referring to it as "Ex".
- Aachen 3y agoOr just stop referring to it, rather than continuing to give it attention I'm on Mastodon now, there's no need for me to talk of ex-twitter. It's not a topic that interests me
- pessimizer 3y agoThe only point is to talk about how much you hate Twitter. If they didn't talk about hating Musk and Twitter constantly, you wouldn't notice the slightest difference between their behavior pre- and post-Musk. I honestly think the Musk hate has been gradually dialed down because the people who set mainstream agendas thought it was going to take attention away from Trump hate going into the campaign season.
- whiterace1488 3y ago[dead]
- jasmer 3y ago[dead]
- grogenaut 3y agoThis does happen at other places when I worked at Sony we needed a social media account that was in the name of one of the characters for an alternate reality game on PlayStation Network however I'm pretty sure I remember that Sony either gave the person who had the account three grand worth of free games on PlayStation or a like 2-year unlimited games entitlement. If I recall that person was quite happy with the trade
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoWhen 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 billion for the company already. Paying people for their accounts sets up a poor precedent if they decide to take over other accounts in the future, and determining the amount to pay seems arbitrary. However, maybe giving these people a free Blue subscription for some number of years, or even for life, would've been a good move since it encourages them to continue participating on the platform.
- okprod 3y agoI 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.
- PaulHoule 3y agoPeople 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.
- kfrzcode 3y agoI don't agree
- evandale 3y agoThe thing about people is they'll whine and cry about how awful <anything> is but if it gives them convenient access to a dopamine hit they'll put up with whatever they're complaining about. Putting your money where your mouth is and using your wallet as your vote are rare values to find in people anymore. Most people want cheap entertainment and they want it now.
- paulpauper 3y agofun fact: @elonmusk originally did not belong to elon musk
- bradgranath 3y agoFuck around on private platforms, find out.
- ecf 3y agoGuess what, you don’t own anything on the internet. Nothing is private. Everything flows through a domain name, and you never actually fully own a domain. All these comments about “shouldn’t have done it on a private platform”. Well, new flash, the internet as a whole is a private platform. I sincerely hope you have a problem like this in the future so others can mock you over your misfortune.
- tamimio 3y agoSome people think reserving a username in a platform fully owned by an entity is like reserving a domain name or like social security number..
- zassy 3y agoIt is absolutely bizarre how many people I know that think social media companies should be able permanently ban or suspend users for literally any reason they want with no possible recourse that simultaneously think these companies shouldn’t be able to reclaim usernames without financial compensation.
- ecf 3y agoAnd some people like yourself think your comment is unique and insightful.
- Jerrrry 3y agoI've been on both sides of this equation from each angle, across the top 4 social networks. I've acquired original names, employee accounts, etc.; and have had my own originals appropriate from me by rouge employees and some crafty others. It sucks but ultimately it's the rules of the games you play. Losing a 10k social media handle sucks so bad precisely because of how valuable they are, and how awesome it feels to acquire one.
- greyface- 3y agoOriginal tweet, rather than screenshot toot: https://twitter.com/jeremyvaught/status/1687223289482035200 https://twitter.com/jeremyvaught/status/1687223289482035200
- jeremyvaught 3y agothanks
- nullfield 3y agoThis 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?
- fluoridation 3y ago>Are there any solutions that are even close to … some kind of fairness, or even approximation of a system that respects… anything? One way could be have names mean nothing in terms of identification. You can call yourself "music" if you like, but so can anyone else. You're better off calling yourself something unique and then building a following, so that future potential followers can distinguish you from copycats.
- andrepd 3y agoDiscord kinda had that with username#1234 (4 digits). But that's being phase out.
- tagamma 3y agoIs there an explanation anywhere of their reason for doing the phase out? Very curious!
- rurounijones 3y agoUser confusion.basically
- Ekaros 3y agoBecause absolutely everyone employed there. Or at least those having any power were incapable of coming up with alternative solution for adding friends... As 4 numbers was too hard to remember. And only possible way was to use exact name... Not to generate link or email or something...
- Dalewyn 3y agoIt is generally (almost always) the case that user accounts on a given service are the property of said service, you merely have the privilege of using them according to terms and conditions set forth by said service. Which is to say you shouldn't rely on them for anything critical; they can and in certain cases will be seized by said service for any or no reason at any given time. This can be said of Twitter, regardless Musk, as well as any other online service (eg: Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Google...). Journalism of this sort is merely stoking the emotional flames for sensationalism (clickbait!) and driving the mainstream narrative that Twitter is a goner and an evil that must be slain.
- whimsicalism 3y agoI dislike Musk but this seems fine to me as long as they actually do transfer the followers.
- noman-land 3y agoWhat if Google took your 16 year old email address? Corporate cloud is an absolute trap. A prison. You cannot trust these companies with your important digital belongings. Free, libre, open source software, peer to peer networks, and citizen run communications infrastructure are the only viable way forward if we don't to live in a rental society where none of your belongings belong to you, not even your identity.
- javajosh 3y agoWhat about ARIN and IANA? Eventually there is some central authority associated with the internet, IP address blocks and DNS root servers.
- Aeolun 3y agoThat’s why we normally have faith in the rule of law, so that big players cannot just rip the livelihood out of smaller ones.
- quickthrower2 3y agoNot in my threat model. But yes at some point you could get offlined completely or your internet heavily sensored if you live in a country that does that
- noman-land 3y agoThis is why I was very careful to include "citizen run communications infrastructure". We need public antennas, public access points. Publicly run physical infrastructure.
- quickthrower2 3y agoI am assuming they will take my 19 yo email address. So I am moving my logins slowly to my own domain.
- adolph 3y ago“my own domain” Which is a touch more solid (I use in in that way) but still an ephemeral rented thing, not owned.
- the-printer 3y agoThe most interesting part of this are the Mastodon posts underneath the initial one that insult this Vaught's integrity for not taking the handle repossession personally.
- Aeolun 3y agoI kind of get that. I would take it personally. Violations of trust should be punished, regardless of whether the rest of the world thinks I was stupid to trust in the first place.
- wslh 3y agoThe post includes innecessary resentment against billionaire owned platforms, sadly it does not take the opportunity to promote Mastodon or other technologies with that post success.
- tombert 3y agoA part of me really hopes that Musks' seemingly-incompetent handling of Twitter does sort of legitimize Mastodon (and other Fediverse projects) to the public. I set up a mastodon server a few weeks ago out of boredom, and I finally get the appeal of tweeting, and have been using it regularly, and it makes me happy that I get to own all the hardware powering it.
- bmitc 3y agoTwitter was already confusing. Mastodon more so.
- tombert 3y agoI agree; it's honestly easier for me now because my mastodon instance has exactly one user (me). Substantially less cluttered because there's no attempt at a recommendation algorithm.
- 627467 3y agoI could bet that number of users losing their account on mastodon on way or the other is proportionally higher than on Twitter. Instance admins are more powerful that reddit mods. Yeah, you could take your date elsewhere, but not your original identify (yourNameAtSomeoneElsesDomain). (...unless you're selfhosting your instance)
- jonwest 3y agoAm I the only one who finds it interesting that @ musicfan and @musicmusic were available? Or did they “acquire” those as well?
- Freaky 3y agohttps://twitter.com/jeremyvaught/status/1687444457837187072 https://twitter.com/jeremyvaught/status/1687444457837187072 > Oh wow, I didn't even think to look up the alternatives they were offering. THEY ARE ALREADY USED AS WELL! So if I choose one, I'll be complicit in stealing more accounts.
- hackernewds 3y agowhat do the @musicfan user do then?
- jonwest 3y agoPresumably become @musicfanfan.
- qingcharles 3y agoIt's turtles all the way down!
- monero-xmr 3y agoThere is no such thing as true digital ownership for things built on anyone else’s platform. If you want to truly own something you need to use open protocols - like websites and bespoke software. If you build on someone’s API, or rely on “owning” a Twitter account which you literally have zero right to and is at the whim of the platform’s owner, don’t be shocked when it’s taken from you. Of course, you can always use Bitcoin / Ethereum and the Ethereum Name Service which is true, legitimate digital ownership. But few on HN like that. There is a lot of cognitive dissonance when arguing that blockchain has literally zero use cases and then being angry when Twitter or Facebook or Google rugs you.
- moralestapia 3y agoWhat about domain names? I have a really nice .app site and fear this every time I renew it. (For those who don't know: .app is owned by Google)
- presson 3y agoThis cannot happen with domains. If you were to drop the domain, they could potentially reserve it for themselves, but as long as you're not breaking laws and pay for renewals, the domain is yours.
- moralestapia 3y agoI hope you're right! (I'm quite honored to get your first comment on this site after lurking for around 3 years and a half, lol)
- presson 3y agolololol the web as a distribution platform is very important to me! :-P
- skinner927 3y agoAre there actually legal restrictions to this? Does anything prevent a registrar from increasing the domain renewal price from $12 to $12,000 which effectively prices out everyone?
- specialist 3y agoI feel bad for Vaught. Most have been misquoting Musk, creating a great deal of confusion. So of course Vaught, like many more to come, was unwittingly caught betwixt. Musk is a Freemium Speeches™ absolutist. If you wanna have your say, then you're gonna have to pay. A lot. PS- In totally unrelated news: Stackoverflow hit $1.6b (?) valuation from exploiting uncompensated labor. Retailers, MLMs, gig economy titans, among other grifters, have since been furiously studying this sterling example of plantation inspired ventures.
- ecf 3y agoMy god this story might make me leave HN again. I hope every “too bad” Musk-riding commenter here has their domain names names taken from them or something.
- mike503 3y agoThis is pathetic. The right handle and recognition could literally be tied to someone's wellbeing at this point. Not to mention world leaders who use their "X" handle to announce stuff - while always could have been stolen by Twitter, there was an expectation the company wouldn't do things like that. Now there's this unstable billionaire troll who makes decisions on a whim and is hellbent on destroying the platform. This is just another example of "untrustworthy" behavior that makes no sense to tolerate from this type of platform.
- Grum9 3y ago[dead]
- Gud 3y agoI just can’t feel bad for people who do this, when this happens to them. He has for 16 years effectively helped push the open web further away by investing so much time into Twitter. These proprietary platforms(Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc) should not be supported at all - Time and time again have we warned this is exactly what will happen. And by investing in these platforms, you are essentially supporting the silencing of dissenting opinions, making sure only the supporting voices of global capitalism are heard. Remember: Twitter is the McDonald’s of the internet.
- dredmorbius 3y agoOne of the features of the late Google+ I continue to find intriguing was that account identities were not based on any semantic terms, but rather on a nineteen- or twenty-digit numeric string, apparently randomly assigned and not in any determinable sequential order. Descriptive account handles were effectively aliases assigned to these, and yes, multiple accounts could share the same alias, as both my primary "Edward Morbius" and secondary "The Real Slim Shady" accounts demonstrated.[1] Eventually, Google hit on the idea of offering "vanity URLs" to members, with the catch that you had to provide a phone number in order to get one. I demurred on that basis, but discovered when the service was discontinued that one side-effect was that posts referenced by those vanity URLs weren't archived by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine ... and that there was no viable way of mapping from the vanity name to the canonical numerical ID. People who'd elected to use those IDs were doubly screwed in the cancellation as their content couldn't be archived, even if they otherwise wanted it to be. Random numeric identifiers were also a characteristic of MCIMail back in the day, if memory serves. Vint Cerf worked for MCI before moving to Google, and I wonder whether or not he had any influence in either system's account identifier policies. This whole story-arch of Twitter's enmuskification would have been mooted had a similar architectural decision been made a decade and a half ago. I'd also strongly recommend any future account-based systems consider this model as well. ________________________________ Notes: 1. I created TRSS after getting locked out of my principle account, in a fit of pique. Given that I was already pseudonymous, why not emphasize the point, particularly when trying to reconnect. The fact that the new account pretty rapidly reestablished relations with my principle prior contacts was ... interesting. How much of that was algorithmic, how much social function, and what that has to say about both impersonation and reestablishing identity strikes me as interesting.
- reportgunner 3y agoWhat is @music on Twitter ? I've never heard of it. edit: To answer my question it seems it's just a borderline spam account that occasionally posts links to youtube music videos. I don't see anything being "built" there.
- jeremyvaught 3y agoI'm the Jeremy Vaught this happened to. I just noticed this was here. Reading thread now...