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He said he wasn't using it much. Thus, isn't he basically a squatter?
by brador 13y ago
He said he wasn't using it much. Thus, isn't he basically a squatter?
- harryh 13y agoYa, the fact that he tweeted a grand total of twice in 2013 (see https://twitter.com/N_is_stolen https://twitter.com/N_is_stolen) makes me have a little less sympathy.
- imsofuture 13y agoI'm a very casual and infrequent tweeter, and I can't fathom how that makes my username 'up for grabs'. Sorry you have such a twisted view of username ownership :/
- harryh 13y agoOh it definitely doesn't make your username 'up for grabs'. What happened to you totally sucks and I hope you manage to get your account back. That being said if you're not actually going to use your account you might want to at least consider giving it to someone who would put it to more active use. Just a thought.
- nathanb 13y agoSomeone offered him 50 grand for it, and he turned them down. I would be surprised if he hadn't considered it at that point, if not previously.
- nh7a 13y agoI've been actively using the account for other purpose than tweeting, and had a vague plan to start using it for tweeting again. Should I have mentioned the plan publicly so that the attacker would have refrained from blackmailing me? I don't think so.
- jrs99 13y agoThis COULD make sense. Are all other names taken up on twitter? Is it difficult to tweet without using the @N name? I never used twitter before.
- harryh 13y agoMaybe google.com should have built their web site on kljasdklfjnaksdfn.com instead. That would have worked out just as well for them right? I haven't used the web very much.
- bigiain 13y agoWhile sympathetic - I'm also slightly amused at your twisted view about twitter name/account "ownership"… Just how much of the "real world" law you're alluding to by using the term "ownership" do you suppose applies to Twitter handles? (or Gmail addresses, or Facebook pages, or even domain names?)
- riffic 13y agoThe twitter namespace is property of Twitter alone. It's cute that there are those who think the "owners" of these names would be each user.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- scintill76 13y agoWell, OK, but a certain level of assured "ownership" is beneficial to everybody. Twitter handles, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, etc., would not be very useful if Twitter, ISP, postal service, telcos, etc. frequently exercised the right to deny access to previous users at any time. Seeing how easily GoDaddy handed over the domain, it seems one can't even own a domain properly, and that is supposed to be a lot closer to an "ownership" right than Twitter handles.
- riffic 13y agoThe difference between some of those and twitter's namespace is that Twitter is not a public utility. It is a privately operated company with a defacto monopoly on short status updates (micro blogging). We could look towards email and dns, though, as examples of a more fair distribution of namespace resources. Organizations would do well to investigate what their options are to retain control over their namespace, lest it fall whim to a mishap such as this instance.
- malka 13y agoI really don't understand why people still use goDaddy. i wouldn't recommend it to my arch-ennemy
- hnriot 13y agowhile it clearly doesn't, I wonder though if someone is using twitter so infrequently they would even care what their handle is. It's not like it has any intrinsic value or meaning. Why not just pick a random guid and use that as a handle (like I did) since I don't care one hoot what the handle is as I use twitter for exactly two things. Machine Learning datasets, and following a dozen or so people. I can do that from a guid as effectively as if I had @2600
- mdmarra 13y agoIf someone had a Mercedes and only drove it twice a year, is it OK for someone to steal it?
- harryh 13y agoNo. But I'd feel less bad for that person than someone who drove their Mercedes every day and had it stolen. Also, a Mercedes and a twitter handle (or domain name) aren't exactly the same thing as a twitter handle is a unique owner of a particular pice of the namespace. A better analogy would be an owner of a valuable piece of property who wasn't putting it to good use.
- bushido 13y ago> A better analogy would be an owner of a valuable piece of property who wasn't putting it to good use. So if you were not putting your backyard to good use you would not feel too bad if your neighbors decided to encroach on it?
- harryh 13y agoI think you're deliberately not hearing what I'm saying. Here's a good analogy: Some rich guy buys an amazing house on a beautiful California beachfront. But then never even bothers to stay there because he's got 3 other vacation homes. It just sits there empty all year long. Would it be ok for someone to break in and start living there? No, of course not. But you do have to kind of dislike that guy right? If he doesn't want to use this limited and valuable resource he should maybe give it up so someone else can get good use out of it.
- holyavengerone 13y agoSo if I don't really use my $50k collection car, it's as bad if it gets stolen?
- madiator 13y agoTo use Twitter, one does not have to tweet.
- harryh 13y agoIf you're not interested in creating tweets then you don't really need to be taking up such a valuable piece of the namespace.
- maxerickson 13y agoWhy is it valuable? What amazing things are other single character handles being used for? Or is it just vaguely notable?
- harryh 13y agoApparently (according to the author of this blog post) it's worth 50k. That's at least moderately valuable. shrug
- zz9pza 13y agoharry works around people that pine for vanity usernames. vanity = big deal in those circles. who knows why. not bad in itself. places like foursquare, people know people at twitter. if your outside the valley twitter won't even help you when the autosuspender mistakenly pops your account but valley/connected people call an investor or executive and get their vanity handle in hours. seen it happen twice. it's all who you know and never forget it. when i dealt with twitter support as a normal the disparity between insider service and official was pretty amazing. they are the worst of the valley backscratchers. bet they would have taken @n if the right person called. what would you do, sue?
- harryh 13y agoTwitter never would have taken @n if the right person called. Up until maybe 18-24 months ago if you knew the right folks you could generally get an inactive account released but even that is pretty much off the table at this point. All industries have insiders. In some you can get a twitter handle, in others hard to get concert tickets, in others I bet it's early access to the latest in air ventilation equipment. It's not malicious. It's just personal relationships.
- timhaines 13y agoHe tweeted pretty heavily previously. Was one of the small team who made @echofon. He'd reduced his tweeting, but was still using the account in other ways.
- nicolethenerd 13y agoTwitter's official policy is that an account becomes inactive after 6 months - at that point, they reserve the right to release the account (in practice they rarely do this, though - there isn't an automated job releasing inactive accounts or anything) https://support.twitter.com/articles/15362-inactive-account-policy https://support.twitter.com/articles/15362-inactive-account-... @N (now @N_is_stolen)'s last post was 4 months ago, so he is still technically considered an active user.
- harryh 13y agoActivity doesn't require the creation of a tweet though. There are plenty of active accounts where the users just read.
- monsterix 13y agoNot logging in for months or years at a stretch counts, IMHO.
- unreal37 13y agoNo one said he didn't "log in" for years. You can log in every day and leave no trace.
- unreal37 13y agoAnd there's nothing wrong with "just reading". Plenty of people post 100+ times per day and say nothing interesting at all.
- blueskin_ 13y agoMost of the userbase.
- doubt_me 13y agoThat is what I do. Less than 10 tweets in 3 years and all I do is read other tweets
- 13y ago
- hrabago 13y agoIt depends. I know of several people who have Twitter accounts so they can follow other people, but they don't tweet much (or at all) themselves.
- baby 13y agoBut you can use your twitter account to log into some websites now.
- jrs99 13y agoHe's definitely a squatter. If you own something and you don't use it, you're a squatter. I own an old original Nintendo that I haven't used all year. That's why if someone comes into my house and takes it, it's my own fault.
- chmars 13y agoI tend to disagree: The right of ownership includes to right to use what you own in your own way.
- riffic 13y agoThe ownership of twitter namespace is Twitter's alone, not the user's
- sdk16420 13y agoIIRC, Twitter officially doesn't allow you to sell your handle.
- riffic 13y agoI did not know that but I'm not surprised.
- chmars 13y agoThere's an agreement between Twitter and each user. And depending on the name used, Twitter users have own rights too, trade marks and of course domain names are examples.
- chrisbennet 13y agochmars, I think he was being sarcastic.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- harel 13y ago
- aptwebapps 13y agoIf he was trying to shake down someone who had a legitimate claim to it, yeah. Otherwise he's just a speculator, not a squatter. Or an opportunist maybe.
- dspillett 13y agoNot using something much is not the same as not using it at all, nor is it the same as not planning to use it in future. It doesn't appear that he is trying to sell it, which is the usual behaviour of an account/name squatter. I have several domains that I plan to use for little projects over the coming year (though given my lack of free time right now that may not happen like it didn't last year...). Am I a squatter for having paid for something I intend to use but have not got around to doing anything with yet? A couple of them are password/credentials related, for an example of a squatter talk to the person who owns password.net and sends me unsolicited email regularly trying to get me to offer to buy it as it will "help my brand" (the names I've got are the intended "brand", the generic short name is worth no more to me than standard registration fees - who slaps short names into their address bar instead of using a search engine these days?).
- chris_wot 13y agoNo. A squattor who takes over something that is abandoned or little used. Someone who does the abandoning or little uses the thing they own is the one being squatted upon. Now I reread that, it sounds a little... sexual.