[HN Gopher] X is selling existing users' handles
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X is selling existing users' handles
I've been on Twitter since 2007 as @hac. In recent years I didn't
sign in frequently, then last week I saw my handle show up on the
new X Handles marketplace. It seems the account now belongs to X,
and because I had a "rare handle" I can't even buy it back. From
what I can tell, they will wait for some time and then auction the
handle for around $100k. Losing your account is frustrating.
Having it sold to someone else doesn't feel right. Of course,
there is no warning when it happens. All you can do to prevent it
is sign in every 30 days and read all changes to the TOS.
Author : hac
Score : 90 points
Date : 2026-03-11 20:11 UTC (2 hours ago)
| stephenr wrote:
| Or congratulate yourself on being divested long enough that they
| don't think you're coming back?
| ronsor wrote:
| I think people sitting on a handle for 10-20 years without active
| use is annoying, so I'm fine with them taking them from dormant
| accounts. I think the selling is sketchy though.
| arcfour wrote:
| It's less sketchy than third party underground sites, though,
| which is the alternative.
| quirk wrote:
| Came here to say this.
| imglorp wrote:
| Hey it's a revenue stream. I guess it's like selling domain
| names? Better than more ads maybe? Better than selling your
| data? Who are we kidding, they'll do all of the above.
| mingus88 wrote:
| You'd probably feel differently if you paid $44 Billion for the
| platform
|
| Can you even imagine?
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| According to the X app:
|
| - the user @hac has existed since 2008
|
| - since then, it has posted 5 tweets totalling 14 words
|
| - it does not follow any accounts
|
| Is this your account, or is this a different account that
| recently took over the @hac username?
| al_borland wrote:
| Dormant account reuse should be ok, assuming proper notice is
| given. Though 30 days is far too strict. A life event could leave
| someone offline for a month.
|
| Selling I have an issue with, especially the arbitrary selling of
| "rare" handles. This leaves normal users stuck with junk names
| and encourages Twitter to be even more of a place for corporate
| communication above all else.
| dmix wrote:
| I'd imagine the 30 days just the TOS, if they sell a username
| that has been active (posting, replying) in the past 6 months
| then it'd be a big deal for sure. It's not clear when OP last
| used his account but I'd imagine the people doing auctions look
| to see if they post or interact at all, not just login once in
| a while. X should probably clarify this.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > if they sell a username that has been active (posting,
| replying) in the past 6 months then it'd be a big deal for
| sure.
|
| What about this scenario:
|
| If you register a domain name, a bot registers a related
| handle/name/brand pretty quick if you do not.
|
| So, you register a twitter handle to preserve your brand
| identity right after registering a new domain.
|
| You don't check it for 6 months.
|
| Is it OK for Twitter to sell that handle?
| dmix wrote:
| If you don't pay for a domain name you could lose it too.
|
| If I signed up for a free social media account hosted by
| another company and neither logged in or posted on it for a
| year then it got autodeleted for inactivity, I wouldn't
| really feel I had a particularly strong claim to it.
| echoangle wrote:
| If your domain is used as a brand identity, you should
| register it as a trademark and sue anyone who uses your
| brand identity as a twitter handle.
| consumer451 wrote:
| I'm thinking more like solo founder territory here. And
| apparently, it can be as short as 30 days?
| wrs wrote:
| You're gonna be really unhappy with how domain name registrars
| work, then.
| al_borland wrote:
| I am very unhappy with domain name registrars for the same
| reasons. This is where most of my options on the topic were
| born.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| Heroku just gave me a 30 day warning for being inactive and
| threatened to delete all my data if I don't log in within the
| next 30 days.
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| I think that dormant accounts, where someone has not logged in
| for, say, 2 years, does not post, does not engage, should be
| repurposed - with given notice. It's kind of the equivalent of
| cybersquatting. Also, technically, a platform is within its right
| to do this. I think the better course of action is to utilize the
| account. Gmail has made this clear that if you don't log into an
| account after some time they will repurpose it.
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| I disagree, there are security implications if an account was
| previously linked to someone but then it's repurposed allowing
| for fraudulent social engineering use to occur. It's like as if
| Gmail gave your email to someone else after a while. They don't
| because it's a bad idea.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Are you aware that domains can be exchanged? And emails can
| be sent from domains?
| gdulli wrote:
| It gets lost in the distracting partisan bickering over Musk/etc,
| but Twitter has gotten hostile and crappy in many ways like this
| that have nothing to do with politics. Imagine how much more
| hostile this action would have seemed in 2010. But now, people
| put up with it.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Not really sure how much people really even put up with it. I
| just went to Bluesky once I got an invite, and I've generally
| noticed my cohorts migrating there over time too. Sure, some
| content isn't there, but a smaller social media better than
| beating your head against the wall.
| davidw wrote:
| As a 50 year old, I can recall a lengthy stretch of time in the
| US when lamenting the lack of a "white homeland" would not be
| considered "partisan", but extremely fringe speech that the
| mainstream would mostly shun.
| gdulli wrote:
| Twitter is certainly terrible for those reasons as well.
| Terrible people are excusing apolitical enshittification
| because they're thankful the Overton window has been pushed
| down to where they live in the bottom of the barrel. You just
| can't say the latter part too loudly here because there's
| sufficient sympathy and affinity for it.
| surround wrote:
| Your posts: https://twiiit.com/hac
|
| 2020 - "Ping"
|
| 2021 - "Pong"
|
| 2023 - "Boop."
|
| 2023 - "Bleep"
|
| 2023 - "will inventing new technology be the solution to our
| problems?"
| jauco wrote:
| I think that account is a work of art and should have been kept
| as digital heritage.
|
| I mean: ping and then a year later pong? Priceless.
| arcfour wrote:
| I can't believe X would take back the account of such an active
| and valued member of the community who is clearly not squatting
| on the name or anything.
| bccdee wrote:
| Squatting is something you do to someone else's property. It
| implies that there is someone else out there with a more
| legitimate claim to the @hac handle, which there isn't. It's
| not as if we're talking about @google or something.
|
| If I stole your house and sold it because I didn't think you
| were using it properly, that would clearly be illegitimate. I
| don't see why the rules change when we talk about someone's
| twitter handle. Nobody _needs_ @hac. X merely wants it and
| has the power to take it.
| arcfour wrote:
| But you don't own it. X does. It's their service, they are
| free to apportion handles as they see fit. It is nothing
| like a house where you have an actual ownership claim
| through the deed.
| Krasnol wrote:
| This "ownership" or rather "identification" is a
| significant part of the service though.
|
| It wouldn't have been so successful if everybody be
| called "Anonymous" meaning that they wouldn't be able to
| make money with it.
|
| They've started to take this away now. Today it's some
| account with obviously few words. Tomorrow it might be
| one with wrong words. What you counted as value is
| nothing. It might be lost tomorrow, so why bother?
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| can we please not play stupid. obviously you don't
| legally own it. but there's something of a grand social
| contract that keeps the concept of accounts on websites
| working, that literally all of the global internet has
| followed for decades. it is absolutely _insane_ to
| normalize yanking people 's accounts. why would you ever
| want to use a website where you can lose access to
| everything you have because someone else decided they
| want your account? for public figures, imagine how much
| reputational damage can be done by letting some rando buy
| your account? i think reclamation of unused years-old
| handles is one thing and maybe fair game, especially for
| things lower-importance and with less longevity than
| twitter, but _selling_ them goes beyond the pale and
| incentivizes perverse and destructive behaviour from the
| "owners" of your account
|
| then i'm sure we'll get to the trite "just don't use
| twitter" argument, but for anyone with a presence online
| (artists, open-source developers, game studios,
| journalists, any kind of business at all, etc. etc.)
| that's essentially playing life with a handicap. twitter
| is a piece of infrastructure used by a thousand millions
| of people, with a compounding network effect that makes
| it impossible for alternatives to gain real traction
| because viewers go where the content is and content goes
| where the viewers are. it should, ideally, not be allowed
| to be enshittified to this degree. after achieving a
| certain degree of global monopolization, "just use
| something else" fails to be a working solution
| nomel wrote:
| > but there's something of a grand social contract that
| keeps the concept of accounts on websites working
|
| no there's not. this is complete and utter fiction. the
| things that keep it working are _ads_ and _normal users_
| putting their eye in front of them, and the tos to make
| any silly claims of "social contracts" legally and
| absolutely moot.
| markstos wrote:
| X already owned it.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Since when do you "own" social media handles? Maybe you
| should, but that's not reflected in the laws of our
| countries or the policies of these platforms. They own your
| presence, your content, and your reach. This is our
| "solution" to self-publishing. Do you want change? Advocate
| for it.
|
| Of course, if you advocate for a system with no equivalent
| to eminent domain you'll quickly discover why the rule
| exists.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| People have accounts and never post. Since X makes it
| mandatory to be signed in to read anything on the site
| meaningfully, there would be millions of such accounts with
| limited post history. And that doesn't even include the fact
| that people sometimes go away from a platform for months for
| a variety of reasons.
| conception wrote:
| People can use Twitter actively and not post. That's not really
| a reason to take someone's handle away.
| fwn wrote:
| The obvious reason is, of course, money.
|
| Since rare handles can generate high prices and are returned
| to auction once the buyer fails to meet their obligations,
| Twitter has a strong incentive to increase the number of
| handles in its auction pool.
|
| The relevant product manager has probably ranked existing
| attractive handles according to their expected
| mobilisation/outrage potential and started confiscating
| handles from the bottom of that list.
|
| This is probably also why you won't be notified about their
| auction of your handle, even though you'll receive email
| alerts for irrelevant stuff all the time. The process looks
| designed to be stealthy.
|
| Money really is the trivial Occam's razor explanation here.
| lm28469 wrote:
| This is unironically deeper than 90% of what's expressed on
| this platform
| pupppet wrote:
| So if you sign-up just to be able to read Twitter's gate-kept
| content you should assume they can pull the rug out from under
| you?
| throwa356262 wrote:
| Imagine this: you are hit by a car, spend 4 weeks in coma.
|
| Wake up and can't even post one of those cool hospital selfies
| because Elon really needed that $100K...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| https://handles.x.com/
| lanewinfield wrote:
| who wants to screenshot what's on the other side because I sure
| as hell am not paying to see it!
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Alt: https://help.x.com/en/using-x/x-handle-marketplace
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| It's a drag for sure, but, what were you doing/going to do with
| it? You almost never posted, and when you did, it didn't
| contribute to anything.
|
| If I owned a site like X, I'd want some way to reclaim user names
| in cases like these. I don't doubt X is sneaky or gross about it,
| but it's a reasonable need too.
|
| Putting the name on a marketplace is weird. I'd simply free it up
| if it was my platform, and send a note to the original owner
| explaining what happened. Though I'd send warnings as well.
|
| Something like 'Hey, you haven't [met an engagement metric] for
| [n period of time]. We're going to shut down your account to make
| space for other people'. People could game this, sure, but I
| suspect it would be better than what happened to you.
| foogazi wrote:
| > but it's a reasonable need too. > Putting the name on a
| marketplace is weird.
|
| These two ideas are in direct contradiction to each other.
|
| Why would a site care about vanity handles if not to monetize
| them ?
| atmavatar wrote:
| > but it's a reasonable need too.
|
| Why?
|
| User names are for all practical purposes infinite: merely
| allowing 10 character alphanumeric usernames already gets you
| into the quadrillions, nearly enough for every person on the
| planet to claim a million unique usernames.
|
| The username in question, while short, doesn't seem to have any
| inherent value, as it does not appear to be a valid word in any
| language, and the most common acronym expansion for it (Home
| Access Center) is too generic to be particularly useful as an
| identifier such that anyone but the original user would fight
| for its use.
| pohl wrote:
| The vast majority of users on every forum in Internet history,
| from Usenet to slashdot to Twitter and beyond, have always been
| lurkers: people who almost exclusively read. They are essential
| to the vitality of the forums but they are invisible,
| proverbial dark matter. They do not deserve to be treated as
| less than. But I don't exactly want to stop X from shooting
| themselves in the foot for the umteenth time.
| nunobrito wrote:
| That is what I like about NOSTR.
|
| Your keys == Your account
|
| It is about time to stop having identities tied to companies.
| segmondy wrote:
| I see lots of people defending this. What if the owner doesn't
| post, but reads and uses DM? What if they post the delete their
| posts when it gets old? Like Michael Burry?
| seydor wrote:
| use another handle. It's not really something worth defending,
| but are twitter handles even precious? some of the biggest
| institutions have cryptic/unrecognizable handles
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| But why should they have to use another handle just because
| someone wants it? Your handle is your online identity, and
| some people have built up theirs around it. Not everyone just
| chooses random strings for each service they use.
|
| Of course, I'm only saying this for active accounts. If
| you've been inactive for a reasonable amount of time, sure,
| let someone else have it.
| delichon wrote:
| > but are twitter handles even precious?
|
| >>> From what I can tell, they will wait for some time and
| then auction the handle for around $100k.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Begone, squatter
| anonymousiam wrote:
| I was an early adopter on many platforms, and used the same three
| letter handle on each. I've had the same thing happen to me, even
| with an account that was being actively used. There's nothing
| that you can do about it. It's their platform and they can grab
| your handle if they want it.
| cdrnsf wrote:
| It's someone else's (a terrible someone's) platform. Nobody owns
| their handles.
| xrd wrote:
| My 3 letter handle (xrd) is a cryptocurrency. I get all kinds of
| @ spam where people shilling a cryptocurrency tag me, assuming
| I'm associated. I really wish I could move the markets and make a
| quick buck somehow.
|
| I wish Elon would give me a way to sell it before they steal it.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| > I wish Elon would give me a way to sell it before they steal
| it.
|
| Just put it online. Maybe use an escrow service. What's
| stopping you?
| xrd wrote:
| I just did a search, and the second link is escrotrust.com.
| But, the SSL cert is bad. This all looks a bit shady to me.
| puppycodes wrote:
| Yeah if only we could really own anything online, unfortunately
| its basically all rented.
|
| This is what excited me about distributed technologies but
| fighting capitalism is hard.
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