> 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.
Fucking 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.
Because 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.
Please, 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.
“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.
You 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.
Both 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.
It 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.
i’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.
I 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.
Wildly 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.
The 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.
Exactly, 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.
every investment and activity has tail risks that you have to factor into your decision making, there are always things that can happen outside of your control
In 2007, social media was still the "Wild West" and having expectations one way or another was not a sensible, it was not something you should have gotten involved in if you wanted low tail risks
I don’t understand the relevance or any of those things, nor does the prediction need to include emerald mines.
What should have been on the bingo card is “this company with whom I have no formal agreement might change its terms on a whim and destroy my project”. Even by 2008 you could probably have looked at Facebook apps as an example. I remember some startup for music sharing became the most popular service on there then one day FB changed some integration detail and their business died overnight.
He didn’t wake up 16 years later to finally realize how Twitter operates. Sure at the very start it’s hard to predict this. But through the years/decade seeing how Twitter do this many times, he should have implemented other options a long time ago.
We manage non-unique names in a lot of domains. It'd be a shit-show if given names had to be unique. It'd be acceptable to have an ID in the background that helped regain specificity. (Kind of like social security numbers in the US, though those also notably are not unique.)
Google 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.
On 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.
Are 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.
On 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".)
I 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.
What kind of comparison is this? In most modern countries, banking isn't a platform in the same sense that Twitter is, and despite large issues over the last few decades, they are still regulated by the government(s) they operate in.
I 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.
Meh. 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.
Can 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.
Sorry, 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.
Here 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.
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.
Eh fine if the original reply is not getting reinstated I'll repost it:
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It’s fine in the sense that Musk owns Twitter/X and can do whatever he likes with it. It’s a bit stupid in my opinion (I don’t know if they really gain much by having @music vs @twittermusic) but there have been plenty more stupid things going on over there and the former owner is apparently a fan of Elon so it’s not really worth losing any sleep over.
The right-wing guy recently posting child porn and getting personally reinstated by Elon, for example, was another one of those “he owns it and can do what he likes” issues … but one that’s far more troubling.
I would not like that, but also understand how purchased real property, which has a long history dating thousands of years and a whole legal system and framework on point getting into even minutiae (Rule Against Perpetuities anyone?) is different than squatting on a generic username on someone’s new tech platform for free.
In the former case, I would usually have legal recourse, unless this is a dystopian future where Twitter can leverage eminent domain.
As 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.
It'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"?
This 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.
Someone, 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".
That'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.
Fact 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".
How 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)
By that logic, Uber and Instagram and WhatsApp should not have been started, as the iOS App Store is unequivocally "someone else's land", and these services could only exist as native apps.
> At this point it's all but inconceivable that those would be removed from the app servers, iOS or Android.
Not at all: one could see a future where any of those companies become Uber rivals - they're both researching autonomous vehicles. When that comes, one incident at Uber and its reason enough to expel them.
You can build on someone’s land, but you’d be wise to be ready to move as soon as it becomes necessary. Essentially you are a nomad, reconfiguring your business to changing conditions, accepting that things will change over time.
You used to not be able to access the camera or camera roll from webapps on iOS. The only way to take or upload photos was with a native app. The file upload input control on websites simply did not work on an iPhone.
This is a relatively recent development. I'm fairly convinced it didn't happen sooner in an anticompetitive move to promote native apps over the open web. (Same with web push notifications and a million other tiny things.)
Instagram did not and could not have had a webapp in those days (which is a majority of the time Instagram has existed).
99% of people primarily use Instagram to view content. I used to use their site to do that. Instagram broke that a little while ago (I assume to force people to download the app).
Ironically, given your conspiracy theory, it was Meta that broke Instagram for the web.
Kind 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?
Are 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.
To go back: the problem with your analogy is that it's not about the land, it's about the house.
ThePirateBay didn't build their solution on the premise that they would have an irrevocable right to their domain name. If the land owner decided to take back the land (like they did, many times) TPB could simply take their things and move elsewhere (like they did, many times).
I don't think I ever saw someone from TPB saying "oh, they took our domain, it's so unfair!", instead what I hear them saying is "we are building magnet-links and a bunch of redundant proxies so that our service continues to exist even if we lose all the domains we have.
In case of domain registries there is a contract with clear terms.
In case of twitter handle or other free services there is no consideration on user's side so there is no binding contract, therefore the service could be revoked at any time.
It’s not a good excuse to not build anything, but quite a good excuse to not build on what others own in such a way that you’re entirely reliant on them. Yes, unless you’re self-hosting your product on a solar-powered server via community-owned networks, you’re going to be beholden to someone, and often that’s multiple parties. But that’s not the same as being completely beholden.
Many businesses start with single points of failure. The goal is to get enough money to where this is not true, but they all start this way. Ultimately the goal is managing risk, and that often means not building out your own data center as the first thing you do.
This, more increasingly, doesn’t mean building out your own data center. Often this just means you can deploy services to multiple platforms without a dramatic or upending burden of effort. I don’t think startups should necessarily burn capital on federation, but startups can at least make engineering decisions and trade-offs to ensure a future livelihood not contingent on single points of failure.
Unless you’re Apple or Google, you’ll have some single points of failure. But that’s not the same as the livelihood of what you’re setting out to do being reliant on a single vendor for over a decade.
It's a reason to not stop building. You have to start somewhere but you have to stay in that place. That's why you see successful public personalities diversify away from just the platform / schtick that got them started, they know that to succeed long term they need many ways to reach their audience or organize their community.
The 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.
This 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
When 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.
I 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.
People 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.
The 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.
I mean yes Elon doesn’t want to spend money. Whether he has to would be determined by a court, if the handle owners decided to sue for unfair trade practices or the like.
In 2015 twitter changed favorites to likes, but since the username "likes" was taken, the url to view your likes switched from twitter.com/favorites to twitter.com/i/likes (later on they changed it to twitter.com/username/likes)
Guess 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.
It 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.
This 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?
>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.
Because 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...
Authors of books don't call themselves Scifi P. BestAuthor, they market themselves and their books.
First come first served for @music or @movies or @whatever shouldn't really matter if you want to find content you enjoy and want to follow the author for more of the same.
A mandatory random set of numbers at the end of every name is an approach I quite like. Not only does it directly make every name available to 10,000 people, it should reduce the demand for these desirable names in the first place since you have to share them with thousands of other people.
Platforms should also consider accommodations for trademark holders. Most have some sort of program, but it seems to be a mess. If every normal screen name has a numeric code at the end, there's room to give trademark holders a non-numeric name without having to seize a handle from someone else. The spot normally occupied by the numeric code could be replaced with an indication that that account is owned by the trademark holder or with the name of the entity that owns the trademark, to differentiate it from normal accounts and also from any accounts that might hold a similar mark in a different business.
I like that you're making concrete proposals and the append-random-numbers approach is thought-provoking.
Removing the numbers for trademark holders is an imperfect solution though, though, since multiple entities can hold the same mark so long as they are in different markets.
A critical test for trademark violation is "does it cause confusion in the marketplace?" and if nobody confuses Oracle Software with HiSpec Oracle trailer tires or Oracle Lighting, they're all allowed to hold a trademark on "Oracle". But if you're talking about a namespace where "there can be only one", which of the entities who holds a registered trademark wins?
That's why I followed on with the suggestion of replacing the numbers with the owning entity. "Apple|Apple Inc." would be separate from "Apple|Apple Records." Of course, this is complicated when a trademark is owned by different companies in different countries or when a trademark is licensed to a company including the right to advertise with that trademark. An alternative thought I had was replacing the numbers with the business the trademark is in, but plenty of trademarks apply to more than one business and the 'primary' one can change over time.
There are assuredly better solutions, but even an imperfect solution is better than the current state of things. First-come-first-serve with unique per-site screen names just plain sucks.
Beyond making each name available to 10,000 (or more) people, randomizing the numbers puts everyone on a playing field. It’s an elegant solution—and why it’s such a baffling shame that Discord recently abandoned it for the terrible, outmoded “one unique username for everyone” approach.
Yes, I was quite annoyed that Discord decided to abandon their 4-digit numbers. The first place I saw the approach was Battle.net, and was happy to see it when I joined Discord. I'm glad Discord decided to provide the ability to have a separate nickname from your actual handle, but there was no good reason to dump the numbers.
edit: I agree the randomness is important. Without random numbers, the first person to get in will pick "0069".
It 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.
What 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.
Not 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
This is why I was very careful to include "citizen run communications infrastructure". We need public antennas, public access points. Publicly run physical infrastructure.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Ultimately, you're going to depend on other parties behaving in a common interest, whether that's your email provider, your ISP, your registrar, anyone accepting your ip address announcements...
And then you have an endless stream of spam, people knocking on ports, etc. Better to keep things airgapped. All one really needs in life is a cyberdeck utility running on freertos in an MCU. Then you are truly captain of your own ship and own your world of compute.
So only way is to find my own nation state... And get it recognized. As then I can have my on ccTLD. And then only slight issue is staying in power for rest of my life...
>What if Google took your 16 year old email address?
They can take my email address, I'm keeping my emails.
Got a mail client running on several machines for that reason. All hail IMAP.
Notifying all the people I've ever sent an email to of a new address is a quick task with an offline email client.
Changing the email address on all the accounts is a bit of a chore, but that goes with (as you rightfully say) not owning that email address.
Guess one of these days I'll run a mail server just for creating online accounts. It won't even need to send anything, so no worrying about aggressive spam filters. And it can auto-delete everything each day too without harm.
The 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.
I 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.
The 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.
A 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.
I 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.
I 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).
> 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.
There 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.
This 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.
Are 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?
https://eth.limo/ is one attempt of several to map ENS domains to web addressable domains. Ideally all the major browsers will support ENS for domain-to-IP mapping and the issue is solved.
> Of course, you can always use Bitcoin / Ethereum and the Ethereum Name Service which is true, legitimate digital ownership.
Why is this legitimate digital ownership vs other forms? Bitcoin and ETH are stolen all the time, and it’s not recoverable, even if you can prove it rightfully belonged to you.
People are wary of crypto because it’s controlled by a cabal of extraordinarily entrenched early adopters, many of whom established themselves on speculation, grift, and fraud. It’s no better than the centralized banking it purports to supplant, and worse in most measurable regards.
A lot of early people sold, it’s hard to buy and hold when you 10x. Then people in at $1 sell at $10, those buyers sell at $100, those at $1000, and so on. It takes deep, deep conviction to sit on 10000% gains and not sell.
And those people are true believers in the tech, and IMO deserve their riches. Same as anyone who bought FB or AMZN or GOOG at IPO and held until now.
As a separate issue, do the longer term holders pose a threat to the crypto ecosystem? You are so naïve - the traditional economic and banking system is the same! Except for centuries! Do I sound conspiratorial? Well, you said crypto has a “cabal”. Pot meet kettle.
At least in crypto it’s open source, and the addresses and balances are public. A fundamentally more equitable system at its core.
I have no love for the banks. But crypto is open source in name only. The deflationary nature of it ensures that expansion of adoption is exclusively to the enrichment of current holders. It’s a glorified ponzi scheme, posturing behind sham principles of openness and inclusion.
I feel like you are at an inflection point of understanding. The fiat economic system, which has been the global system since the gold standard went away, is a glorified Ponzi scheme! You are so close
Neither is a ponzi scheme, but I think you're both trying to say that each rewards the already rich, which is true.
But replacing one "rich get richer" economic system with another is not an improvement, except for a very few people who might become rich during the transition.
I am using a rhetorical technique to point to the traditional economic system to contrast it with the crypto system, and in this way crypto is at least equally bad (if not (much!) better). That technique is for observers of the thread.
Unfortunately, if you have a problem with “rich get richer”, I believe you are arguing against fundamental requirement of technological improvement.
It takes patience to do anything of value. Anything. Learning a skill, mastering a job, earning the trust of your peers, becoming a leader - this requires time, dedication, and discipline. A government cannot simply mandate that everyone can read, or everyone can be rich for that matter.
All risk has tradeoff. It takes those with more stuff in order to risk enough stuff to subsidize a lot of experiments, some of which will bear fruit. I would argue that even in the smallest communities, with everyone starting equal, very soon some will have more and some have less. This is simply human nature.
> It takes patience to do anything of value. Anything. Learning a skill, mastering a job, earning the trust of your peers, becoming a leader
I don't have a problem with "the hard working get richer", as in your examples. I have a problem with the way crypto would reward people for simply owning it as they did nothing.
It sounds like you have a problem with property in general. If I bought equities, or bonds, or a house, and sat on them for years, I would be rewarded for “doing nothing”. I took risk and was rewarded.
A deflationary currency does not encourage you took take risk. In fact the complete opposite, it's not quite the same a buying a house (not that there is anything particularly positive about growth in real estate prices outpacing inflation).
> It sounds like you have a problem with property in general
It sounds like you have a problem with economic growth and increasing productivity in general
Was an objectively awful system. The 19th century economy was on a permanent boom and bust cycle alternating between severe inflation and deflation. 2009, let alone what has happened over the last few years would've been very mild by gold standard standards.
> I feel like you are at an inflection point of understanding
It's funny that the edgy people who are so excited about the gold standard/bitcoin/deflation are so clueless about economic history.
Replace "digital platform" with the Internet and it sounds like a terrible dystopia. Just because the policies existed doesn't make it right. What next? @POTUS is claimed by X and is put up for bidding to the highest bidder.
That's true of literally everything and yet we have figured out in other spheres how to have fair dealings, and have things like leases, and insurance, and other fair ways of working together when dealing with things owned by other people. As people build businesses on these platforms it is completely necessary that standards and duties between these parties be formalized, predictable, and non-capricious.
No I have a constitutional right to the property I own, except in exceptional circumstances. Your Twitter handle is not land, nor a physical object in your house, and the laws we have won’t protect you if the contract says you can’t own it.
Cryptocurrency is simply a different thing in terms of digital ownership. It’s not the same as other digital things.
I 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.
My 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.
This 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.
I 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.
One 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.
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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.
What 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.
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