X is selling existing users' handles

86•hac•2h ago

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.

Comments

stephenr•2h ago

Or congratulate yourself on being divested long enough that they don't think you're coming back?

ronsor•1h ago

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•1h ago

It's less sketchy than third party underground sites, though, which is the alternative.

quirk•1h ago

Came here to say this.

imglorp•1h ago

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•19m ago

You’d probably feel differently if you paid $44 Billion for the platform

Can you even imagine?

rahimnathwani•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

> 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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•7m ago

I'm thinking more like solo founder territory here. And apparently, it can be as short as 30 days?

wrs•1h ago

You're gonna be really unhappy with how domain name registrars work, then.

al_borland•12m ago

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•34m ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

Are you aware that domains can be exchanged? And emails can be sent from domains?

gdulli•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•44m ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•4m ago

> 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•1h ago

X already owned it.

idle_zealot•1h ago

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•37m ago

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•58m ago

People can use Twitter actively and not post. That’s not really a reason to take someone’s handle away.

fwn•34m ago

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 also why you won't be notified about the process, even though you'll receive email alerts for irrelevant stuff like every new IP address that logs into your account. It is designed to be stealthy.

Money really is the trivial Occam's razor explanation here.

lm28469•53m ago

This is unironically deeper than 90% of what's expressed on this platform

pupppet•38m ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

https://handles.x.com/

lanewinfield•1h ago

who wants to screenshot what's on the other side because I sure as hell am not paying to see it!

ChrisArchitect•1h ago

Alt: https://help.x.com/en/using-x/x-handle-marketplace

steve_adams_86•1h ago

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•1h ago

> 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•1h ago

> 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•1m ago

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 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•1h ago

That is what I like about NOSTR.

Your keys == Your account

It is about time to stop having identities tied to companies.

segmondy•1h ago

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•54m ago

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•47m ago

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•8m ago

> 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•1h ago

Begone, squatter

anonymousiam•1h ago

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•1h ago

It's someone else's (a terrible someone's) platform. Nobody owns their handles.

xrd•1h ago

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•1h ago

> 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•53m ago

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•25m ago

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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X is selling existing users' handles

Comments

Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

Temporal: A nine-year journey to fix time in JavaScript

Many SWE-bench-Passing PRs would not be merged

Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web

Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS

Google closes deal to acquire Wiz

Personal Computer by Perplexity

The MacBook Neo

Meticulous (YC S21) is hiring to redefine software dev

BitNet: 100B Param 1-Bit model for local CPUs

Entities enabling scientific fraud at scale (2025)

I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years

Show HN: Klaus – OpenClaw on a VM, batteries included

5,200 holes carved into a Peruvian mountain left by an ancient economy

AI productivity gains are 10%, not 10x

I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

Physicist Astrid Eichhorn is a leader in the field of asymptotic safety

How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

Can the Dictionary Keep Up?

Show HN: Open-source browser for AI agents

Launch HN: Prism (YC X25) – Workspace and API to generate and edit videos

Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

Show HN: Satellite imagery object detection using text prompts

Launch HN: Sentrial (YC W26) – Catch AI agent failures before your users do

What Is a Tort?

Show HN: Vanilla JavaScript refinery simulator built to explain job to my kids

Fungal Electronics (2021)

The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

Building a TB-303 from Scratch