X user quits paying for Twitter Blue to protest X commandeering his account.

Archived version: https://archive.li/Yg8r8

My favorite part:

But while his reaction the day after learning that X was commandeering his handle was extreme frustration, Vaught told Ars that the platform will remain his primary form of social media.

“it’s highly annoying, but Twitter is still my preferred social media,” Vaught said. “That’s how I communicate and learn my news about what’s going on. Nothing else compares.”

His only “minor protest” to X’s action, he said, was to cancel his Twitter Blue subscription.

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.

  • Devccoon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    71·
    1 year ago

    It’s like the CEO of Reddit editing users’ comments. Once you’ve opened this can of worms, you can’t exactly close it again.

    Outside of expected circumstances like long-term inactivity or having snuck an inappropriate username past automatic censors, being forced to forfeit your handle is simply unspeakable on social media platforms. Your identity can be straight-up stolen, or altered, without forewarning, for any reason, and you have no recourse at all. And the guy deciding who gets screwed over like this is a rich, entitled right-wing monster who blatantly hurts others if he~~ thinks it might align with his politics somehow~~ wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and you’re today’s punching bag, frankly.

    • R00bot@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      Idk why he couldn’t have just created a new @ equivalent for his X accounts or whatever he’s doing. A $ sign would work, or a +, -, *, !, anything really. If he’s trying to make these be the “official” accounts then they don’t need to use the same @ symbol.

      • pitninja@lemmy.pit.ninjaEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        That would require Musk to either be intelligent or willing to listen to people who are and I’m unconvinced he’s either.

        • R00bot@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          I think the real problem is that Twitter’s account URLs are like twitter.com/username. They haven’t given themselves any wiggle room to mess with stuff like this. This is why most other sites have URLs like twitter.com/user/username, so then they can mess around with various other pages that don’t eat into their available usernames (another interesting quirk of this is that there cannot be a user on twitter with the username “home”, because twitter.com/home is the home feed). If they want to change it now it’ll break every linked account across the internet.

          • pitninja@lemmy.pit.ninjaEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I don’t know if that’s as big a problem as you think. Assuming they have not previously allowed special characters at the beginning of Twitter handles (I don’t know whether they had the foresight to do this), they could use a character that was disallowed previously and is a legal character in URLs and then include that special character in the URL path so that it would be twitter.com/~user/ or whatever. This would only be applicable to new official accounts and would not break URLs for existing users.