this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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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.

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[–] C3D 183 points 1 year ago

The poor guy has stockholm syndrome for Twitter and Musk

[–] StringPotatoTheory 122 points 1 year ago

he's pissed that Elon took his handle but not that pissed because he's still on the platform (cancelled his twitter blue, wowwww great protest), he still loves Elon, and calls X "Twitter" 😭 this is wild

[–] Devccoon 117 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] whatsarefoogee 26 points 1 year ago

Because he wants to be the original, damn it!

"But mom, I want to be a Tesla founder!"

"You weren't there when Tesla was founded"

"I want it anyway, waaaah!".

He has the emotional maturity of a spoiled child. Once you see it, everything he does makes 10x more sense.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] User_4272894 10 points 1 year ago

Love the idea of Twitter advertisers becoming $username, !username for public figures, and +username for Twitter blue subscribers. It also means it would be super easy for people to write scripts to filter out certain users.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

$ is already used for stock tickets and such. For example $AAPL

[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago

what a dumb person. he deserves to lick boot.

[–] TwoGems 59 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"This company did a bad unethical thing to me but by golly, I think I'll stay"

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

It's crazy to me that Musk isn't throwing them a couple thousand dollars for their trouble. They've only commandeered a few accounts, it's like .0001% of their balance sheet.

[–] SlopppyEngineer 47 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If people actually follow Musk when he gets to Mars, that's going to be their planetary overlord. He'll just take their oxygen and they'll thank him.

[–] Hildegarde 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

No way he ever gets people to mars.

[–] breakingcups 21 points 1 year ago

He'll rename Mars to Z before he gets there. When they inevitably won't get there, he'll declare that their craft is actually the thing called Z.

[–] SlopppyEngineer 4 points 1 year ago

So that's why he started that Optimus robot project. It's going to turn out like Westworld, isn't it?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Apparently it’s just called Xygen™ when on Mars.

[–] assassin_aragorn 1 points 1 year ago

"10x the cost for a tenth of the oxygen as normal air!"

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago

Beatings will continue until morale improves

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is the best summary I could come up with:


"16 years ago, I created @music and have been running it ever since," Jeremy Vaught, director of engineering at the nonprofit Life Happens, posted on X.

But Vaught never had the time to focus on leveraging the @music audience, only ever benefiting from the account when companies occasionally sent him free perks like headphones in trade for promotions.

Vaught said he was never interested because he knew that selling his handle violated Twitter's terms of service, and he figured there was more value in keeping the account.

To "minimize any inconvenience" from having his account handle taken away, X defaulted to changing Vaught's username to @musicfan, which he described as "probably the least worst" alternative the platform suggested.

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.

"Twitter's not dead to me at this point," Vaught told Ars, even if "it's a super huge bummer" to lose the @music account.


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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Lol he even did just hold it only to sell it

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago

Meh. Super pissed but doing nothing about it and staying on the platform anyway == I guess they really weren't that pissed. Not even at least leaving just sounds like absolute compliance here.

[–] mlg 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"...Nothing else compares."

My dude never seen a forum in his life

[–] ashok36 1 points 1 year ago

The guy is a software engineer that was super into Second Life. I'm guessing he's seen his share of forums.

[–] Ab_intra 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That is some integrity right there. Wow. /s

[–] Desistance 19 points 1 year ago

LOL just like a redditor.

[–] Haha 16 points 1 year ago

Lmao so pissed that he cancelled his subscription wowwww

[–] FireWire400 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Long-term plan? I'm more than convinced that most of Musky's decisions are made on the spot, during bathroom brakes presumably

[–] UnaSolaEstrellaLibre 10 points 1 year ago

Where's that gif of Oprah shrugging like she knew this was expected

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Sucks to be him I guess. Stop using "X"

[–] tallwookie 3 points 1 year ago

oh no!

anyway...