this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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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.
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.
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.
That would require Musk to either be intelligent or willing to listen to people who are and I'm unconvinced he's either.
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.
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.
Good point actually.
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.
$ is already used for stock tickets and such. For example $AAPL