I’m trying to sign up to Twitter but all the usernames I can think of are taken. Annoyingly, they’re generally not taken by people with active accounts. I’ve searched for well over a dozen usernames (to see if they’re already taken) and, with precisely one exception, all of them belong to accounts that either (a) are permanently suspended, or (b) belong to people who signed up in 2008, made three tweets and then buggered off forever.
I get that Twitter might not want to free up the usernames of all inactive accounts. For instance, some will belong to people who’ve died and whose accounts may serve as a sort of memorial. But where’s the harm in deleting the usernames of suspended accounts, or accounts that were never used in the first place?
Does Twitter actually have a good reason for keeping these accounts? Or is it just that they can’t be bothered to do the necessary housekeeping?
Yeah, but why apply that policy to suspended accounts? Suspended account usernames can’t be sold. I’m no coder, but I can’t imagine it’d be that difficult for Twitter to write some kind of program that’d identify and delete all permanently suspended accounts. That alone would free up an enormous number of usernames.
Seems like a lot of work for Twitter, for very little benefit for Twitter. The intersection of people who will be active enough on Twitter to create revenue and people who are going to leave because they couldn’t get a username that was already taken, but which belongs to an account it would arguably be fine to memoryhole will be vanishingly small.
Chaos is practically an understatement. No one who knows anything about computers would ever consider assigning an old user name to a different person. The problems that this would cause are a nightmare.
Phone numbers used to be connected with particular locations (houses) or particular devices, so it was easy to understand that someone new had that house or someone new had that device. User names have been understood as names - something that rarely changes, and almost never transfers to someone else.
But Twitter gives users the option to change their usernames, and when they do the old one immediately goes back into circulation and can be used by anyone else. How come that doesn’t cause chaos?
Yeah, but - and I know this is incredibly lame and the absolute epitome of a First World Problem - there aren’t that many good usernames, y’know? Like, I could sign up as @buttscratcher69_420 or whatever, but I’d rather have something cool like, I dunno, @VitoCorleone or something. But I can’t have @VitoCorleone because some guy who got suspended about 15 years ago already picked it. It just grinds my gears
I am quite dubious at the idea that reusing retired usernames is some huge problem. And there is a benefit: it clears up the database and can allow people to get the name they want, which can be a deciding factor in some cases on whether they join you or your competitor. The downsides are generally mitigated just by having a gap before retired names become available.
But force retiring accounts is a big deal that is usually only done sparingly, with plenty of warning. You want to be absolutely sure it is not in use.
And, yes, you can’t tell by how many tweets someone has made if they use the account. And freeing up banned accounts allows for easy ban evasion.
What about other social mediae? Do they allow transfer of user names?
I’m thinking of Gmail here. I recently created a Gmail account and tried to use my first-initial-last-name and it’s very rare last name. But someone already has that Gmail account. If user names can be transfered, I suppose someone could have camped on the name expecting me to eventually contact them to buy it. Probably just a cousin I don’t know about, though.
The user’s login name is just one aspect of their Twitter identity. When you change your Twitter username name from JohnSmith to BillJones, everything that JohnSmith ever wrote is now labeled as having been being written by BillJones. Anyone who has a 5 year old link to some ancient pearl of your wisdom will find the link still works. But it now says BillJones wrote those words 5 years ago.
The reason that works is that internally your real identity is Twitter User #123456789012. That number can never change and ties all your life’s work together. And all your links. Whether the human-readable name for User #123456789012 is JohnSmith or BillJones right now doesn’t matter to the computer as long as it puts the right (AKA “current”) name on the webpage when it displays the work it found by your eternal user number.
That is a very, very different thing from human A using JohnSmith for a few years, abandoning Twitter, then Twitter allowing Human B to claim the same name as a different human. That could work if Twitter was willing to throw away all of Human A’s work forever and invalidate forever any and all links that may exist anywhere to Human A’s work. If they’re not willing to do that, then what human name should they attach to A’s work? It can’t be JohnSmith anymore because that’s now you.
This XKCD is almost on point. And the mouseover text is exactly on point:
For systems with a functionally infinite lifespan, only the very insightful and luckiest of early adopters will get anything close to a good username.
Interestingly enough, I wanted to secure the username “Dimestorenovel” as an account for my story, Dimestore Novel. It was taken, however, by someone who tweeted a few times in 2013. I got as far as finding the person who owned the account, but before I could ask her about it Twitter deleted it for inactivity. I was then able to set up a new account with that username and have have been happily posting my art there ever since.
Because of this, I’m having a hard time accepting the premise that there are lots of ancient usernames from 2008 that are still floating around taken but never used, and in fact Twitter’s policy states that inactive accounts may be deleted. So like AlsoNamedBort said, accounts that seem inactive are probably active, just not tweeting.
Though here, it’s even more necessary, because Discourse (for some reason) uses the username as primary identifier, instead of an ID number like every professionally-designed system on the Net.
