Jeremy Vaught spent 16 years to build @music on Twitter, then X took it away
syzito.xyz
syzito.xyz
I think the move should have been, if one were going to start on Twitter, to slowly funnel the largest possible portion of their 11M followers to their own external site, or collaborated with I don’t know Spotify to funnel people there for cash.
In 2007, the housing market hadn’t crashed. George W Goddamn Bush was President. The Web seemed wide open for the taking, and scrappy startups seemed like fun places to share your life or your words or whatever. Vine was still more than half a decade away from being invented. Apple’s market cap was $151B.
That's true for anything that relies on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, ...
You should always have a plan: what's the risk that X company terminates our account, what would the consequences be, and what do we do in that case.
In 2007, social media was still the "Wild West" and having expectations one way or another was not a sensible, it was not something you should have gotten involved in if you wanted low tail risks
What should have been on the bingo card is “this company with whom I have no formal agreement might change its terms on a whim and destroy my project”. Even by 2008 you could probably have looked at Facebook apps as an example. I remember some startup for music sharing became the most popular service on there then one day FB changed some integration detail and their business died overnight.
At first Twitter seemed to want to be a platform - something for others to build on.
Twitter clearly does not want to be a platform. It wants large corporate customers, lots of consumers, and spambots.
I know the danger of building on another's platform. But it still sucks.
Some of the replies when @x and @music got transferred were also complaining about not being compensated monetarily, which honestly seems like a bizarre expectation. Elon paid $44 billion for the company already. Paying people for their accounts sets up a poor precedent if they decide to take over other accounts in the future, and determining the amount to pay seems arbitrary. However, maybe giving these people a free Blue subscription for some number of years, or even for life, would've been a good move since it encourages them to continue participating on the platform.
Putting your money where your mouth is and using your wallet as your vote are rare values to find in people anymore. Most people want cheap entertainment and they want it now.
They understand how to manipulate people specifically or intrinsically. They are, each, sociopaths for better or worse.
Of course, you can always use Bitcoin / Ethereum and the Ethereum Name Service which is true, legitimate digital ownership. But few on HN like that. There is a lot of cognitive dissonance when arguing that blockchain has literally zero use cases and then being angry when Twitter or Facebook or Google rugs you.
I have a really nice .app site and fear this every time I renew it.
(For those who don't know: .app is owned by Google)
(I'm quite honored to get your first comment on this site after lurking for around 3 years and a half, lol)
Why is this legitimate digital ownership vs other forms? Bitcoin and ETH are stolen all the time, and it’s not recoverable, even if you can prove it rightfully belonged to you.
People are wary of crypto because it’s controlled by a cabal of extraordinarily entrenched early adopters, many of whom established themselves on speculation, grift, and fraud. It’s no better than the centralized banking it purports to supplant, and worse in most measurable regards.
And those people are true believers in the tech, and IMO deserve their riches. Same as anyone who bought FB or AMZN or GOOG at IPO and held until now.
As a separate issue, do the longer term holders pose a threat to the crypto ecosystem? You are so naïve - the traditional economic and banking system is the same! Except for centuries! Do I sound conspiratorial? Well, you said crypto has a “cabal”. Pot meet kettle.
At least in crypto it’s open source, and the addresses and balances are public. A fundamentally more equitable system at its core.
But replacing one "rich get richer" economic system with another is not an improvement, except for a very few people who might become rich during the transition.
Unfortunately, if you have a problem with “rich get richer”, I believe you are arguing against fundamental requirement of technological improvement.
It takes patience to do anything of value. Anything. Learning a skill, mastering a job, earning the trust of your peers, becoming a leader - this requires time, dedication, and discipline. A government cannot simply mandate that everyone can read, or everyone can be rich for that matter.
All risk has tradeoff. It takes those with more stuff in order to risk enough stuff to subsidize a lot of experiments, some of which will bear fruit. I would argue that even in the smallest communities, with everyone starting equal, very soon some will have more and some have less. This is simply human nature.
I don't have a problem with "the hard working get richer", as in your examples. I have a problem with the way crypto would reward people for simply owning it as they did nothing.
> It sounds like you have a problem with property in general
It sounds like you have a problem with economic growth and increasing productivity in general
It's objectively much worse. Especially bitcoin.
> government cannot simply mandate that everyone can read
To be fair they did and it turned out it's possible. It just took a while. More or less everyone can read nowadays.
However deflationary currencies reward them significantly more than inflationary ones.
Was an objectively awful system. The 19th century economy was on a permanent boom and bust cycle alternating between severe inflation and deflation. 2009, let alone what has happened over the last few years would've been very mild by gold standard standards.
> I feel like you are at an inflection point of understanding
It's funny that the edgy people who are so excited about the gold standard/bitcoin/deflation are so clueless about economic history.
Aka buying the stuff while you lot were laughing at it and calling them magic internet beans over on /r/buttcoin
Cryptocurrency is simply a different thing in terms of digital ownership. It’s not the same as other digital things.
That said, I’m not sure that first-come-first-wins is simultaneously fair, in such a universal environment. Nor, really, do I want it to be a “whoever can pay most gets the desirable names”, like DNS works.
I don’t have a better solution right now, but acknowledge that there’s a problem with the combination/intersection of “rarity” and “ownership” and such.
Are there any solutions that are even close to … some kind of fairness, or even approximation of a system that respects… anything?
One way could be have names mean nothing in terms of identification. You can call yourself "music" if you like, but so can anyone else. You're better off calling yourself something unique and then building a following, so that future potential followers can distinguish you from copycats.
Not to generate link or email or something...
Authors of books don't call themselves Scifi P. BestAuthor, they market themselves and their books.
First come first served for @music or @movies or @whatever shouldn't really matter if you want to find content you enjoy and want to follow the author for more of the same.
Platforms should also consider accommodations for trademark holders. Most have some sort of program, but it seems to be a mess. If every normal screen name has a numeric code at the end, there's room to give trademark holders a non-numeric name without having to seize a handle from someone else. The spot normally occupied by the numeric code could be replaced with an indication that that account is owned by the trademark holder or with the name of the entity that owns the trademark, to differentiate it from normal accounts and also from any accounts that might hold a similar mark in a different business.
Removing the numbers for trademark holders is an imperfect solution though, though, since multiple entities can hold the same mark so long as they are in different markets.
A critical test for trademark violation is "does it cause confusion in the marketplace?" and if nobody confuses Oracle Software with HiSpec Oracle trailer tires or Oracle Lighting, they're all allowed to hold a trademark on "Oracle". But if you're talking about a namespace where "there can be only one", which of the entities who holds a registered trademark wins?
There are assuredly better solutions, but even an imperfect solution is better than the current state of things. First-come-first-serve with unique per-site screen names just plain sucks.
edit: I agree the randomness is important. Without random numbers, the first person to get in will pick "0069".
See e.g. https://spritelyproject.org/news/petname-systems.html
Free, libre, open source software, peer to peer networks, and citizen run communications infrastructure are the only viable way forward if we don't to live in a rental society where none of your belongings belong to you, not even your identity.
Which is a touch more solid (I use in in that way) but still an ephemeral rented thing, not owned.
Ultimately, you're going to depend on other parties behaving in a common interest, whether that's your email provider, your ISP, your registrar, anyone accepting your ip address announcements...
They can take my email address, I'm keeping my emails.
Got a mail client running on several machines for that reason. All hail IMAP.
Notifying all the people I've ever sent an email to of a new address is a quick task with an offline email client.
Changing the email address on all the accounts is a bit of a chore, but that goes with (as you rightfully say) not owning that email address.
Guess one of these days I'll run a mail server just for creating online accounts. It won't even need to send anything, so no worrying about aggressive spam filters. And it can auto-delete everything each day too without harm.
Also, if it helps, by that logic no one shouldn't be using iOS or anything by Apple, which is also a rule that I follow.
In the early days if something had gone wrong, it might have been a different story.
Though I suspect that companies with good VC connections might have side channels into Apple or Google to clear up problems.
Not like little guys who can wake up one morning to discover their $20K/month business is no more.
Not at all: one could see a future where any of those companies become Uber rivals - they're both researching autonomous vehicles. When that comes, one incident at Uber and its reason enough to expel them.
You can build on someone’s land, but you’d be wise to be ready to move as soon as it becomes necessary. Essentially you are a nomad, reconfiguring your business to changing conditions, accepting that things will change over time.
Splitting yourself between platforms is exactly how you risk mitigate this kind of thing.
This is a relatively recent development. I'm fairly convinced it didn't happen sooner in an anticompetitive move to promote native apps over the open web. (Same with web push notifications and a million other tiny things.)
Instagram did not and could not have had a webapp in those days (which is a majority of the time Instagram has existed).
Ironically, given your conspiracy theory, it was Meta that broke Instagram for the web.
Are the people on the piratebay "pissed at ICANN" when they lose a domain? No, they learned that the domain name is worthless by itself.
The problem in your example is that the people behind TPB work with the principle that any domain name might be taken away from them at any moment, unlike Mr. @music, who was naive enough to think he was immune to any takeover just because he called dibs on the name.
ThePirateBay didn't build their solution on the premise that they would have an irrevocable right to their domain name. If the land owner decided to take back the land (like they did, many times) TPB could simply take their things and move elsewhere (like they did, many times).
I don't think I ever saw someone from TPB saying "oh, they took our domain, it's so unfair!", instead what I hear them saying is "we are building magnet-links and a bunch of redundant proxies so that our service continues to exist even if we lose all the domains we have.
In case of twitter handle or other free services there is no consideration on user's side so there is no binding contract, therefore the service could be revoked at any time.
but if you have a self-hosted bitcoin account or ether account or use some of the naming services on those platforms, this isn't the case
You can own land that no one wants, you can own anything that no one wants.
too few people care about true sovereignty to change the behavior of popular services
a good excuse to never build anything
life is risk
this sucks, no doubt but this snark is so unproductive
Unless you’re Apple or Google, you’ll have some single points of failure. But that’s not the same as the livelihood of what you’re setting out to do being reliant on a single vendor for over a decade.
... on closed platforms. Open and censorship-resistant protocols do not have have this risk, Free Software does not have this risk.
So, yes, if in 2023 you are still building things on closed platforms despite all the cautionary tales, you deserve all the snark you'll get.
Now there's this unstable billionaire troll who makes decisions on a whim and is hellbent on destroying the platform. This is just another example of "untrustworthy" behavior that makes no sense to tolerate from this type of platform.
Eventually, Google hit on the idea of offering "vanity URLs" to members, with the catch that you had to provide a phone number in order to get one. I demurred on that basis, but discovered when the service was discontinued that one side-effect was that posts referenced by those vanity URLs weren't archived by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine ... and that there was no viable way of mapping from the vanity name to the canonical numerical ID. People who'd elected to use those IDs were doubly screwed in the cancellation as their content couldn't be archived, even if they otherwise wanted it to be.
Random numeric identifiers were also a characteristic of MCIMail back in the day, if memory serves. Vint Cerf worked for MCI before moving to Google, and I wonder whether or not he had any influence in either system's account identifier policies.
This whole story-arch of Twitter's enmuskification would have been mooted had a similar architectural decision been made a decade and a half ago. I'd also strongly recommend any future account-based systems consider this model as well.
________________________________
Notes:
1. I created TRSS after getting locked out of my principle account, in a fit of pique. Given that I was already pseudonymous, why not emphasize the point, particularly when trying to reconnect. The fact that the new account pretty rapidly reestablished relations with my principle prior contacts was ... interesting. How much of that was algorithmic, how much social function, and what that has to say about both impersonation and reestablishing identity strikes me as interesting.
I set up a mastodon server a few weeks ago out of boredom, and I finally get the appeal of tweeting, and have been using it regularly, and it makes me happy that I get to own all the hardware powering it.
Yeah, you could take your date elsewhere, but not your original identify (yourNameAtSomeoneElsesDomain).
(...unless you're selfhosting your instance)
> 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. Vaught still refers to the platform by its original name.
I love the smell of 'cult of personality'
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/x-user-super-pis...
I tell you one and one makes three
Oh, I'm… the… cult of personality
w00t!
I mean seriously, stop for a moment and think if "I don't dislike the guy who runs the company that inconvenienced me and I think things may turn out okay" warrants the association that the person who feels like this would be sexually gratified by his wife sleeping with another man.
I know it makes me sound like a crotchety old man to complain about the changing nature of language but I’m not going to start helping it along.
I say "Great Founder Theory".
Who’s going to tell him that Twitter/X is controlled by a person who’s name is Elon Musk?
Both have gone through countless wives. Both have a habit of not paying people because they can get away with it - as it’s too expensive to sue them for nonpayment; they can drag it out in court and bankrupt you.
I never got caught up in the Musk hype and the more I learn about him the more wary of him I became. I have seen the amount of damage to society a narcissist can do in the form of the 45th.
So... the 'thermostat' is theirs and theirs alone. You are just allowed to eat/sleep in your parents house. You're not entitled to anything in it.
Perhaps the $8 per month may give you some 'rights' but I'm sure the T&C give them the upper hand.
Why do you think that somebody who points out dishonesty would think what happened is "completely ok"?
Google was running my email server with custom domain for years, free of charge. I think that it is still grandfathered in for those that signed for Google Apps early on. IT doesn't mean that the "email is free".
I use fastmail and a custom domain for my email. If I'm unhappy with the service I can migrate or host it.
If you can't leave having your own domain is not much help.
Note: I believe webfinger are supported by Mastodon too, so not so special of a feature.
Which is to say you shouldn't rely on them for anything critical; they can and in certain cases will be seized by said service for any or no reason at any given time. This can be said of Twitter, regardless Musk, as well as any other online service (eg: Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Google...).
Journalism of this sort is merely stoking the emotional flames for sensationalism (clickbait!) and driving the mainstream narrative that Twitter is a goner and an evil that must be slain.
What about _any_ of Naughty Ol' Mr Car's actions with Twitter would make you think that this is something he's at all interested in?
I've acquired original names, employee accounts, etc.; and have had my own originals appropriate from me by rouge employees and some crafty others.
It sucks but ultimately it's the rules of the games you play.
Losing a 10k social media handle sucks so bad precisely because of how valuable they are, and how awesome it feels to acquire one.
Your business is located at 420 West 69th Street. Along comes X and takes that address away from you? Would you like that?
Secondly, I don't think this comparison with an address by a random stranger for no apparent reason is correct to begin with
Someone takes something* away from you. Would you like it?
*thing wasn't yours to begin with
In the former case, I would usually have legal recourse, unless this is a dystopian future where Twitter can leverage eminent domain.
It’s a bad comparison.
Do not refer to them as 'billionaires' since they're oligarchs. I have expunged the word 'billionaire' from my vocabulary.
Musk is a Freemium Speeches™ absolutist.
If you wanna have your say, then you're gonna have to pay. A lot.
PS- In totally unrelated news: Stackoverflow hit $1.6b (?) valuation from exploiting uncompensated labor. Retailers, MLMs, gig economy titans, among other grifters, have since been furiously studying this sterling example of plantation inspired ventures.
edit: To answer my question it seems it's just a borderline spam account that occasionally posts links to youtube music videos. I don't see anything being "built" there.
> Oh wow, I didn't even think to look up the alternatives they were offering. THEY ARE ALREADY USED AS WELL! So if I choose one, I'll be complicit in stealing more accounts.
All these comments about “shouldn’t have done it on a private platform”. Well, new flash, the internet as a whole is a private platform.
I sincerely hope you have a problem like this in the future so others can mock you over your misfortune.
On the other hand, the sense of arrogance and entitlement on display here marks an impressive new nadir in fuck-you capitalism. Contractual arguments are sort of meaningless since most user agreements are extremely one-sided contracts of adhesion and the judicial establishment often rejects equitable arguments in favor of narrow technical ones, notwithstanding the vast asymmetries between user and service provider. All the legal, economic, and (increasingly) social incentives favor abusive behavior.
This is ... becoming untenable.
(The more so as ToS often have strong legal sanction, or as Cory Doctorow calls it, "criminal contempt of business model".)
I'm on Mastodon now, there's no need for me to talk of ex-twitter. It's not a topic that interests me
I honestly think the Musk hate has been gradually dialed down because the people who set mainstream agendas thought it was going to take attention away from Trump hate going into the campaign season.
Imagine if Google started grabbing Gmail addresses it wanted for products.
He has for 16 years effectively helped push the open web further away by investing so much time into Twitter.
These proprietary platforms(Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc) should not be supported at all - Time and time again have we warned this is exactly what will happen.
And by investing in these platforms, you are essentially supporting the silencing of dissenting opinions, making sure only the supporting voices of global capitalism are heard.
Remember: Twitter is the McDonald’s of the internet.
This @music is a nice OG.. too bad they ruined it for him.
Platforms that wanted to provide user pages at the top level were always gonna have this issue. Nobody would want a user to name himself "support" or "customerservice".
And as I understand it, they didn't impersonate support and cause harm in that way, or pretend to be official in any other way, as in your example of calling yourself @customerservice.
I don't think either of these arguments work, especially because you did in fact draw customers to the website for 16 years so you did provide them value (your content in between their ads)
What country is this? In the US this is absolutely not true.
> If I rent a place for a decade, I can't just be thrown out with the three months' notice that are enough if I lived there for only a year.
What country is this? In the US this is absolutely not true.
By the mention of the HRC, I'm assuming the UK or Europe? Your experience of employment and renter's rights is not generalizable.