How I lost my $50,000 Twitter username

It doesn’t even take that much. Twitter simply took @mattness from me – without notifying me – because they claimed it was unused. That was a few weeks before I was ready to launch my redesigned website…

I wrote to twitter support and they basically told me that well, it didn’t look like the account in question had my email address on it.

Unregulated centralized name registries are not a good thing.

Very interesting... and thanks for the detailed post... even though @N is a protected account now, its current set of 30+ followers may know the shameful deed done by the current owner. May be Twitter should suo moto take action too.

Use https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7141532 instead.

I think this really highlights the problem with current security on websites. There isn't enough to prove that you are indeed you.

Third post of the same is the best?