Comment by ampersandy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ampersandy | Hacker News Reader

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What does this have to do with Facebook and the acquisition? Anyone working at Instagram pre-acquisition would also have been able to reclaim inactive handles.

Twitter does this as well and that's how I got my current username. There are a couple of things that are required before you could reclaim a handle (I forget the exact timespans, but it was close to this):

    * Has not logged in for one year
    * Has not tweeted in a year and half
    * Does not any have applications linked to Twitter

If Instagram has a similar policy, I really don't have any sympathy that the username was taken.

How exactly did you do this? I want my name on Twitter but it's being squatted on by someone who has zero tweets, zero followers and following one person.

I put in a request back in 2009 to free up the name and they told me the same thing that's still in their support document five years later: they're working to free up names but don't have a timeline. https://support.twitter.com/articles/15362-inactive-account-...

I used to work at Twitter, so I was able to request it internally. As I mentioned, you were only able to request a handle that met some strict 'inactive' policies.

I left in 2012, so I don't have much context since then. The root problem is that you want to give handles to people who will genuinely use them. But if you open up any system for reclaiming handles, it's just going to be abused by people trying to snag and sell handles (just like domains). Since there was no obviously correct way to ensure only people who would use the handles got them, it was just done internally for people who requested it (and their friends).

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