X user quits paying for Twitter Blue to protest X commandeering his account.

Archived version: https://archive.li/Yg8r8

My favorite part:

But while his reaction the day after learning that X was commandeering his handle was extreme frustration, Vaught told Ars that the platform will remain his primary form of social media.

“it’s highly annoying, but Twitter is still my preferred social media,” Vaught said. “That’s how I communicate and learn my news about what’s going on. Nothing else compares.”

His only “minor protest” to X’s action, he said, was to cancel his Twitter Blue subscription.

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.

  • @[email protected]English
    31•1 year ago

    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.

    • @whatsarefoogeeEnglish
      26•1 year ago

      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.

    • pitninjaEnglish
      11•1 year ago

      That would require Musk to either be intelligent or willing to listen to people who are and I’m unconvinced he’s either.

      • @[email protected]English
        10•1 year ago

        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.

        • pitninjaEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          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.

    • @User_4272894English
      10•1 year ago

      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.