@The_Hwang_Formerly_Known_as_X

Hwang received an email from the company explaining that his account data would be preserved, and he’d get a new handle. It offered Hwang merchandise, a tour of its offices and a meeting with company management as compensation.

Seriously.

Seriously that would be great lol. At least it would be a funny reference.

I think you mean the swastika emblem on the Eagle on the Nuremburg stadium that the US blew up, but yes, I thought that too.

EDIT: Wasn't on an Eagle, was just a huge swastika.

There was no Hakenkreuz on the Reichstag, you are thinking of the Stadium in Nürnberg and it was the Americans who blew it up :)

I'm not encouraging or condoning this sort of behavior, but I would be quite amused to see some creative vandals go make some modifications to Elon's little monument.

We know. Twitter had every right to perform this dick move. They did nothing technically wrong, in acting shitty to one of their users.

I mean. Sorta.

When you use some service you have some expectation that they’ll treat you fairly and predictably. Sure their Eula let’s them do whatever the fuck they want legally but that doesn’t change the fact that if they opt take certain actions (like arbitrary taking people’s usernames) then they risk losing user trust.

If the admin just took your username one day would you just quietly accept it? What if they edited or deleted your comments? Would you just shrug and say “well it’s their site they can do what they want” and just walk away?

Look what happened when Spez got caught editing posts on Reddit, for example. Massive user outcry.

Dude’s allowed to be annoyed about it.

Yeah, legally it's fine. Societiarily, it's not really fine. If you are building a service and I put on my business cards this is the address you can reach me at through this service, removing that address without warning is unacceptable. If you want me to trust the service you are building is reliable and worthy of my business then you better be prepared to treat the data the service owns and the choices the users make with lots of respect.

For example, if your lemmy instance owner took your name and started using it for their own purposes without warning but sent you a quick message that read "I took your account name, but hey, as compensation you can just tell me what other handle you want and you can have it. Also, I know I am really awesome, so if you want to meet people who have talked to me, let me know and I can set that up." What would you do? Would you stay on that instance or would you go find a service that you feel is reliable and trustworthy?

Honestly, I can probably safely assume you'd find another service because your account age is the same as mine and that is around the time that Reddit started to show they were not a trustworthy service. So kind of proof that this is legally fine but societally not going to instill trust.

To be clear, "having the right to do whatever they want" does not equal "they're not dickbags for doing it."

Musk randomly decided to rebrand and stole a username he liked from someone because he's an asshole playing at feudal lord. Sure, there's no legal repercussions because it is his website. Doesn't mean he's not a fucking douche for doing it.

While this is true, the act erodes confidence between users and the platform. (Whatever confidence that still remains)

After all, it's not illegal to be an asshole.

The thing that's wrong here is that people use/trust a proprietary web service as if it was a part of public infrastructure.

including changing my username.

👁️👄👁️

My very first mastadon handle was taken from me because it was two characters and matched one of the admin’s initials. I agree they had every right to do it.