Since rare handles can generate high prices and are returned to auction once the buyer fails to meet their obligations, Twitter has a strong incentive to increase the number of handles in its auction pool.
The relevant product manager has probably ranked existing attractive handles according to their expected mobilisation/outrage potential and started confiscating handles from the bottom of that list.
This is probably also why you won't be notified about their auction of your handle, even though you'll receive email alerts for irrelevant stuff all the time. The process looks designed to be stealthy.
Money really is the trivial Occam's razor explanation here.
Although I live in the EU, I have no trust in its ability to regulate my media usage or platform providers at all.
The EU just managed to postpone chat control for a bit, and my own country has found a renewed passion for punishing expression crimes (so-called "Äußerungsdelikte") through various legal and pre-legal means.
Social, legal or technical centralization is not a solution to any issue related to public discourse, and Euro-nationalism is not a wise concept. It will simply make us another economic bloc, just with an older population than the others.
Contrary to the current zeitgeist in the EU, power should be dispersed as much as possible. We should embrace global open-source initiatives and work towards a European Union that open-source projects (and tech companies!) want to organize under because of our superior regulatory frameworks, not subsidies, legal pressure, promised government service demand or political initiatives.
We already have a lot of failed political initiatives, so why not try the organic, good governance approach for once?
Instead, we just create more bureaucracy and red tape. This absurd CRA nugget is a good example for our european style tech regulation for open source: https://cra.orcwg.org/faq/stewards/
Might be vulnerable to classic salami tactics, though. Once we arrive at a general consensus on new norms that expect age verification online, we can just legislate it to ID users as a step 2.
Maybe wait for the next terror-attack before pushing for it, but it's an easy fix to a culture that already accepted a layer control against the user. The end user will only perceive a small difference in whether they provide full ID or just verified age information.
I want to believe that some supporters of age verification are not cynical. However, whatever good can be achieved through age verification seems such a small win, compared to the dangerous precedent it sets for the internet in general. I cannot get my head around it.
> ... it would take me weeks to convert those accounts to a new domain ...
I did the same with about the same amount of accounts and it took me the better part of a Saturday. Even if you were really slow and needed five minutes per account, 200 accounts would still only take about 17 hours.
I don't think that's a lot of effort. You could easily spend that time fixing something around the house or garden, which often might not have nearly as big of an impact on personal agency.
This reply does not address parents question at all.
A key feature of Obsidian is that it stores your notes in an open folder structure on your file system.
A very valid question is whether there are benefits to using a special note sync application rather than a standard file system sync application, and if so, what those benefits are.
It's always a dubious method to ask an LLM to reveal information about its inner workings.
However, if you export your Grok account information via the Settings menu, it will export your information, including a risk score not exposed by the browser UI. You can try it yourself.
I wonder if this risk score is compiled based on any content you produce, or if it's informed by other factors, such as VPN or app usage.
Your comment specifically, I believe, falls short of the ideal to get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic becomes more divisive.
We should probably avoid posting shallow dismissals and remember that a good critical comment teaches us something.
Additionally, as your comment leaves readers wondering which parts of the divided comment section you deem "worthy of HN" and which you do not, I cannot help but think of this ambivalence as a method to spark reactions. Another word for this method would be "to bait", I think.
reMarkable still work really hard to force you into a subscription - or at least into using their very bad, non-zero knowledge cloud service. ... I don't know why but it is not obvious why this would be for the benefit of the user.
I own a reMarkable 2, but I fill it via RCU [1]. I will absolutely not buy into yet another opaque cloud offering in 2025.
edit: The project you linked looks interesting, though!
I don't know about their methodology, but as a German, I get the feeling that the project is rather vague.
For example, I would have liked to see more specifics on what they define as censorship in terms of scope.
Mainstream discourse in Germany is very conservative when it comes to defining censorship. They would hardly name de-ranking, deplatforming, intimidation, exclusion from the financial system, or even full control of information by private organizations as censorship. Government-enacted media bans, such as the Commission banning Russian state media, are rarely viewed as censorship by Germans. ( https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-rt-sputnik-illegal-eu... )
I'm not trying to make a value statement in one direction or the other, but if your communication product addresses a market or seeks to tie into public discourse, it should be in touch with its concepts.
Since rare handles can generate high prices and are returned to auction once the buyer fails to meet their obligations, Twitter has a strong incentive to increase the number of handles in its auction pool.
The relevant product manager has probably ranked existing attractive handles according to their expected mobilisation/outrage potential and started confiscating handles from the bottom of that list.
This is probably also why you won't be notified about their auction of your handle, even though you'll receive email alerts for irrelevant stuff all the time. The process looks designed to be stealthy.
Money really is the trivial Occam's razor explanation here.
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