
I just deleted 36K tweets - robk
https://ethankaplan.com/i-just-deleted-36000-tweets-91e196dc129f#.eolhoswgr
======
uptown
"As an experiment I downloaded my entire archive"

I've wanted to do this, but in order to do it, you need to verify your email
address with Twitter. Whenever I request the verification email nothing is
sent or delivered. (Checked spam and everything). Twitter's support hasn't
responded to my inquires, so I'm basically stuck. Anyone happen to have a
solution for this?

~~~
amorphid
Use a different email address?

~~~
uptown
You mean change the one associated with my account? Good idea. I'll give that
a shot. Hopefully won't lock me out completely.

~~~
uptown
This ended up working. Thanks so much for the suggestion!

~~~
ValentineC
What email provider were you using at first on your account?

~~~
uptown
GMail. Only thing I can think is that at some point I may have opted out of
all emails from Twitter, and somehow this got swept up in that block.

------
anotherturn
I did a similar thing recently. Archived my tweets and then deleted them all.
Something to note is that archives don't come with local copies of
photos/videos, but I found a handy python repo to help with that [1].

[1]:[https://github.com/mwichary/twitter-export-image-
fill](https://github.com/mwichary/twitter-export-image-fill)

~~~
johnloeber
Shameless plug: I have written a similar tool to also archive all of your
tweets, with a delete option. It's a little more fully featured.
[https://github.com/Datamine/Archive-
Tweets](https://github.com/Datamine/Archive-Tweets)

------
robk
My favorite quote was “Assembling reality from the fragments of nuance is as
foolish as making a snowman by catching flakes in mid-air.“

------
tnone
I like the party line analogy, and for once the spectre of anonymous trolls
isn't used as a catch all.

Twitter definitely jumped the shark a while ago. The hashtags got hijacked by
brands and activists for hollow signaling and marketing. Retweeting and
quoting got repurposed to shame and bully. Forced brevity got redirected into
hot takes and memes. It was the core community who did it all first.

I suspect Twitter has been pushed aside by many for more private and granular
services like Discord and Slack. Discovery there is a problem though, a
million chat rooms of 10 people each make for a poor community. In some ways
it's like the living rooms of Iran: most know public discourse is messed up
and broken beyond repair, so they only speak openly behind closed doors.

If Twitter could admit that and shift gears, there might still be some hope
and a future in it. As it stands, all they're doing is giving people better
shovels to dig themselves deeper into the hole of their own making.

~~~
flocial
Twitter was ahead of its time and tried build a messaging protocol on a doomed
stack (ror). Then they nuked the third party apps they didn't already buy and
the list goes on. I sometimes wonder how history would be different if they
deleted Trump's account for trolling while they still had a chance.

I still think a new twitter like service could still be relevant minus the
baggage of what twitter has become. They could solve a lot of their issues by
quarantining trolls including Trump into a different sub domain.

The biggest problem with most social networks is that once celebrities flock
to your service they tend to dominate all discourse and you end up with a
dichotomy of leaders and followers.

Facebook somehow manages to still keep trolls from dominating dialogue though
it can be suffocating and reddit manages to counter the trolls with quality
subreddits for people fed up with trolls.

------
sarcasmic
This is funny to me, because while I used Twitter, I mostly did it to
broadcast mundane things to my friends, and never really participated in the
"Twitter community", whatever that actually means to people. Facebook cloned
one of Twitter's core features with the 'Status' prompt that served as an
effective replacement for real-life friends, while Tumblr was a better place
where you could pseudonymously post long-form content with many of the same
pressures and rewards of virality, but its many different communities that had
a lower propensity to devolve into flaming and trolling.

By the time professionals' "I'm leaving Twitter" posts became unremarkable and
trite, the mass exodus was well on its way: to Facebook for its more granual
privacy/audience controls, Medium for its analytics, social features, and
perceived professionalism, or to the social black hole, having been
disenchanted with an overtly social, always public presence altogether.

It's always bittersweet (though mostly bitter) when communities falter and
fall apart, but to me Twitter was never a good place to build a community
anyway. Most of its advantages came from media and commentators fuming over
having missed the boat on Facebook, so there was a concentrated effort to
never make that mistake again: hashtags and Tweets were everywhere more so
than AOL keywords ever were, which quickly made Twitter mandatory for people
who wanted to feel like they could be "influencers", or hang out in their
company. In this social and reputational gold rush, only a few came out ahead,
which should not be a surprise to anyone, as much as it frustrates those who
tried.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Funny, I recently got into Twitter about two years ago. I've ditched Facebook
b/c its creepy af, prefer my own static site with Disqus for blogging (won't
get taken down, or at least easily portable if Github or AWS eventually
fails), and consider Tumblr a cultural wasteland.

The important thing about Twitter is it's a really good real-time online
CV/resume. I basically use it to tweet about things I care about
professionally, and then link my Twitter account on my other personal pages.
That way I can keep my personal pages relatively generic and point potential
employers, employees, customers, or partners at my Twitter if they want to see
a more current snapshot of my professional activities.

For the most part I don't get involved in the naval-gazing self-back-patting
"Twitter Community" either, nor do I post about mundane personal shit, I keep
it all professional-related. Most of my posts are intended for non-Twitter
users (or at least people coming to my profile from origins other than
Twitter) who are vetting me for some business opportunity.

------
arrakeen
i suppose i use twitter very differently than mr. kaplan. for me, twitter is
almost like a social "one line a day" journal, where i persist random thoughts
and jokes i have throughout the day. what he considers "fragments of nothing"
without any worth, i consider memories. i can still look back at my old tweets
from 2008 and remember what i was doing and why i made the tweet almost 10
years on.

i'm likely in the minority, but twitter for me is more personal than
performative or social. i keep a backup of my tweets archive so that i will
never lose any of my memories. and this is why i find tweet delete services so
baffling.

~~~
ethank
My usage transitioned over time from a more mundane "here's what I'm up to" to
more of a pulpit. I became bored with bother versions of me.

------
xiaoma
I wish he'd said what service he used to delete all those tweets and to auto-
delete his new ones after a certain amount of time has passed.

~~~
marklyon
It's not automated, but I used Twitter Archive Eraser [0] to purge around 50k
tweets around the new year. It worked well.

[0] [https://martani.github.io/Twitter-Archive-
Eraser/](https://martani.github.io/Twitter-Archive-Eraser/)

~~~
Fermat963
I made this tool, I'm glad it was useful for you :) I made out of frustration
with other tools that didn't help with deleting my own tweets.

~~~
marklyon
Thank you! Ever thought of doing something similar for Facebook?

------
pixelbill
I've never used twitter, am I deserving of some sort of reward or recognition
too?

~~~
angstrom
Some people get off on tomb-stoning large amounts of data. Let him have his
moment. Tweets are equivalent to taking a dandelion that's seeded and blowing
it into the wind.

------
ChrisNorstrom
I wish we could petition y-combinator to allow them to allow a member to
delete their Hacker News account and comments.

This year for spring cleaning. I deleted facebook, twitter, disqus, and
thousands of comments I left on websites from over a decade ago. No archiving,
just permanent deletion. It was the the most beautiful feeling. I felt free.
Like a new person. Like there wasn't a part of me roaming around on the
internet building up dust anymore.

I know space is cheap and startups love data but we should study what all that
does to a person emotionally.

IF {Google Glass was suppose to keep us connected /BUT/ Google glass failed
because we felt too connected /BECAUSE OF/ a human emotional desire to be left
alone and let the mind relax.}

THEN {Permanently archiving all your content is suppose to be a feature /BUT/
people are deleting their content /BECAUSE OF/ a human emotional desire to
start over, clean up, and not leave things strewn about}

That being said I really wish the Hacker News team would add a "DELETE ACCOUNT
and all comments" feature. It's ironic that Y-Combinator's hacker news team
stands up for so many positive internet movements yet feel that they can
permanently keep all the content I generated. It is MY content after all. Do
they own the copyright to MY words? The excuse has always been "it's a part of
the public dialog". Everything is. Facebook, Twitter, & Disqus are also part
of the public dialog. And they let me delete myself off of their services.

~~~
saurik
If it makes you feel any better, I am pro Hacker News not allowing you to
delete content and also extremely against Twitter letting you delete content.
You saying something to me should be just as much a belonging of me as it is
of you. Imagine a world where you could just arbitrarily retract all the
emails you ever sent me, all the text messages you ever sent me, and all the
letters you ever mailed me, just because you decided you wanted a "clean
slate". (And while I am going to mention in passing that way way too often I
see people be extremely mean to other people and then use content deletion to
gaslight others into thinking "this user isn't so bad and I can't find any
evidence of your assertions otherwise", I am going to give you the benefit of
the doubt here and only want to mention this at all as my comment feels
incomplete as an essay without this.)

As for your copyright, the terms of service on websites deal with this, making
certain that the content you provide is licensed to them (it has to be, or
they wouldn't even be able to distribute it at all), and can spell out altered
terms to avoid the problem of someone insisting their comments be deleted
later. Further, even without extra clauses, I would argue for copyright
purposes the "work" is the conversation, not your words, and so any lack of
clear ownership should either argue for the entire conversation to be deleted
due to one objector (which I think might be more likely by law, and what the
terms of service are dealing with) or none of it to be able to be deleted
until everyone agrees (which seems more clearly correct and what the terms
should state if deletion is to be allowed); I can't come up with a scenario
where it seems OK for you to delete just your part unilaterally.

You decided to go to a public forum and contribute to a public conversation.
The fact that you said something meant that some people replied to you and
others upvoted you instead of saying the same thing, making your comments load
bearing and structural. You going back later and deleting what you said
changes the context of what I said. For a great (related, though slightly
different) example, seek out the account on reddit whose name was something
like "edited_to_make_you_look_dumb", which would later edit what they said to
make all people who responded to it look really dumb. The two hour window on
Hacker News feels about perfect to me, giving time to fix typos, make minor
structure and formatting fixes, and even delete things while other people
still have time to react and adjust, but then locking the content in for the
later record when the content becomes part of the archives.

When you go on a redact and purge, you are destroying something that not just
that you created, but something that tons of other people took part in, and
you are individually revising the historical record. One may as well argue "I
also want everything I said in public comment at last week's City Council
meeting redacted from the minutes and I want everything I said at last week's
trial redacted from the transcript". This is how you should treat saying
something in public as part of a public dialog: you said something in public,
and now are part of the public record. Again: if you weren't prepared to say
something in public, _don 't say it in public_.

And honestly, I would much rather you _not_ contribute to a conversation if
you are going to come around later asking for your part to be deleted. It is
as if we are going to paint a mural together, but for some reason every five
years you go around finding all the murals you helped with _and take back all
your paint_. If you hadn't have been there at all, someone else might have
helped more, and it isn't at all clear our mural would be drastically worse
off: but you removing your paint _destroys_ the mural and invalidates all of
the work of everyone else involved. It _wasn 't_ "your paint", it was " _our_
mural", and you shouldn't get to unilaterally alter it :/.

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
I disagree 100% with you on this. You have good points but those very points
are the very reason why I'm for deletion and against data retention.

 _" And honestly, I would much rather you not contribute to a conversation if
you are going to come around later asking for your part to be deleted."_ That
statement perfectly describes what's wrong with the silicon valley "dataphile"
era. You're encouraging the shutting down of conversations, not the growth of
more.

Even Y-Combinator said it in interviews that founders reveal more during more
intimate interviews and talks than ones on camera. When you go around with a
microphone and camera and record and set into stone what people say it doesn't
encourage them to say more, but rather less. Because they're not sure if that
information can be used against them in the future. When you fail to give
users privacy and data retention rights they may just run away from your
platform altogether.

There's a dread a user feels when they realize they don't remember what they
said or who they were 10 years ago, but the whole internet does.

1) I don't mean this as an insult but what is your age? Because when I was
younger my views matched yours, as I grew older the mental stress of my
digital self being all over the place began to build up. It's something that
happens with time and age. Sure there are outliers but for the most part we
all slowly tun into privacy advocates as we get older.

2) _" When you go on a redact and purge, you are destroying something that not
just that you created, but something that tons of other people took part in"_

It's better to create and delete rather than to never have created at all.
Also, we're talking about Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News, and blog comments.
This isn't a scientific journal, National Geographic, a Newspaper, or a text-
book. We're talking about internet comments here. There's a time and place for
data retention and I don't believe this is it. The burden of feeling like your
life is cataloged on the internet with you having no control over it. The
burden of feeling like your identity is split up in a million different little
pieces is not a feeling you want your users to feel. No facebook or twitter or
HN post is worth undermining basic user rights of privacy and deletion.

3) Your views on data retention seem extreme to me, the very conversations
you're trying to permanently save will in a few months become outdated, no
longer visited, not important, and useless. So what if someone deletes a
comment and people reading 5 years in the future don't see it. What is the
importance or significance of it that makes it worth destroying user rights.
This is a sort of "Data Pack-Rat mentality", an obsession with archiving and
compiling everything that everyone has ever said into a perfect neat little
collection. And anyone that gets in the way of that perfect collection is a
threat to it. You're more sympathetic and caring toward "the collection" than
the users who create those collections.

I'll agree to disagree with you. I can't and don't want to change you but at
least now you know why I am the way I am. Who you were 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago
is not who you are now. What you care about changes, what you think changes,
your identity changes, your dreams change, and unfortunately comments do not.

I believe User rights are more important than a perfect archive of some
internet comments on a website.

~~~
icebraining
I sympathize and am inclined to agree with your position, but be a little more
charitable and don't try to psychoanalyze other commenters; the second half of
your third point is unnecessarily harsh, and doesn't help the argument.

I can understand the viewpoint against allowing deletions, and it's not
necessarily a "ratpack mentality" of storing it all: it's losing the pearls in
the chaff. Sure, most comments are worthless after a few days, let alone
months or years, but a few are still valuable. I've been browsing the web for
quite a while now, and I've never bookmarked much, let alone tried to "save it
all", yet it still pains me a little that the few links I did save are mostly
lost.

That said, I don't think that's enough to justify not allowing deleting
comments. I'm just saying we shouldn't paint a caricature of people with
different positions, even if we fully disagree with them.

All that aside, there's another point: HN can't actually delete your comments,
they can only delete their copy. Dumps have and will be made, and a simple
search can find comments by your nickname outside of news.ycombinator.com, and
this is inevitable on an open site. Isn't there the danger of creating a false
sense of privacy?

------
stesch
"As an experiment I downloaded my entire archive"

This is still possible? I've done this when the feature was new and tried it
again a few weeks ago and there was nothing. Thought it is broken.

~~~
a_bonobo
It works for me-

go to
[https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data](https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data)
and scroll alllllll the way down, there's a link to 'Twitter Archive'

~~~
stesch
They want me to approve my e-mail address (again) and this process seems to be
broken. No e-mail. Nothing in junk.

Well, …

~~~
kator
Same here, I'm debating on changing email address but worry that will fail
too!

------
chippy
I also recently deleted most of my >10K tweets after signing up around 10
years. I'm keeping certain tweets that have a specified string in them, and
I'm keeping all the favourites.

I used this Ruby application to do so, together with the archive CSV,
customising it a bit.

[https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/TwitterDelete](https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/TwitterDelete)

I think Twitter became less local or personal and became more serious.

------
passwordreset
I just found 12 bricks.

------
unicornporn
I wonder how many of those tweets that were ever retweeted. Retweeted tweets
are replicated and will never go away. I know you shouldn't expect things
published publicly on the internet to ever go away, but I think that this one
of the cons of Twitter.

------
james_pm
This post inspired me to do the same thing. 41,000 tweets deleted (but
archived first). I quit tweeting and unfollowed everyone a few weeks ago, so
deleting everything was a good next step. We'll see how long my 773 followers
stick around now :P.

------
jccooper
I'm not a heavy Twitter user so I must be missing something. How does a
Twitter history make any difference to current usage? Do people actually
dredge up and react to old tweets?

~~~
ethank
It's like detritus without context. Memory is so subjective and left over
tweets from ten years are a pseudo objective slant on memory that doesn't
really work.

------
ethank
I guess I can answer questions here too. Hi there.

------
skylan_q
Everyone I know from #FrogTwitter got banned so the remaining few went back
and deleted all their tweets.

