
Why I just deleted all 77.5k tweets I’ve sent out over the last 10 years - dajbelshaw
http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2017/09/06/deleting-my-tweets/
======
jzl
I'd downvote this if I could. It was submitted by the author to boost views.
This article had pretty much no useful content. He deleted his tweets because
he didn't like them changing their terms of service a few times. No deep
analysis of why, though. And ... um, data mining? Like that's breaking news,
that public tweets and likes could be data mined? Ok ... yeah, moving on,
nothing to see here folks.

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nickthemagicman
It's adorable how the author thinks he deleted his tweets.

~~~
Dylan16807
It sure is easy to be condescending when you ignore chunks of the post. Like
the link to [http://twitter.dougbelshaw.com/](http://twitter.dougbelshaw.com/)

~~~
nickthemagicman
Do you think twitter deleted them from their database? Or just flagged them as
not visible?

Id bet on the second one.

~~~
Dylan16807
It doesn't matter. In both scenarios it's off the twitter site and backups
still exist.

~~~
carlmr
But can still be mined...

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existencebox
What stands out to me is the call-out against "Data miners". This is ironic to
me in that twitter has been historically one of the LEAST friendly platforms
for data ingestion. They have very strict limits on # of historical tweets
fetched, firehose access (to summarize, "no you can't have it"), and
utilization of data, to the point that in most discussions about the platform
they're seen as very closed. (or at least too risky to rely on) The author
even acknowledges this in his having to use a third party service to extract
the tweets to a _more searchable_ subdomain?

I guess what this ramble is meaning to say: Where does the author's globbing-
in of "Data miners" come from, why the distaste, and how does mastadon solve
the issue?

~~~
carlmr
He's advertising his own service. His criticism night be justified, but
there's no new reason he mentioned why he would leave Twitter exactly now.

It's an ad.

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getpost
I deleted all my favorites after Twitter renamed them to likes, and Twitter
restored them a few months later, so I deleted my account entirely.

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b3lvedere
"this service that used to be on the side of liberty is becoming a tool for
the oppressor, the data miner, the quick-buck-making venture capitalist."

Gee, what a surprise.

I doubt there are a lot of companies that don't try to monetize their userbase
and "free" product in some way eventually.

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RickS
there's an irony to bashing the shallow corporatization of twitter while
actively trying to manufacture outrage alongside a link to your competing
service.

gross.

~~~
Dylan16807
His? Did I miss something here? And the point of Mastodon is _not_ having any
company in charge.

~~~
RickS
From the article:

> In particular, I’ve been hanging out at social.coop, which I co-own with the
> other users of the instance.

Now, whether that's "own" like "founder" or "own" like "credit union member"
is perhaps up for debate, but the opening paragraph leads with an endorsement
for a competing service over which he has partial ownership, in his words.

~~~
Dylan16807
Since he's just advocating for people to join credit unions in general, I
don't think it's a problem either way. But it looks like the latter from what
I can see.

