
TweetDelete – Automatically delete your posts that are older than a maximum age - DyslexicAtheist
https://www.tweetdelete.net/faq.php
======
ams6110
Services such as this cannot delete a tweet from other services or people who
archive them or even just take a screenshot. You still have to assume that
anything to post on Twitter will be public forever.

~~~
_wmd
As someone whose current Twitter account was created around 2013, only 1.9% of
my 2248 tweets appear in Google thanks to archiving around once every 24
hours, that includes hits due to archiving by third party services. Meanwhile
regular people can read my account without having to follow.

That's a 98.1% reduction in one big source of potential HR-related hiring
showdowns.

There are plenty of benefits to a service like this

~~~
throwaway0255
> There are plenty of benefits to a service like this

Are they greater than the benefits of simply never tweeting at all?

~~~
kosei
That’s like making the argument for abstinence vs. birth control. Yes, the
only 100% solution is not to ever post anything publicly. But there is still
value in making things more private/less permanently persistent for the people
who still choose to post.

~~~
reificator
Since you can delete posts through most services, even not posting anything
isn't 100%.

For instance: I notice that you deleted this tweet. Interesting choice of
avatar by the way.

[https://i.imgur.com/0R4Xn6O.png](https://i.imgur.com/0R4Xn6O.png)

------
slyall
Of course widespread use of this will mean tweets are less useful. You won't
be able to find that book/movie that somebody talked about or their great
analysis of some topic. ie also on the front page today:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727319)

which links to a series of tweets, the top comment in HN is:

"I'm the author and linking to my tweets is a bad idea because they auto-
delete after 14 days."

~~~
scrollaway
I've seldom seen any tweet carry information for longer than a few days. The
combination of the messages being small, threads being hard to read, and
tweets being hard to search makes them an atrociously bad medium to store
information.

It's kinda like IRC discussions but almost worse. It's a shame because there's
a lot of information stored in there... it's just not accessible.

~~~
doomlaser
they're useful in gauging public responses to events or products, and old ones
can be particularly useful to see how something was viewed in its time.

you can get pretty fancy with date range searches at
[https://twitter.com/search-advanced](https://twitter.com/search-advanced)

I use it to read the pulse on all sorts of things all the time. I even have
't' set as an address bar hotkey trigger for
[https://twitter.com/search?q=%s](https://twitter.com/search?q=%s) on every
browser that supports the functionality.

------
rinze
A while ago, I created a very simple set of Python scripts to accomplish
precisely this, if you'd rather use something you actually control. Here:
[https://github.com/rinze/obliterate_tweets](https://github.com/rinze/obliterate_tweets)

~~~
tombrossman
This is what I'm using for the past year or so, running daily as a cronjob:
[https://gitlab.com/tombrossman/TwitterDeleteMost](https://gitlab.com/tombrossman/TwitterDeleteMost)

You can whitelist specific tweets to keep, and set a threshold for favorites
or retweets above which the tweets are preserved. For example, if you tweet
something and ten people retweet it, the script will save it forever. If you
tweet something that no one retweets or favorites, it's gone after 30 days. I
call it a 'socially curated' feed, since old tweets are basically worthless to
anyone but strangers wanting to profile you.

And props to Mike McQuaid over on GitHub for originally creating this tool,
and for helping me adapt it to my use-case.

~~~
tanepiper
Awesome! I used Mike's original tool a few years back, got rid of a lot of my
twitter. Probably time to do it again with your fork :)

------
written
The way I use Twitter is to download tweets to a local database, including
images/videos/unshortened URL and then I view the data in my own UI from local
DB.

It circumvents the tweet/account removals done by users or Twitter. Also I can
do any kind of search/data processing I want.

I guess I'm not alone. You can't hide your data once they are made public.

It's interesting what is possible once you start treating web services as a
data source. Sometimes there is much more exposed than is visible or easily
consumable on the page and you can filter/search/consume the way you want
without all the clutter/feeding algorithms around the original page/service.

~~~
anubisresources
How many petabytes does something like this take up?

~~~
llao
The internet says there are about 500 million tweets per day. If we assume 500
bytes for storing each, this would be 250 Gigabytes per day.

~~~
written
Average tweet JSON object size is 5300B.

~~~
llao
Should compress nicely though.

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Puer
For people who use Reddit, deleted comments only remove the username and not
the content, making it trivial to trace back the original poster. If you
delete posts/comments regularly use Shreddit which overwrites the content
before deleting it making this trace back much more difficult.

[https://github.com/x89/Shreddit](https://github.com/x89/Shreddit)

~~~
lucb1e
> deleted comments only remove the username and not the content

Source?

I just tried posting something and deleting it for myself. I don't even see
'[deleted]' or anything in the thread. It's just gone completely. The
permalink says "there doesn't seem to be anything here" (like it does for
empty threads or subreddits). No mention of my username nor the content
anywhere that I can find.

~~~
Puer
It's been a while since I've checked so I may be wrong on this, but deleting
your reddit account will remove the username while preserving the content.
Deleting your comment without deleting your account will preserve both.

Reddit internally saves post deletions but not post edits, so if you really
want to delete something you should edit it to some nonsense before you delete
it.

Of course, the best way to protect yourself is to never post anything
compromising in the first place because there are already a lot of services
out there that cache everything, but I think it's a good practice to follow if
you're going to delete anyway.

~~~
lucb1e
> deleting your reddit account

Ah, that's something completely different.

~~~
plexicle
You're both half-right.

Comments that are deleted (either self-deleted, removed by a mod/admin, or
deleted from account deletion) will disappear as long as no one replied to it.
This behavior is the same, no matter how the comment gets deleted.

If the comment has at least one reply, then the username will become [deleted]
(or [removed]), but the comment/content will remain.

~~~
Buge
>If the comment has at least one reply, then the username will become
[deleted] (or [removed]), but the comment/content will remain.

That's false. Both the content and the username will be replaced by [deleted]
if the user (or a mod) asked for the comment to be deleted, and it had at
least 1 reply.

Here's a test I just did:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/television+none/comments/88rd9e/net...](https://www.reddit.com/r/television+none/comments/88rd9e/netflix_acquires_seth_rogen/dwnns4q/)

------
verylittlemeat
All this talk of deleting old content is necessary for privacy but it still
makes me sad.

Imagine if something like twitter existed for the entire 21st century. Yeah,
we have books and articles describing those times but they're almost always
elite or intentionally elevated perspectives. I could see myself getting lost
for days in historical tweets from regular people shitposting around the
spanish-american war.

------
reledi
An item on my todo list for years has been to create a project that wipes your
history on various social media services.

I haven't used TweetDelete yet, but a quick search shows there's many paid,
free, and open source options available. This one stands out as being better
since you can inspect the code and it also deletes favourites and direct
messages: [http://martani.github.io/Twitter-Archive-
Eraser/](http://martani.github.io/Twitter-Archive-Eraser/)

~~~
Fermat963
And close to deleting 3 billion tweets so far.

------
josteink
Ive created some similar host-yourself FOSS options for Reddit and Disqus:

[https://github.com/josteink/web-privacy-
reddit](https://github.com/josteink/web-privacy-reddit)

[https://github.com/josteink/web-privacy-
disqus](https://github.com/josteink/web-privacy-disqus)

I honestly don’t see why I should have to trust a SaaS to maintain privacy
data on another SaaS. That’s not solving the problem, but just moving the
goalpost.

------
notatoad
This seems like a good way to make twitter even more toxic than it already is.
If you're afraid of your tweets coming back to haunt you later on, maybe you
shouldn't be tweeting those things.

~~~
danielvf
In the 1930’s, it became a crime (in a certain large country) to think that
plants had genes that gave heritable traits. Thousands of scientists,
biologists, agricultural researchers and others were imprisioned or executed
for disagreeing or previously having held the wrong view.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism)

Sure, there a lot of evil and stupidity said on Twitter, and through human
history. But not everyone who is punished for what they said was saying
something wrong.

------
kylehotchkiss
I would recommend leaving 5 per month behind of neutral/boring tweets. If
Twitter says account was created in March 2008 and your tweets start in 2016,
somebody who's reviewing your feed might wonder what you're trying to hide.

------
benmarks
The title of this post is a little incongruous with the linked content, which
gives equal footing to data tidiness and privacy:

> _TweetDelete is useful for people who want to reduce the amount of old data
> in their Twitter account (perhaps because of other apps they use on it) or
> people who want to limit the amount of data about themselves they expose
> online._

I think most of us will dismiss the privacy angle here, moderated as it is.

~~~
sctb
Thanks, we've reverted the title to a representative phrase from the page.

------
mike-cardwell
I set this up earlier, and of course it deleted my keybase twitter proof.
Shame there's no option to exclude tweets matching certain patterns.

~~~
sbarre
Crap, I just set this up today, and realize that I just now did the same
thing..

------
exotree
I’ve been using this service for a few years now. I catch some flak about it
from folks (deleting my tweets breaks threads). However, I love that there’s
an option that works to do this. I’ve been on Twitter for nearly a decade. A
lot of who I am has changed, also meaning my tweets have as well. It’s good to
have a fresh start, which is very hard to get on most social media networks.

------
beager
I use this, but have no expectation that it improves privacy for me or that it
actually deletes anything. If something I type goes over the wire, it’s out of
my control forever. Deleting my tweets is strictly a tool that I use to
unburden my own self from things I was thinking about before.

------
sebazzz
I would like this to exist for Facebook, so I can clear everything except the
current year.

~~~
StavrosK
Alas, it can't. Facebook doesn't let you delete things through the API.

~~~
thomble
Wow, that is awful.

------
harlanji
I like this, been thinking similar. My current ideal solution is data
retention cap, something reasonable like 7 years. Next people should have
archiving tools and make use of fair use. This would give realistic view of
what others may archive, help inform their online conduct. Screenshots are the
best medium to archive tweets etc imo, captures as viewed.

------
shanev
I made a text-only ephemeral social network as a side project a while ago. It
deletes messages after 24 hours, and warns if a screenshot is taken:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blink/id1086509452?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blink/id1086509452?mt=8).

------
josefresco
I use an iOS app called Xpire and do this somewhat manually (sort by oldest)
while in the toilet etc. I only do so manually because I enjoy reading my old
tweets one last time before deleting. Despite being on the service for 8+
years I only have about 6 months of old tweets available.

------
landr0id
I'm going to go ahead and plug a script I made to do something similar (if you
were to put it on a cron job I suppose):
[https://github.com/landaire/detweet](https://github.com/landaire/detweet)

------
6d6b73
If you need privacy don't use taotfer or don't post stuff you will later
regret.

~~~
bicubic
If you need privacy then self censor?

One of the core reasons for privacy is to _prevent_ censorship in all forms.

~~~
manigandham
Or use different tools that are built for it.

Twitter is a public broadcast system, there is no privacy there.

~~~
mobilefriendly
Sure there is, you can publicly broadcast anonymous speech-- a cornerstone of
free speech tradition.

~~~
intopieces
How’s that? The tradition of free speech has been standing on a public square
and announcing your views or attending a public meeting with officials to tell
them how you feel about their policies. The concept of privacy itself is very
young, and the idea of anonymous speech even younger. Can you point to some
anonymous speech traditions in the US or elsewhere ?

Also, Twitter is not anonymous.

~~~
mathgeek
Another of the traditions of free speech is publishing under a pseudonym.

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ntonozzi
You can use search to find your tweets that are not in your most recent 3,200.

------
swlkr
I use this or something like it, I’ve been on twitter since 2010 I think and
I’ve changed a lot since then. No point in keeping tweets around longer than
they need to be

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minch
Here's a similar tool that I built for fun:
[http://www.deletehub.com/](http://www.deletehub.com/)

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xref
back when I still tweeted at least two users blocked me since after a few
weeks my tweets would delete and so their replies were neutered as well.

------
mansilladev
Change the name to avoid getting bothered by Twitter.

------
wyclif
Why doesn't Twitter have this feature built-in?

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HillaryBriss
the twitter community needs a service that deletes regrettable tweets, and
anything that might one day cause a public relations nightmare

~~~
tenpies
> anything that might one day cause a public relations nightmare

That category includes everything. Your post about how you're crushing some
pancakes today could be considered a celliac-phobic statement punishable under
the Freedom from Oppression and Tyrannical Online Speech Act passed in 2040.

~~~
HillaryBriss
Well, I'm not convinced that it includes _everything_ , but I do agree with
your general idea that it can be really hard to figure out what will be
considered offensive in the future. That's why a service like this could be
valuable.

It would even have value if it could just eliminate, say, 50% of future PR
nightmares.

------
amelius
I want this for my Facebook activity.

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matte_black
I deleted all my tweets once but still have a count of 3 tweets. Where are
these shadow tweets, and how do I eliminate them??

~~~
beager
That’s probably some incrementor in a DB that has fallen out of sync. At high
scale it’s inefficient to run SELECT COUNT(*) for things like activity counts,
and under normal use, being within 5 of the actual count when people often
accumulate 10,000+ of an activity is acceptable.

~~~
matte_black
What could trigger the incrementor to resync?

~~~
LeoPanthera
Probably done on a periodic basis, so, wait.

~~~
matte_black
It’s been a year

