
Twitter account deletions on 'pause' after outcry - herendin2
https://bbc.com/news/technology-50581287
======
Sendotsh
I understand why some people are upset about it (Eg due to accounts of
deceased people), but I was really REALLY hoping to snap my first name which
was registered by a European person 10 years ago, has 0 followers, and has
never posted.

I definitely feel like they could compromise and at least delete those
blatantly unused ones.

~~~
guessmyname
> _… but I was really REALLY hoping to snap my first name which was registered
> by a European person 10 years ago, has 0 followers, and has never posted._

I created a Twitter account in 2012 and it was immediately put in _“private
mode”_ because I didn’t want to post anything; ±7 years later the account is
still empty, no posts, no followers, nada. The only reason I created that
account was to prevent cybersquatting over my short-and-simple username
_(which I have to clarify is not “guessmyname”)_. I’ve done the same thing in
other popular websites which I also never use, aside from signing in once in a
while to keep the account _“active”_.

Can you imagine if I release my Twitter account, after almost a decade of
constant cultivation of my other professional profiles _(GitHub, GitLab,
LinkedIn, etc)_ and then someone starts posting malicious messages to make my
username look bad? People will quickly associate these messages with other
accounts on the Internet with the same name. I don’t want to take that risk,
and I guess other people with inactive Twitter/Facebook/Gmail/etc accounts are
the same.

~~~
tom_mellior
1\. Most Twitter users are not malicious in the way you suggest.

EDIT: 1'. Twitter has rules and procedures against impersonation:
[https://help.twitter.com/forms/impersonation](https://help.twitter.com/forms/impersonation)
though I don't know how effective they are if you are not going by a real name
but by an Internet handle that you claim is unique.

2\. If you have such an important personal brand to protect, your Twitter
account should not be in private mode. It should be public, with a public
tweet explaining that you are really you but are choosing not to use Twitter,
and where to find you instead.

3\. If you have such an important personal brand to protect, you presumably
have something interesting to say. Twitter is not a bad platform to say it.

All in all, if they take away your squatted Twitter handle, I wouldn't feel
bad for you. Certainly not without a _lot_ more information about why your
brand is so special. And, well, if you can keep them from doing it by logging
in once every six months, it seems that that is something you can shoulder to
protect your brand.

~~~
ForHackernews
> If you have such an important personal brand to protect, you presumably have
> something interesting to say

Sorry, but do you actually believe this? In my experience, nearly everyone who
talks about their "personal brand" is some variation of a dull-as-dishwater
marketing drone. Be a human, not a brand.

~~~
tom_mellior
> Sorry, but do you actually believe this?

I believe it to the extent that if the person "cultivates" GitHub and GitLab
profiles, presumably they at least have new releases of interesting features
to announce, for whatever software they develop there.

~~~
byteshock
Do you really think people will draw their concussions about you based on a
Twitter account they found with the same username?

~~~
dillonmckay
It depends on the severity of head injury.

------
atticmanatee
It never ceases to amaze me how Twitter is so unprepared for anything they do.

This was something Facebook did a few years ago Even Google+ (rest in peace)
had a similar feature. How could they have forgotten that dead people may have
used their platform, and living relatives would be upset?

Either Twitter is completely run by amateurs - since its inception - or by
people who just don’t care. Which one is worst, I wonder?

~~~
undefined3840
It’s pretty disappointing. Their share price has been completely flat since
IPO. I’m surprised shareholders have not revolted against Jack being a part
time CEO. Clearly there needs to be some dedicated focus to clean up the app.
So much potential to be so much better.

~~~
fphilipe
It has always amazed me how one can be a part time CEO, let alone CEO at two
companies simultaneously. How would a board even allow that?

~~~
caymanjim
CEOs aren't that busy. That's what they hire people for. The most successful
people aren't running around like maniacs all the time. They are organized,
they delegate, and they focus. How much of your day is spent actually working?
How much is spent on pointless meetings, status updates, and busywork? CEOs
don't have to waste their time on other peoples' priorities. Board members
work far, far less. To them, it's the CEOs that look like they're busy all the
time.

~~~
C1sc0cat
I think You mean Chair - the CEO absolutely should be busy

~~~
dmix
It’s still possible to delegate a lot of the CEO day to day stuff and be
available for all important directional and strategy stuff.

Co-CEOs is also a thing.

Having half a talented persons attention is better than zero. Whether they
should still be the show piece CEO vs the background mastermind is up for
debate though.

------
K0SM0S
This makes me realize that from now on, most human beings will probably
increasingly be "memorialized" online.

I can't help but see in this a new form of modernized, digitalized mortuary
ritual, comparable to all the things we humans have been doing with our deads
for millennia. Egyptian tombs sought to preserve the body; now with big-tech
tombs we seek to preserve the mind, what's left of it, what has been revealed
by the deceased. I bet this is just the beginning of that.

The work of historians is changing, fast, in this fledging computing era.
Think that, from now on, we may be increasingly able to replay then-dead-but-
real people in real situations as if it were just another virtual world.

Which leads to this suggestion: maybe all the data held by big tech companies
should be released for public research (public datasets) upon one's death,
after anonymization etc. of course (and maybe a 'wait' period of 10 years, or
a full generation or more, whatever precautions are necessary). The point
being to learn cumulatively from all our deceased brothers and sisters, make
them count forever in the great study of humanity and the cosmos. Of course
people should choose for themselves (including delays and anonymity), like
some have donor cards, may prefer incineration, etc.

~~~
freeflight
That's very idealized, right now we still struggle with having big tech even
acknowledge its actually _our_ data [0] and not completely and only theirs the
moment we give it to them willingly or often enough unwillingly.

At our current trajectory, it looks much more like we are heading into a
cyberpunk Esque dystopia in which people are not just only commoditized
through their labor, but also their data value.

So instead of post-privacy for big data projects that could serve all of
humanity, we end up with data oligopolies hoarding the "gold" in neatly
segregated silos to control its scarcity and thus value.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/11/tim-
berne...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/11/tim-berners-lee-
web-inventor-save-internet)

~~~
K0SM0S
> That's very idealized

Agreed, as we speak.

This is why I generally think we ought to take control back of our data,
massively, as citizens. And devs and the tech community in general are front
and center to lead the charge, obviously.

It's a long road. Years, decades probably. But eventually we must get there.
We may have sacrificed the first generations in that regard because we
honestly build as we go, we can't anticipate everything. But now that we're
here, that we see that we know, it's time to stop deploring what is, and start
building what should be.

IMHO... This isn't 'holier-than-thou' at all but very humbly calling for all
of us to wake up and start creating tomorrow's solutions to these problems.

------
emiliovesprini
As far as I can tell, there are two systems for meaningful names (as opposed
to "arbitrary" ones like phone numbers or 4chan IDs):

1\. _A first-come-first-serve system_ like Twitter. I'd list drawbacks but
this comment section is full of them.

2\. _A lease system_ like domain names, whose drawbacks are best explained in
this tweet by @devonzuegel:

    
    
      > Domain names really hold you hostage. As soon as you've shared a link
      > from that domain, you have two options when it comes up for renewal:
      > (1) Pay the ransom for that domain registration, or
      > (2) Break the internet, specifically the part linking to your own
      > content
    

Does anyone know of another way to do meaningful names?

~~~
legohead
what do you mean by meaningful?

you can just allow people to choose whatever username they want, that's a
system...that nobody seems to allow for whatever reason. people have the same
names in real life and we've learned to deal with it. twitter already has a
verified system to deal with imposters for high profile accounts where it
would matter.

blizzard (battlenet) lets you choose any username but tags on a number for
everyone. so there's bob#1234, bob#2342 etc. and then it hides the number for
display purposes. that seems a decent compromise.

~~~
reaperducer
Or drop the alpha chars altogether and just go numeric. It worked for
CompuServe. Everyone's ID was an octal number. 72167,4531 for example.

That way there is no overlap, and nobody is slighted when they find out that
their name is taken.

~~~
thiagomgd
Compuwhat? sorry, never heard about it. (which might or not be related to this
decision)

ICQ uses a number, but yeah, how many people still use it?

------
dang
Original thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21644230](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21644230)

------
echelon
I wonder what the real reason for account deletions is.

Could it be possible they have overflowed their primary / foreign key
allocation necessary to support further user growth? Depending on their
internal architecture, a migration to a wider key might not be feasible within
the time horizon they have. Maybe it's easier to delete accounts?

If they have weird sharding and a lot of microservices, this might be their
only way out without shutting off registrations - and they'd never do that.

Or maybe they have metrics that show new users skip signing up when their
desired name is unavailable.

Can a Twitter engineer speak more to this?

~~~
danShumway
It could be a variety of reasons.

If you forced me to guess though, I think the most straightforward, simplest
one is that threatening account deletion is a good way to force older users to
become active again, which will increase engagement on their platform and
allow them to deliver more ads. In other words, the same reason that Facebook
will start spamming your email if you stop logging in.

I can't imagine any manager at Twitter would be upset about the idea that a
substantial portion of their dormant userbase would be effectively "forced" to
log in every 4-5 months or so.

~~~
wsn_101
>>In other words, the same reason that Facebook will start spamming your email
if you stop logging in.

Are you sure that's what is actually going on? patio11 calls it lifecycle
email marketing, and Nir Eyal thinks it is just a harmless way to keep your
users "hooked". Why would you even say such things about such a brilliant
technique which provides such great joy to the "growth hackers"?

Oh, I just got a "notification" from Facebook that someone I care about said
something I probably _don 't_ care about, but there isn't any way to know for
sure so I have to log back in to Facebook again. I will be back in 3 hours.

~~~
notduncansmith
For what it’s worth, I haven’t heard Nir Eyal call it “harmless”.

------
vectorEQ
honestly i am a bit surprised why it would be an issue to delete content from
a user who is no longer a user... it's kind of in the name of the thing. a
user is generally 'able to use' the thing, hence `user`... if someones dead,
they are not a user anymore. i think its a bit silly people are claiming disk
space and resources for their deceased loved ones and heroes on some other
people's service / servers. it seems even indecent to request such a thing...
its a free service.

that being said it would likely be trivial to add something like
isActivelyViewed as a condition not to delete an account. if a lot of people
view a page still it could be considered active. despite the account not being
used anymore. If no one looks at it, delete it ...

------
avian
Did Twitter already delete inactive accounts in the past? When I created my
account in 2008 my preferred handle was taken by an empty account that
seemingly never posted anything. With this recent news about account deletions
I was curious if maybe I could get it, so I checked it again. I was surprised
to see that it’s now a very active account with a “joined in” date in 2014. So
it looks like the old inactive one was deleted at some point and then the
handle was re-registered by someone else. Either that or the “joined in” date
isn’t accurate.

~~~
kevingadd
My understanding is that twitter employees were able to manually delete an
inactive account in the past to free up the handle for use. I know a couple
people who got their preferred handles that way.

------
conston
This is one major benefit of having a decentralized blockchain. You don't have
one entity that can decide one day to shut your account down because they
don't agree with you or your policies. I they is why I am really doing most of
my social interactions on Keybase which is connected with stellar. Its like
what telegram should be with super duper privacy and without all the S*amers.

------
arnaudsm
They could have a threshold for deletion, only deleting account with <1k
followers. This would spare accounts with real historical value.

~~~
syshum
This is not about Historical Value.

~~~
Thorrez
Some people care about historical value. Consider the previous BBC post about
it:

> So too would accounts set up specifically as an archive, such as @POTUS44, a
> collection of all the tweets made by President Barack Obama while in office.

[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50567751](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50567751)

------
hartror
Darn had my eye on a new username.

------
corodra
Was this some halfass pr stunt to artificially boost their engagement numbers
for the quarter? Something for their shareholders?

------
vinclou
I'm I the only one who dont get it. Why would anyone care about an account of
a dead man?

------
pmontra
What they mean about GDPR compliance is a mistery. GDPR doesn't apply to
deceased persons:

Recital 27

> This Regulation does not apply to the personal data of deceased persons.

> Member States may provide for rules regarding the processing of personal
> data of deceased persons.

Each country has its own rules. This is a summary
[https://www.twobirds.com/en/in-focus/general-data-
protection...](https://www.twobirds.com/en/in-focus/general-data-protection-
regulation/gdpr-tracker/deceased-persons)

However the tweets of a deceased person can contain personal data of an alive
person. How do they handle that when the author can't agree to changes of
policies anymore? But how can FB's memorialized accounts handle that?

~~~
anticensor
Easy problem: If heirs do not explicitly consent within 3 months of death,
consider the consent _retroactively_ revoked.

------
golemotron
> The social network said it now would not remove accounts until it had a
> process for "memorialising" dead users on the network.

With corporate personhood this should apply to inactive business accounts too.

------
privacywiki
No, please proceed Twitter!!

------
crusty511
Maybe Twitter will start charging a fee to allow a person to keep a username
for n years.

------
pentae
I really sometimes wonder if it would be a net negative or net benefit to
humanity if we could just shut down Twitter. I don't use it but I can't
remember the last time I heard something positive happening on there. From my
standpoint it's all just trolls, hate, arguments, trump, drama and angry mobs
using the platform for censorship.

~~~
cryptozeus
That is because you are not using the platform but watching the news. Guess
what is going to be on the news ? Only the outcry. Twitter has matured in last
few years and is a fantastic platform if you know whom to follow. People
crying about Twitter are not there to connect or learn from others, they are
just there to cry and harass others.

~~~
syshum
That is part of the problem but not the biggest one

Twitter is filled with controversy because most of the "news" people that fan
the flames use Twitter has their primary message platform, This is why twitter
is talked about more than Reddit, or Facebook or any others. The activists
that pretend they are journalists are all on twitter, all talking to each
other, and rage baiting the mobs

