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.
They haven't scrapped their plans for this. They said they'll put it on pause until they've come up with a tool for memorializing accounts. So presumably accounts that are legitimately not going used will still eventually free up.
Assuming of course that the account is truly idle and not being used to read without every interacting.
A simple fix would be to make an exception for accounts with >X statuses posted or >Y followers.
The inactive accounts that people are worried about losing are the ones that used to be active, or which were significant enough to make a lot of people follow them. However, the bulk of inactive accounts probably have very few (<10) statuses posted or followers, and deleting those is likely to be uncontroversial.
A simple fix would be to pick a character that can not otherwise occur in Twitter handles, like ':'. Then move every inactive @foobar user to @inactive:2019:foobar. If a follower of the original account complains, change "inactive" to "memorialized" or whatever, possibly adjusting the year backwards.
If I choose to squat the now freed up @foobar handle and not do anything with it, next year they can move my inactive version to @inactive:2020:foobar and free up @foobar again for the next person interested in using it.
Any way they solve this, there is a danger of people using bots to mass-squat liberated names to offer them for sale. I don't see any very good way around this. Possibly to give first pick to users with long-standing accounts that share a nontrivial common substring with the liberated handle. For example, if my current Twitter name is @firstname_lastname, and I really want @firstname, I think it might make sense to prioritize me over @random_bot_204safhq23.
Twitter's in a good position to detect most bots. If someone uses a bot that's good enough to evade detection, I think it's ok to let them keep the handle.
I can understand not making a tool to memorialize users in first 3 years of creation but once twitter became a household name they really SHOULD have already updated their roadmap.
In the era of cloud computing, how expensive would it be to make an account readonly and store the paltry data it created in a cached location somewhere?
All of their tech decisions feel really reactive nowadays
With roadmap decisions like these, the compute or storage cost for the data is an insignificant part of the product decision making.
The real cost of doing something like this is doing user research to figure out the set of human behaviors around the memorialization process, deciding where in the product to make the functionality available, training material for how it escalates up to human support teams, and what other things are on the team's plate at the same time.
Why does it have to be specifically the tech holding them back from doing it?
Personally the permanence of internet content is terrifying and by far the worst aspect of it. Potentially there are people like me who would be at the table whenever "what to do with accounts of dead people" is discussed, strongly advocating for deletion. Lacking clear consensus they just left the decision until it had to be made.
> … 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.
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 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.
I get what you're saying. But in the context of this discussion, a "real name" would just be whatever Twitter thinks it is. They use the term a lot in their docs (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22real+name%22+site%3Ahelp.twitte...) but I don't know if they ever define it in a way that would make you happy.
yea. i get the deceased people argument. but this name / brand protection thing is total bollocks. if you are not going to use the precious @firstname or @first.lastname maybe someone who has something important to say would? not fair to be name squatting.
> 1. Most Twitter users are not malicious in the way you suggest.
the odds of, at a minimum, any given twitter profile being at least wildly off-brand for your namespace colliding persona are still very high. this looks like a legitimate edge case anxiety to me.
We have known instances of people’s twitter accounts being hacked, and then fired from their job, after ‘their’ twitter feed posted objectionable content.
1. is irrelevant because it only takes one malicious person to ruin your life
As for Twitter’s enforcement, it doesn’t shut down Elon Musk bitcoin scammers but it does shut down women complaining about the revolting DMs they get from men.
> 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.
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.
If you use a "short, simple" string as a username across various services, the price you pay is that various others are going to be using that same name on other services.
You aren't entitled to a certain username on every service simply because you happened to be the first to register it on one service.
That's literally the definition of name squatting. If you want to link to your Twitter account, maybe use it, before complaining someone else has made something useful out of it.
Btw this is not at stake in this situation anyway, since you would just need to log into your account and accept the new ToS.
And agree to their new terms and conditions - THAT is the real reason why they're doing this. I'm sure the new T&C's grant Twitter the right to do more with existing accounts / tweets.
You can't be the first to register on every platform out there. If you ever become successful enough, people are going to impersonate and false flag you anyway. You have to balance putting your beliefs out there, so people know an obvious fake; with not over sharing to the point you annoy people with differences from you, which I can tell you first-hand is hard to recover from.
After that, make a links/contact section on your website to list all your accounts. Post a note that anything not on the list is an imposter or someone coincidentally using the same name as you (which does happen, especially when you naively pick a four-letter name.)
Anyone still conflating a false account with you with one step to verify it as a fake will be acting in bad faith regardless.
To me it didn't sound like they linked this dead account anywhere. They literally just squatted a name to never use for anything.
Real class move btw, I hope GPs account gets deleted soon. (And then the flood of people having nothing better to do than destroy some nobody's reputation on social media comes in I guess...)
It's ego-centric behaviour which leaves everbody worse off. Thank god it's only a Twitter account name! (...and not global politics governed by old farts out of touch with reality, which is another area where this behaviour is rampant)
Well if they literally said that, then I'm sure you can copy + paste said portion. Because even upon re-reading the comment, I can't find this statement.
Oh, you're right, I misunderstood the point where they said
> 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?
I thought they'd linked their Twitter account on their other professional profiles.
So you claim/reserve a private good, with no intention to use it. Just so others can't use it?
That said, should there be some sort of central internet registry where we all registered our unique usernames which will be the same and reserved on every platform?
This reminds me of the days of EFNet where you would fight to have a username. If you stopped using it/disconnected, it was fair game.
I don't think someone would start posting malicious messages to make you look bad. They would just use it for themselves, with their own profile pic and would be obvious it's not you.
Heh. Learned this lesson in college when a friend started registering all of our acquaintances names on AOL instant messenger, and impersonating a large number of people.
I think yours is an extremely idiosyncratic special case, and there are always going to be one-off special cases. You can't reasonably expect policy for the other 330 million users to grind to a halt to solve something that you could solve yourself by logging in once every six months.
> 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?
Oh no, you'll be just like everyone else under the sun who has to use different names in different places. You aren't special and no-one really cares.
Whoa. Posting like this will get you banned here. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site to heart? Basically: yes to thoughtful and curious conversation, no to being a jerk and snark.
If someone uses the same username in multiple places, and another site has a user with the same name, it’s easy to assume they are the same person. If there is a risk of impersonation or confusion with another account, it’s fair to try to protect your reputation by registering an account in that name and not posting, especially if you are well-known in some internet circles.
> and another site has a user with the same name, it’s easy to assume they are the same person.
No, no it is not. Not at all... You are one of the lucky people who managed to get your chosen handle on those sites.
My preferred handle (givennamesurname) got registered in 2008 on twitter and hasn't done anything since (no tweets, no profile, etc).
On instagram, both (givennamesurname) and (givenname_surname) are taken, so I went with (surname_givenname).
The only real way to get around this is to just list your social media / accounts on your personal website. Then prove that you own it on keybase with gpg or whatever.
> it’s fair to try to protect your reputation by registering an account in that name and not posting,
If you stay on top of / are aware of every new service. I was 12 in 2008 and wasn't concerned about name squatting.
If you want a short-and-simple username, you need to do what it takes to defend it, even if that means logging into twitter once in a while. Even registered trademarks require active defense, or they lapse[0]. Why should it be as easy as just grabbing it first, especially if that pollutes the platform in a way that hurts the platform company?
If you want an easily defended but unique identity, pick something that isn't short-and-simple, and you'll have less competition.
I've noticed there is a "schedule tweet" option maybe you could schedule some tweets to keep your account active. A Happy New year here, a St. Patrick's Day there, maybe a few others. I know you don't want to tweet but at least this keeps you in the active category.
They plan on releasing the usernames of the deleted accounts for users.
____
previously unavailable usernames will start coming up for grabs after the 11 December cut-off - though Twitter said it would be a gradual process, beginning with users outside of the US.
As a firstname user, life isn't easy when it comes to notification spam b/c people think that putting a space between first and lastname still gets sent to the correct user. I've basically stopped checking them.
I have a similar issue on Github and Gitlab.com - my handle there (same as here) overlaps with a certain annotation from Java's Hibernate, so I get a lot of @mentions from random repos.
(And all that because Github and Gitlab are both case-insensitive when matching @mentions.)
A lot of this is automatic - someone uses the proper @Annotation in a commit messages or pull request name, and I get an e-mail that I was just mentioned in some random repo.
My college email forwarding is just my first name. (We got to choose our username and I got in early.) It doesn't really happen any longer but back in the day when a lot of people were not terribly familiar with the new-fangled email thing, I would get fairly regular emails--including some that were probably at least a bit sensitive--addressed to my first name by people who just assumed the email would somehow get to some other person with the same first name.
Ha, yeah. Imagine how I feel, sharing a name with a major VC firm! @sequoia was squatted for years, I asked for it back in 2011 or so along with verification that I am in fact Sequoia (github.com/sequoia etc.), they said they "don't release usernames."
It sat like that for several years until lo and behold, they do release usernames under the right circumstances (see @sequoia now). I just want to know what made them release the name to @sequoia and not me (don't answer that :p).
You must not be interacting with it in ANY way at all. I periodically use twitter to sign up for stuff at max and worst i've gotten is a compulsory password reset
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?
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.
> 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.
It's not disappointing, it's amazing that it's worth $24 billion now. A fair value is less than half that, and even at a 50% reduction that'd be at a obscenely generous 30-40 PE.
The premise of the outcome being disappointing supposes that there is anything that could have reasonably been done to meaningfully bolster the share price during that time. As opposed to Twitter in reality being a mature, slow growth, second tier social network (which is what it will always be no matter who is running it).
Dorsey has done a great job fixing the operational disaster that Twitter was previously. The reason the Twitter stock has been flat since the IPO, is because it was comically overvalued at the IPO, not primarily because it has been operated poorly since then. Based on its operating results contrasted with now, Twitter should have been worth a minimum of 3/4 less at its IPO than it was (probably more reasonably it should have been worth ~90% less at IPO, and worth a minimum of 50% less right now).
2015 | revenue $2.2b | op expenses $1.9b | op income -$450m
2018 | revenue $3b | op expenses $1.6b | op income $453m
The disaster that Dorsey inherited, he fixed. Flipping operating income by a positive $900 million in three years. A spectacular outcome for a business doing $3b in sales.
Twitter is still an independent business today solely because of the operational improvements that Dorsey made to push Twitter into sound profitability. If not for that, Twitter would have already been forced into selling itself (which was a common discussion prior to the dramatic improvement in operational results).
Boost sales $800m and drop operating expenses by $300m. That's as good as it is going to get for Twitter as a business conceptually. There is no scenario where it's going to be the next giant social network or a juggernaut like Facebook, there is no high growth scenario waiting to be discovered. The very nature of Twitter guarantees that can never happen, it can't attract enough participants to that style of social broadcast & consumption.
Yeah. Maybe it's a failure of imagination on my part but it feels like Twitter pretty much is what Twitter is. It's a broadcast medium for people for whom that has value, which is very useful for some of us and not at all useful for many others. People understandably get up in arms when Twitter tries to make the timeline too heavily sponsored. There's no reason to believe subscriptions would work without tanking the user numbers.
Twitter has actually already made changes that make it more useful for its core audience. Increased character counts etc., for example, has allowed Twitter to essentially replace microblogging--or even short-form blogging generally.
Twitter, Facebook, and similar might be of interest because of power and knowledge. If you are already super rich then making another billion or two may be less important than say analytics of how some popular uprising goes.
My pet theory is that Imgur is actually what the NSA needs all that diskspace in Utah for. :o)
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.
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.
People think that thinking through technical issues is hard, but thinking through issues dealing with people can make technical issues seem like child's play. This isn't just Twitter that botches thinking through the people aspect of changes. We see this happen to all sorts of companies across all industries.
This is uncharitable, IMO. It is not fair or reasonable to accuse a group of people of amateurism without knowing or understanding the constraints they’re working under.
You compare Twitter with Facebook but Facebook has 9X or so employees. Presumably that means that while a feature like memorialisation gets worked on at Facebook, there isn’t enough manpower to work on it at Twitter. They’re too busy working on the core parts, keeping the lights on. But again, there could be even more constraints that I’m not aware of and you’re not aware of.
Please please please let’s not sit on our ergonomic chairs and ask “why don’t you just” without understanding their perspective. Let’s assume good intent and reasonable competence. Of course we look smarter and more competent by accusing someone of being the opposite, but we should resist the urge.
After 7 years in tech, i've learnt it's not like dealing with real humans. You're dealing with a business engine - never assume good intent or competence when trying to reason out why a product arrived at it's current level of success or failure
Ah yes, the Littlefinger approach. “What’s the worst reason someone could have for doing the things they do and acting they way they act?”
Notice you still haven’t said how Twitter is supposed to do everything Facebook does but with 1/9th the number of employees. You and everyone else have directly assumed that Twitter has decides not to work on memorialisation because they are malicious or incompetent ... when it’s possible that they just didn’t have enough people to work on it.
With product development it's not about having "enough people" to do everything, it's about having the right priorities and choosing what to focus on.
We could discuss if this feature should have been prioritised or not, but claiming that Twitter is this little understaffed company that cannot be expected to implement something like that is a bit disingenuous.
You’ve misinterpreted what I said. I didn’t make a positive assertion that it was impossible for twitter to pick this up. I merely disagreed with the comparison with Facebook. The GP pointed out that Facebook could do it while Twitter couldn’t. I pointed out that sure, Facebook did it but they also have 9X the number of employees so it’s not a fair comparison.
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.
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.
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.
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?
1. When a person registers a name they declare a price they are willing to sell the name for. They can update their price at any time.
2. They pay an annual tax (about 1% to 5%) for the right to keep the name.
3. If someone is willing to buy the name for the declared price they are forced to sell the name to them.
This system has the advantage that the person who values the name the most will get to keep it, and the person who lost the name will be fairly compensated.
that's an economic solution (and a neat one at that) to a sociopolitical problem. societies use names to address, differentiate, and even affiliate each other.
economics concerns itself with the best allocation of productive resources. names don't really fall into that category (even if there is some marginal utility in the economic domain for edge cases like celebrities' names).
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.
> people have the same names in real life and we've learned to deal with it.
Yes, mostly by having systems that refer to people not by their names, but either by "universal" opaque IDs like social-security numbers, or by attaching to their name a system-specific hierarchical ID like a mailing address (because you're probably the only John Smith living at your address; if you weren't, it'd probably annoy you so much that you'd likely use a nickname.)
The "usernames" that this debate is about aren't "display names" (those can indeed be arbitrary), but rather basically "URL slugs"—things that allow you to target an email to that person, or to make a web request for the right person's content. Those have to be unique, in the same way that an SSN has to be unique. (They're primary/partitioning keys.)
Usernames, as URL slugs, are meant to be a "more readable, if possible" and "shorter, if possible" version of the opaque unique identifier, where you can maybe get something memorable and vaguely-resembling your own name, but where that can't be guaranteed, because a username—as a URL slug—can't sacrifice any of the properties of a unique identifier.
Yeah, I like that the arbitrary nature of non-meaningful names frees us from all these drawbacks and compromises. A simple system. But outside of strictly pseudonymous places like 4chan it erodes the concept of a unique username altogether. If you're always gonna type a display name and choose from a dropdown, why even display the numbers?
Plus, now that the identifier carries no meaning, you can't type "@realdonaldtrump ..." and expect people to know who it refers to, you'd have to type "@aae0450, Donald Trump ...".
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.
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.
>>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.
It is to cull high-volume bot programs, which are managed through the API. Note that every account will require a log-in to count as active, not just be posting.
If a single bot account was created by a person for fun, they can easily log into it once to prove activity.
But if a person (or, say, a national intelligence service) has created 20,000 accounts programmatically, they’re going to have a much harder time manually logging into every one of them to preserve them.
Having an account name like that just makes me completely skip any opinion a person has on social media.It's probably just some convoluted logic for a throwaway shitposting account
I would be pleasantly surprised if one of the big tech companies was deciding policy based on actual technical problems rather than politics/'business' reasons/whatever junk science is trending today. That would make a nice change.
No I highly doubt it. This is most likely as they say a GDPR issue. Per the GDPR they'll have to keep track of which users have agreed to which version of the ToS and Privacy Policy and make sure that they only process their data in accordance. This is a PITA, much easier to deem accounts inactive and delete their data. They've probably been contacted by the data commissioner of some EU country and asked nicely to comply with the GDPR.
A second, somewhat related issue, is that these inactive accounts might also be used by all the russian state trolls. It's much harder to detect when old accounts start doing suspicious things than brand new ones, especially if you don't have a robust process in place for flagging inactive users.
We're talking about users that last logged in more than 6 month ago here. It has obviously nothing to do with government sponsored shills or the GDPR. It's just that Twitter wants to eliminate users that are not "monetizable", they are also looking into users I quote "log in but don't do anything" on Twitter.
Actually, under the GDPR, as a general rule, you can't just keep personal data on your servers forever so GDPR might be involved but for personal data cleanup reasons/requirements.
I am not a Twitter engineer, but I guess that this is nothing else but a great marketing campaign - suddenly many people remember all their accounts and login and that will help to produce very nice reports about the "active user base".
But why is this needed?
My guess: many people are sick of Twitter and since one president of one nation made it his personal propaganda vehicle it is becoming a mental wasteland - new ecosystems are growing and people inside these new communities are quite happy that all the zombies are contained in that trash dump, like facebook.
Actually we should all be happy that these first big "social" networks decontaminated the internet for us - these are now the Tschernobyls of social media where all the toxic waste is collected, hopefully for many years.
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 ...
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.
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.
I'm sure they've at least proposed it before - some years ago I setup a recurring reminder to tweet on each of my Twitter accounts every six months "to prevent account deletion".
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.
“Sorry, your daughter has less than 1,000 followers, and has no real historical significance. Her account will be deleted and reclaimed as a result following the memorialization process.”
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.
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?
The GDPR angle is that this was why they decided to indiscriminately delete inactive accounts. Deceased users are the reason they're delaying it, not the reason they're doing it.
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.
That's also due to the news bias. If you never take the train yourself and only listen to the news, you can get the impressions that they crash or arrive late all the time and wonder why railway companies are still allowed to run...
Curate the hell out of who you follow. Keep politics an arms length away if it impacts you. Use lists to organise who you follow based on a common theme. Makes twitter a gold mine of information if you know how to really mine it. Don’t let the algorithm dictate what you read.
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.
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
Maybe it just looks like a great platform? It gives that nice illusion of communication, engagement, and activity. But would you be really worse off without all that?
I definitely feel like they could compromise and at least delete those blatantly unused ones.