[disjunct]

In contrast to Twitter's newly updated inactive account policy

> We encourage people to actively log in and use Twitter when they register an account. To keep your account active, be sure to log in at least every 30 days. Accounts may be permanently removed due to prolonged inactivity.

It changed from 6 months around early May: https://web.archive.org/web/20230503204041/https://help.twit...

[naet]

I've been wanting my real name as Twitter handle but someone took it in 2012, posted one tweet and never used it again.

Six months or one month is too short and would definitely damage the platform. But I wouldn't hate erasing accounts that have over 5-10 years without activity (and maybe with less than 20-50 total tweets).

[r721]

Why even erase accounts at all? Just rename them to randomized names with a prefix.

[MallocVoidstar]

Tumblr's method is to append "-blog" to the account name. Still discoverable.

[jzig]

How do you find the account again?

[Dylan16807]

A link to a tweet would do it. And if they're in any lists, those lists could show the old name too.

You could also keep the old name (or most of it) as the start of the new name.

[numpad0]

Some inactive users are legit dead with friends still on the platform. It’ll be very mean to erase records of such accounts.

[mvdtnz]

I don't agree with this perspective. People die and the world keeps turning. We don't stop renting out homes that now-deceased people lived in, we don't keep their phone numbers active, we don't keep their bank accounts open and active indefinitely or keep their employment agreements current. I don't see why a twitter username is so sacred.

[jzb]

None of your examples are like a social media handle or account. I can’t visit my dead friend’s bank account to see pictures of us together with a story and comments about a great trip. (As just one example.)

I can export my history from social sites with some ease, but it’s not so easy to preserve other’s once they’ve passed.

The larger topic of how to handle death / inactive accounts on social media deserves some discussion. I’ve had a few friends and several colleagues pass in the last ten years. It’s nice to be able to visit their pages. It’s disconcerting as fuck to have, say, Facebook try to prompt you to message them because you haven’t in a while or because it’s their birthday.

But your response is fairly callous and flippant. Do better.

[paulryanrogers]

Social media is more like a common space, and unique user names are a limited resource. Being born with a common name I've come to terms with never getting my name and being difficult to identify among the masses with the same name.

The people who remember me will have their memories and any copies of digital exchanges or recordings they've made. That's more than enough for me. We'll all be forgotten soon enough.

And recycling user names should actually make problems like disturbing notifications less likely.

[jzb]

"Social media is more like a common space, and unique user names are a limited resource."

This doesn't persuade me that culling usernames after someone dies is a great policy, especially when it also removes their content.

On the contrary - if unique usernames have value, then once someone has established a presence using that identity, it shouldn't be transferred to someone else. We've already seen the harms of domain squatting on expired registrations. I don't see any value in establishing a system that's going to allow people to take usernames that have a reputation built up by someone now dead. But I do see ample harm that can result from it.

For one thing, news doesn't always circulate evenly. You may not know someone has died immediately - so if a social media site allows redistribution of usernames after 12 months, it's real easy to imagine that being used for malicious purposes.

Social media sites really need to get away from the username model. Not sure what should replace it, but there's too many flaws inherent in allowing someone to build up a reputation / identity under a specific username and then turning that handle over to someone else.

Likewise, the first-come, first-serve model has been abused too. For many years Red Hat's twitter handle was not @redhat because someone else had squatted on the handle and would log in just often enough to keep it from being claimed under Twitter's policies. Had they pretended to be Red Hat it would've been reaped, but they just squatted on the username and kept it from being used. There's no reason a rando user should be able to claim a name that clearly isn't theirs.

And the whole common name problem, too. But taking, say @bobsmith away from the dead Bob Smith and handing it to somebody else isn't a good answer.

[allarm]

What are you talking about? It’s not about the username, it’s about the whole history of tweets, including conversations. I assume it’s quite easy to see why removing the conversation history of a deceased person might be considered bad by those who knew them.

[simonw]

We don't round up every existing record of that person and set fire to them either.

[mvdtnz]

I wonder if your gym will feel the same way about your reserved locker after you pass?

[kwhitefoot]

Your locker at the gym isn't a record of your interactions with other people.

[yawpitch]

Those are false equivalencies… a home changing hands doesn’t wipe out the entire world’s memory of every meal that now-deceased person ever had with friends in that house, every saved voice message on their still-grieving lover’s phone, all trace of their money and assets, or all the accounting entries and signatures on contracts they made during their employment history.

The username isn’t sacred… how that human user impacted others, and how the recycling of their account and its history would affect other humans, that’s what — should be — sacred.

And it’s not like Twitter is materially harmed by inactive accounts or have a demonstrable need to recycle usernames… they aren’t doing this to recover inactive usernames, they’re doing it (exclusively) to apply pressure to infrequent users to either view advertising or pay for an increasingly meaningless blue icon.

[numpad0]

I’m suspecting they’ve stopped caring about spam accounts, and spam account has started putting tolls on either their backend or the namespace. The amount of spams named in Docker style format is insane since the buyout.

[duskwuff]

> But I wouldn't hate erasing accounts that have over 5-10 years without activity (and maybe with less than 20-50 total tweets).

Better yet, do it based on the number of interactions (replies/likes/retweets) on the account's tweets. If people interacted with an account when it was alive, it's worth keeping.

[hammyhavoc]

The popularity of something has no bearing on its validity, especially on social media where the signal-to-noise ratio sucks.

Example: an autistic man joins a social media platform to share his ideas/research/whatever, he has no friends IRL, he doesn't do well with interacting with others, but his output is useful if someone were to find it.

I find all kinds of very useful information obsessively documented by folks who have very little in the way of social skills, marketing or interest to reach vast sums of people.

By your logic, a video of someone falling in public in a funny way that gets a few million views is more meaningful than a fix for a niche piece of software, or a mod for an obscure piece of old hardware.

[jzb]

What’s the cutoff? Just how popular does my dead friend’s account need to have been so it doesn’t get memory holed?

[nirui]

BTW: 30 days is the duration of one blue check mark subscription. So I guess, in the mind of Mr. Musk, you must "subscription" your free account as well via login in? Never the less, this is a good thing. I set my Telegram account expiration duration to 30 days as well, and I've never opened their app since... I think 2018.

To me it's great that Twitter is doing something similar to 4chan, which is making publication temporary. Musk probably realized that most posts on Twitter is worthless garbage anyways (which is also true for almost all opinion/emotion based conversations on the Internet as well, this ones too) and incapable of constructing any meaningful solution to the world's problem. Why paying all the money to store these volatile, useless and maybe even destructive information?

Also, this policy has great effect of... shall I put it... testing the real social value of Twitter. Musk brought it for like $10B? That's way over priced ;)

[simonw]

"To me it's great that Twitter is doing something similar to 4chan, which is making publication temporary."

I think it's catastrophic.

Just because some people don't value their own historical content doesn't mean that attitude should be inflicted on everyone else.

The amount of cultural, historic value in old tweets is absolutely immense. They tell stories that are both national or global in scale, as well as stories that are much more personal.

My own Twitter history stretches back over 16 years. It captures my career achievements, online relationships I've formed, things I've learned, stuff I've published. I have a backup, thankfully, because I clearly can't trust Twitter to treat it with the respect that I think it deserves.

If Twitter had been documented as ephemeral from day one this would be a very different conversation. The problem here is that millions of people have entrusted their content to it (over the past 17+ years) on the loose understanding that it wouldn't be thrown away with 30 days notice.

[DiggyJohnson]

Cynically, as someone who isn’t on twitter, I have to ask whether that history is as important as you’re making it out to be?

You, yourself, the human being are the real legacy of your past. I feel like your history on twitter pales in comparison. And I know it might not feel that way if you’ve been on the platform for so long.

What actually matters?

[Alphaeus]

There's a lot of information that was only ever posted to Twitter (whether you're a fan of that or not). Even if only 0.1% of it was valuable, that's still an incredible wealth of information lost. Think about how many pages across the internet cite tweets, how many links would be dead if everything was purged.

[bombcar]

Those, too, will be lost in time, like tears in rain, eventually. Archive the tweet or otherwise duplicate the information if it's important.

Even if for nothing other than all accounts are banned, eventually.

[hakfoo]

This demonstrates a real issue: even information you "own" and feel like you can pull the plug on, really becomes part of a global discussion that can only be lessened by removing it.

A tweet you posted 10 years ago might be irrelevant noise to you, but someone else may have quoted it, assuming it's archived on a "too big to fail" platform, effectively eternal, and then from there it spreads into other conversations.

Who's responsible for deciding how and when to archive that?

Aside from that, there's huge historic value in the mundane in the aggregate. We have fine-grained knowledge of the rise and fall of cultural trends and figured-- the sort of stuff that will never make a "formal" historical record but will richly flesh out future understanding of early 21st century life. Much as many of today's historians will get more value out of a Tudor era garbage dump than a perfect statue of Henry VIII, social media will be an unimaginable treasure trove for 2500's historians.

[allarm]

Is there a way to archive the whole twitter history? I think there was a limitation on a number of tweets you can export using their api.

[ed25519FUUU]

Do people ever go on Twitter to view tweets that are more than 2 days old? The only time I see posts that old is when someone is mocking another person with a “is that you?” post showing some sort of hypocrisy.

I don’t think anyone would really notice if posts older than 2 weeks auto deleted.

[earthling8118]

That's the sole way I use the service. I don't have time to be constantly checking it. I may get linked to something there from some other website though and read into things.

I don't find Twitter to be a good service for real-time communication so it's much better this way.

[simonw]

Yes. I frequently access tweets from years ago using Twitter search or following links from more recent tweets.

[chalst]

> Do people ever go on Twitter to view tweets that are more than 2 days old?

I do, fairly frequently.

[pavlov]

Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter. Overpriced indeed.

[lawgimenez]

This sucks, so Twitter will removed my 13 year old account just because I want some social media detox for over 1 month?

[wahnfrieden]

Yes, time to move on

[quaintdev]

Or ditch social media altogether

[labster]

If you need a detox from Twitter, maybe your account getting repossessed is a good thing for your health. Elon is doing this for public health.

[hammyhavoc]

Call it what it is: forced engagement.

It's Farmville: "Login to water your crops every x hours."

[hablog]

I assume twitter has like 7 million times as many accounts as whatever this website is though