[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.

[paulryanrogers]

Business names and brands get resold. Trademarks expire. People learn. Life goes on.

Tech can provide a variety of measures like archiving the past lifetimes of a user name. Keeping old links to specific content alive whilst allowing reuse of the handle for someone else.

ICANN and platforms can moderate impersonation where it is malicious or causes genuine and widespread confusion.

[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?