[smokinjoe]

What are the use-cases for something like this?

I'm really curious because for me personally, if I were to delete something later then my opinion is that I shouldn't have posted it in the first place. Of course typos and mistakes happen but I feel like those things can't really be scheduled.

I guess maybe having it permanently turning on during evening hours to prevent any lasting drunk tweets/posts - but it's the internet, once it's up there and embarrassing it's probably everywhere else too.

[slg]

A lot of tweets have no value without context and many times that context can simply be timing. This is especially true during live events like the Superbowl or Oscars. Those tweets might have immense immediate value, but they lose almost all value once that live event has passed. If you want a perfectly currated feed that allows users to go back and read your tweet history (or you expect someone might do that as part of a hiring decision) I could certainly see value in clearing out those tweets that are now worthless without their original context.

[klapinat0r]

I follow your point, but isn't that the duality of what hashtags try to solve (topic and context)?

[yummyfajitas]

Sometimes the context of a tweet can be forgotten.

Mel Gibson, 4 years ago: "You Look Like A F---Cking Pig In Heat And If You Get Raped By A Pack Of N---Ers It Will Be your fault"

http://www.ranker.com/list/top-10-most-offensive-mel-gibson-...

A tweet from 4 years ago: "In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though."

Years later the conclusion of the media frenzy was that Pax Dickonson was a great big racist, because no one recognized that he was mocking Mel Gibson.

[md224]

As someone who was just thinking about this concept a week or two ago, I can tell you how I viewed the use case. (And kudos to the developer who actually followed through with building it, unlike me!)

To me, it's about subverting the chilling effect that occurs when you're about to say something online and you think "could someone potentially use these words against me?" Not only governments or enemies with grudges, but even future employers with hair-trigger sensitivity doing some kind of background review. Many of us (if not all of us) have opinions or perspectives that may make others uncomfortable, and it seems unfortunate when we censor ourselves for the sake of maintaining a pristine public image.

One solution is to simply say whatever you want and then, if you reach a point where you sense that your persona may come under scrutiny (perhaps you're applying for jobs), go back and remove any material that you feel might be used against you.

The other solution is this concept of self-deleting messages. Instead of having to go back and find all the things you said that could be liabilities, simply give these comments a maximum lifetime when you make them. It's an efficiency thing. You save yourself the worry of "ah god what if I forget I said this and someone finds it down the road" and you avoid neurosis keeping you silent when you should be able to speak your mind. It seems like a win-win to me.

Sure, if somebody REALLY wanted to preserve your statements on the internet, they could do that. And this tool would basically be useless for celebrities or anyone with a significant following. But most of us aren't those people. Our public faces rarely come under scrutiny, but it would be helpful to have a tool that makes it easier to manage when they do.

[adyus]

I think your comment is assuming that something actually gets deleted permanently from social networks. That has been proven to not be the case.

Once something is published, the cat's out of the bag. Sure, for a person with few followers trying to guard their future, the risk is smaller than the celebrity in your example.

But the risk of a bot snapping a shot of the statement before it gets deleted outweighs the reward of posting ephemerally, at least for me.

[md224]

> But the risk of a bot snapping a shot of the statement before it gets deleted outweighs the reward of posting ephemerally, at least for me.

Sure, that's valid. I guess I just don't see that risk as worth worrying about; I can't envision a scenario in which a future auditor (other than the government, perhaps) would resort to that kind of digital archeology to defeat my attempts at removing controversial statements.

It's possible that I'm just really underestimating how much the average person has their social media statements cached and replicated across the Internet in a public fashion, accessible by a simple search for their name. In my opinion, if you say something and then have a program "delete" it after 48 hours, future employers or adversaries aren't going to see it unless:

a) they happen to work for the social network in question and see no problem in digging through their own databases/backups

b) they're a government agency with access to troves of archived communications

Considering I find both scenarios to be fairly unethical, I don't think I'd want to seek employment from company A or government agency B to begin with.

Of course, when we're talking about governments as adversaries, the rules go out the window. I'm talking more about barely controversial statements made by average citizens who might be a little concerned with how future employers view their public persona. I think that's a valid use case.

[zeroc]

Yeah, absolutely my thoughts. Many times I want to post something related to politics and as you know we all have some weird opinions, then a couple of days after that the post becomes obsolete.

[jamesbritt]

I'm really curious because for me personally, if I were to delete something later then my opinion is that I shouldn't have posted it in the first place.

Twitter, for me, has the feel of an impromptu off-the-cuff conversation with some odd, semi-random, group of people.

It encourages the offhand remark, things that make sense and have value (hopefully) at a given time. When tweeted, a comment is valuable to the owner and the readers, but as time passes and the context is lost the value and meaning changes.

I like the idea of enforcing a public ephemerality on things that are created within a specific time and context.

[smokinjoe]

> I like the idea of enforcing a public ephemerality on things that are created within a specific time and context.

That makes a lot of sense. I could absolutely see the usefulness of an option to delete tweets that have taken place in a conversation where previous tweets had been deleted.

Sure it could be abused, but it wouldn't leave any out-of-context updates out there.

[zorpner]

This is an interesting article from a couple years ago about some people who either disable their social media accounts when not in use, or use them ephemerally: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/11/08/risk-re...