7 ms·
I just deleted 36K tweets
- robk 10y agoMy favorite quote was “Assembling reality from the fragments of nuance is as foolish as making a snowman by catching flakes in mid-air.“
- xiaoma 10y agoI wish he'd said what service he used to delete all those tweets and to auto-delete his new ones after a certain amount of time has passed.
- z0noxz 10y agoWhen I deleted my Facebook and Twitter I wrote a simple little js-bot which did all the work :)
- tombrossman 10y agoThis is what I use: https://github.com/mikemcquaid/TwitterDelete https://github.com/mikemcquaid/TwitterDelete It's configurable, so my tweets auto-delete after 30 days unless 5+ people favorite or re-tweet them. The Ruby script has been running for several years now on my desktop without any issues (I'm using anacron on Ubuntu, because the computer is off at night when cron would normally run) There are third-party services available but I won't grant them access to my account and I prefer to do it myself.
- LordWinstanley 10y agoThanks for that link. Last time I did a Twitter pruning session to remove unwanted drivel, I did it manually and it took me a couple of hours. Thank God I'm only an occasional Twitterer, so I only had a couple of hundred to wade through. What I'm really waiting for though, to make good on my desire to abandon Twitter completely, is for alternatives like GNUsocial[0] to offer the ability to import your existing Twitter archive. But, as is so often the case with open source projects, they prefer to fuck about with "me too" enhancements like adding 'transgender muslim emoji' support, rather than actually providing incentives for people to migrate easily from Twitter. [0] https://gnu.io/social/try/ https://gnu.io/social/try/
- marklyon 10y agoIt's not automated, but I used Twitter Archive Eraser [0] to purge around 50k tweets around the new year. It worked well. [0] https://martani.github.io/Twitter-Archive-Eraser/ https://martani.github.io/Twitter-Archive-Eraser/
- remx 10y ago+1 for this tool. Also it deletes DMs which is handy incase your a/c is hacked and a hacker can't read through your DMs
- stevewillows 10y agoThis is the best! I cleared out all of my social media accounts just over a year and a half ago, but did so using unreliable tools. The real joy is the ability to filter and remove. Unlike the other tools I used, this actually reduced the overall tweet count accurately. When I started fresh before, twitter was still reporting 11k tweets. Thanks for mentioning this!
- Fermat963 10y agoI made this tool, I'm glad it was useful for you :) I made out of frustration with other tools that didn't help with deleting my own tweets.
- marklyon 10y agoThank you! Ever thought of doing something similar for Facebook?
- charlieegan3 10y agoI've been using Timehop to review old tweets daily.
- qznc 10y agoI use https://www.tweetdelete.net/ https://www.tweetdelete.net/
- ethank 10y agoThis one.
- passwordreset 10y agoI just found 12 bricks.
- skylan_q 10y agoEveryone I know from #FrogTwitter got banned so the remaining few went back and deleted all their tweets.
- stesch 10y ago"As an experiment I downloaded my entire archive" This is still possible? I've done this when the feature was new and tried it again a few weeks ago and there was nothing. Thought it is broken.
- a_bonobo 10y agoIt works for me- go to https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data and scroll alllllll the way down, there's a link to 'Twitter Archive'
- uptown 10y ago"As an experiment I downloaded my entire archive" I've wanted to do this, but in order to do it, you need to verify your email address with Twitter. Whenever I request the verification email nothing is sent or delivered. (Checked spam and everything). Twitter's support hasn't responded to my inquires, so I'm basically stuck. Anyone happen to have a solution for this?
- amorphid 10y agoUse a different email address?
- uptown 10y agoYou mean change the one associated with my account? Good idea. I'll give that a shot. Hopefully won't lock me out completely.
- uptown 10y agoThis ended up working. Thanks so much for the suggestion!
- amorphid 10y agoLOL, I was curious if it would work myself, so I tried it and posted the results. It worked for me, too :)
- ValentineC 10y agoWhat email provider were you using at first on your account?
- uptown 10y agoGMail. Only thing I can think is that at some point I may have opted out of all emails from Twitter, and somehow this got swept up in that block.
- 10y ago
- tnone 10y agoI like the party line analogy, and for once the spectre of anonymous trolls isn't used as a catch all. Twitter definitely jumped the shark a while ago. The hashtags got hijacked by brands and activists for hollow signaling and marketing. Retweeting and quoting got repurposed to shame and bully. Forced brevity got redirected into hot takes and memes. It was the core community who did it all first. I suspect Twitter has been pushed aside by many for more private and granular services like Discord and Slack. Discovery there is a problem though, a million chat rooms of 10 people each make for a poor community. In some ways it's like the living rooms of Iran: most know public discourse is messed up and broken beyond repair, so they only speak openly behind closed doors. If Twitter could admit that and shift gears, there might still be some hope and a future in it. As it stands, all they're doing is giving people better shovels to dig themselves deeper into the hole of their own making.
- flocial 10y agoTwitter was ahead of its time and tried build a messaging protocol on a doomed stack (ror). Then they nuked the third party apps they didn't already buy and the list goes on. I sometimes wonder how history would be different if they deleted Trump's account for trolling while they still had a chance. I still think a new twitter like service could still be relevant minus the baggage of what twitter has become. They could solve a lot of their issues by quarantining trolls including Trump into a different sub domain. The biggest problem with most social networks is that once celebrities flock to your service they tend to dominate all discourse and you end up with a dichotomy of leaders and followers. Facebook somehow manages to still keep trolls from dominating dialogue though it can be suffocating and reddit manages to counter the trolls with quality subreddits for people fed up with trolls.
- jccooper 10y agoI'm not a heavy Twitter user so I must be missing something. How does a Twitter history make any difference to current usage? Do people actually dredge up and react to old tweets?
- ethank 10y agoIt's like detritus without context. Memory is so subjective and left over tweets from ten years are a pseudo objective slant on memory that doesn't really work.
- chippy 10y agoI also recently deleted most of my >10K tweets after signing up around 10 years. I'm keeping certain tweets that have a specified string in them, and I'm keeping all the favourites. I used this Ruby application to do so, together with the archive CSV, customising it a bit. https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/TwitterDelete https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/TwitterDelete I think Twitter became less local or personal and became more serious.
- arrakeen 10y agoi suppose i use twitter very differently than mr. kaplan. for me, twitter is almost like a social "one line a day" journal, where i persist random thoughts and jokes i have throughout the day. what he considers "fragments of nothing" without any worth, i consider memories. i can still look back at my old tweets from 2008 and remember what i was doing and why i made the tweet almost 10 years on. i'm likely in the minority, but twitter for me is more personal than performative or social. i keep a backup of my tweets archive so that i will never lose any of my memories. and this is why i find tweet delete services so baffling.
- ethank 10y agoMy usage transitioned over time from a more mundane "here's what I'm up to" to more of a pulpit. I became bored with bother versions of me.
- anotherturn 10y agoI did a similar thing recently. Archived my tweets and then deleted them all. Something to note is that archives don't come with local copies of photos/videos, but I found a handy python repo to help with that [1]. [1]:https://github.com/mwichary/twitter-export-image-fill https://github.com/mwichary/twitter-export-image-fill
- johnloeber 10y agoShameless plug: I have written a similar tool to also archive all of your tweets, with a delete option. It's a little more fully featured. https://github.com/Datamine/Archive-Tweets https://github.com/Datamine/Archive-Tweets
- remx 10y agoI use dhIMG Twitter by Dale Hay https://dalehay.me/dhimg/ https://dalehay.me/dhimg/ There's also tools for ripping Instagram and Tumblr photos :)
- ChrisNorstrom 10y agoI wish we could petition y-combinator to allow them to allow a member to delete their Hacker News account and comments. This year for spring cleaning. I deleted facebook, twitter, disqus, and thousands of comments I left on websites from over a decade ago. No archiving, just permanent deletion. It was the the most beautiful feeling. I felt free. Like a new person. Like there wasn't a part of me roaming around on the internet building up dust anymore. I know space is cheap and startups love data but we should study what all that does to a person emotionally. IF {Google Glass was suppose to keep us connected /BUT/ Google glass failed because we felt too connected /BECAUSE OF/ a human emotional desire to be left alone and let the mind relax.} THEN {Permanently archiving all your content is suppose to be a feature /BUT/ people are deleting their content /BECAUSE OF/ a human emotional desire to start over, clean up, and not leave things strewn about} That being said I really wish the Hacker News team would add a "DELETE ACCOUNT and all comments" feature. It's ironic that Y-Combinator's hacker news team stands up for so many positive internet movements yet feel that they can permanently keep all the content I generated. It is MY content after all. Do they own the copyright to MY words? The excuse has always been "it's a part of the public dialog". Everything is. Facebook, Twitter, & Disqus are also part of the public dialog. And they let me delete myself off of their services.
- nkurz 10y agoIt's ironic that Y-Combinator's hacker news team stands up for so many positive internet movements yet feel that they can permanently keep all the content I generated. It is MY content after all. Do they own the copyright to MY words? The excuse has always been "it's a part of the public dialog". Am I understanding correctly that you asked (politely) by email to hn@ycombinator.com and they refused because "it's a part of the public dialog"? If so, I'm surprised and sympathetic. That response seems out of keeping with their generally accommodating approach.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- grzm 10y agoFor reference, here's 'pg on the topic. It's from a while back, but as I understand it, it's still HN policy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226
- pixelbill 10y agoI've never used twitter, am I deserving of some sort of reward or recognition too?
- angstrom 10y agoSome people get off on tomb-stoning large amounts of data. Let him have his moment. Tweets are equivalent to taking a dandelion that's seeded and blowing it into the wind.
- sarcasmic 10y agoThis is funny to me, because while I used Twitter, I mostly did it to broadcast mundane things to my friends, and never really participated in the "Twitter community", whatever that actually means to people. Facebook cloned one of Twitter's core features with the 'Status' prompt that served as an effective replacement for real-life friends, while Tumblr was a better place where you could pseudonymously post long-form content with many of the same pressures and rewards of virality, but its many different communities that had a lower propensity to devolve into flaming and trolling. By the time professionals' "I'm leaving Twitter" posts became unremarkable and trite, the mass exodus was well on its way: to Facebook for its more granual privacy/audience controls, Medium for its analytics, social features, and perceived professionalism, or to the social black hole, having been disenchanted with an overtly social, always public presence altogether. It's always bittersweet (though mostly bitter) when communities falter and fall apart, but to me Twitter was never a good place to build a community anyway. Most of its advantages came from media and commentators fuming over having missed the boat on Facebook, so there was a concentrated effort to never make that mistake again: hashtags and Tweets were everywhere more so than AOL keywords ever were, which quickly made Twitter mandatory for people who wanted to feel like they could be "influencers", or hang out in their company. In this social and reputational gold rush, only a few came out ahead, which should not be a surprise to anyone, as much as it frustrates those who tried.
- SkyMarshal 10y agoFunny, I recently got into Twitter about two years ago. I've ditched Facebook b/c its creepy af, prefer my own static site with Disqus for blogging (won't get taken down, or at least easily portable if Github or AWS eventually fails), and consider Tumblr a cultural wasteland. The important thing about Twitter is it's a really good real-time online CV/resume. I basically use it to tweet about things I care about professionally, and then link my Twitter account on my other personal pages. That way I can keep my personal pages relatively generic and point potential employers, employees, customers, or partners at my Twitter if they want to see a more current snapshot of my professional activities. For the most part I don't get involved in the naval-gazing self-back-patting "Twitter Community" either, nor do I post about mundane personal shit, I keep it all professional-related. Most of my posts are intended for non-Twitter users (or at least people coming to my profile from origins other than Twitter) who are vetting me for some business opportunity.
- ethank 10y agoI guess I can answer questions here too. Hi there.
- james_pm 10y agoThis post inspired me to do the same thing. 41,000 tweets deleted (but archived first). I quit tweeting and unfollowed everyone a few weeks ago, so deleting everything was a good next step. We'll see how long my 773 followers stick around now :P.
- unicornporn 10y agoI wonder how many of those tweets that were ever retweeted. Retweeted tweets are replicated and will never go away. I know you shouldn't expect things published publicly on the internet to ever go away, but I think that this one of the cons of Twitter.