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I wonder what will happen to the twitter accounts of folks who have passed away? Eg. Aaron Swartz: https://twitter.com/aaronsw https://twitter.com/aaronsw https
by rahuldottech 7y ago
I wonder what will happen to the twitter accounts of folks who have passed away? Eg. Aaron Swartz: https://twitter.com/aaronsw https://twitter.com/aaronsw https://twitter.com/aaronsw_hv https://twitter.com/aaronsw_hv
> The cull will include users who stopped posting to the site because they died - unless someone with that person's account details is able to log-in.
Yeah, this is bad.
EDIT
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Archive Team is making an effort to archive twitter accounts of dead users. Please see these links:
https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1199459588594176000 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1199459588594176000
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScbCbDZEPfxPCqOLRvo525QYGgwRnNgL3dmemZGdtRWk_epsQ/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScbCbDZEPfxPCqOLRvo...
https://www.archiveteam.org/ https://www.archiveteam.org/
- wilg 7y agoSeems like they could avoid this problem, keep old accounts, and still free up the namespace by just renaming all these accounts @_archived_originalname (or something better). Maybe with some kind of process to re-activate the account under the original name (or a new one if it has since been taken). And some kind of hands-on resolution process for people who accidentally got deactivated. Feels tractable.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago> Twitter said the effort is not, as had been suggested by some users on the network, an attempt to free up usernames. > The site said it was because users who do not log-in were unable to agree to its updated privacy policies.
- OJFord 7y agoThat.. makes sense, but is almost suspiciously proactive.
- dmix 7y ago6 months is quite a bold number, much harsher than domain names would do. I’d get like two years which is probably still tens of millions. That’s a lot of potential digital content that will go dark.
- unityByFreedom 7y agoDoes that make sense? Why should a privacy policy be retroactive on things I already posted?
- CKN23-ARIN 7y agoBecause Twitter potentially bears liability by hosting them into the future, and is only willing to bear that liability if you agree to their terms.
- unityByFreedom 7y agoCitation needed. If they receive a copyright takedown request and don't act on it, then they're liable. Otherwise I don't see where liability comes into play. Please cite court cases showing websites are liable for content posted by its users. Nobody is using Twitter to archive copyrighted material.
- jlgaddis 7y agoExcept that Section 230 explicitly states that they don't bear liability.
- flurdy 7y agoDon't like that idea. There are a lot of direct links across the internet to tweets that would get broken if the handle was renamed.
- strict9 7y agoThis was my first thought at reading the headline before clicking through. Thank you for sharing the form from archive team. My first thought was Hal Finney, whose account I occasionally browse for a reminder of what twitter was like 10 years ago. https://twitter.com/halfin https://twitter.com/halfin >Harold Thomas Finney II (May 4, 1956 – August 28, 2014) was a developer for PGP Corporation, and was the second developer hired after Phil Zimmermann. In his early career, he was credited as lead developer on several console games. He also was an early bitcoin contributor and received the first bitcoin transaction from bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto [1] This is only one example. So many historical figures gone to free up some vanity names. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist...
- rb808 7y agoI worked with a guy who died of a heart attack. Every year LinkedIn asks me to congratulate him having worked X+N years at the company. You have to wonder when they'll give up.
- prawn 7y agoI follow an acquaintance on Twitter who set up an auto-tweet while he was alive. Now, after his death, he still tweets whenever the weather drops below a certain temperature in Scotland.
- geofft 7y agoNow I'm wondering what your acquaintance's tech stack is, and more generally, what the most reliable way to keep running scheduled jobs after death is - since Twitter won't remove accounts that still log in, I kind of want to set up a cronjob to keep my username active for as long as I can. (Assume that the job itself doesn't change, i.e., there's no need to move away from a deprecated API.) Maybe Lambda + CloudWatch Events? AWS probably won't go away for decades. Does your credit card automatically close when your death is reported to the financial system, or can you direct it to stay open in your will + set aside a bit of money to pay off the couple-cent bill in perpetuity?
- philliphaydon 7y agoNot sure it would matter if the CC was closed or not. If you're running a Lambda a few times a day you would fall into the free tier for... ever until they change the free tier. So the question would be does your account stay active despite an expired credit card which is never invoked cos you never put your account into debt?
- TurningCanadian 7y agoWhat if AWS changes their privacy policy
- 7y ago
- notatoad 7y agoArchive team seems like the appropriate end for these accounts. Maintaining accounts for deceased people for the remainder of the lifespan of the internet is not really a sustainable thing.
- 55555 7y agomaintaining accounts for deceased people for the remainder of the lifespan of Twitter is probably sustainable, though.
- TheCraiggers 7y agoTo what end? You already assume Twitter has a shorter lifespan than the internet. Are you going to be upset when Twitter dies, removing not just all the accounts of live people, but dead people as well? Also, Twitter may disagree with you on its lifespan. I wouldn't, but I do believe that unless they do start archiving, it will reduce its lifespan, perhaps considerably.
- Laforet 7y agoThis is why I really don't like the recent trend of third party sites dynamically embedding tweets on their own page when a screenshot plus direct link could have sufficed. The internet has already lost a great deal of its past with many historical image hosts that went down or rogue (looking at you Photobucket). Why are people making the same mistake again? BTW Facebook have had the option to memorialize the profile of the deceased for a while. Things seems to have worked out fine for them.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Springtime 7y agoThe issue I've seen with archive efforts that end up on the Internet Archive whether by IA via Archive Team is problems with infinite scroll (and other forms of dynamically loading content via JS), at least in my experience. Though I recall one WARC archiving tool that could achieve it (I believe it required the user to manually scroll the page during the capture).
- markjgraham 7y agoThe Internet Archive uses various Web archiving technologies and processes to capture Web-based resources and is working to improve them on an ongoing basis. This includes support for sites/pages that support infinite scroll via JS. If you have specific requests, bug reports, issues, please send them to info@archive.org and we will try to do better.
- ajcodez 7y agoFor every Aaron there are thousands of people who signed up, took a great all letters no numbers username, never posted, and never came back.
- sojmq 7y agoWhy is it bad? Why should dead people take up usernames? What will happen in 50 years, half of good usernames will be taken by graveyard dwellers?
- rahuldottech 7y agoI don't care about their usernames. Just their content.
- blackearl 7y agoTwitter won't exist that long
- notzuck 7y agoAaron Swartz (hv) @aaronsw_hv 12 Sep 2011 More Wow, Newt flipflopped instantaneously on that one. #CNNTeaParty Yeah really bad that we can't save this shit? Why do you think we should save crap written by dead people? This period will archive so much digital history, it will mostly be considered a joke in the future.
- ryanmercer 7y agoI regularly visit Adam West's feed. I knew Adam and going to see some of his corny posts (like Moose Wayne) are an occasional comfort and not only remind me of him but remind me of watching the tv series as a child with my late father. Sadly, I've noticed that DMs don't seem to be forever on twitter as all of our private messages to each other are all gone, the bulk were gone before he even passed away. Given his account is verified I would hope that Twitter keeps that content as long as the service survives, but for those with family and friends that have passed that weren't high profile, they may also take comfort in going through then posts of those accounts and this is kinda blah. I get it from a cost view, it costs money to keep all of that data but I somewhat feel that a company that has user created content is socially obligated to maintain that content as long as they continue to have that product or until the user wants it removed whichever comes first.
- ForHackernews 7y agoWhy is that bad? Most people probably wouldn't want their twitter account to be their most lasting legacy.
- kpU8efre7r 7y agoI think it's good. If it's determined to be of historical significance someone like archive.org can archive it. If not Twitter can delete it.