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Archive team seems like the appropriate end for these accounts. Maintaining accounts for deceased people for the remainder of the lifespan of the internet is n
by notatoad 7y ago
Archive 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.
- eru 7y agoWhy a screenshot? That would mess with screenreaders. Tweets are text, so quote them as text?
- syshum 7y agoWhy would is mess with Screen readers? the Alt tag has been a thing for a long time.
- vthriller 7y agoWhy then embed tweet as an image if you're going to copy its text anyway?
- ryanmercer 7y agoSo when twitter changes an API, or is down, and someone happens upon your page they can still see what you intended to include. Also if you're documenting something like John Smith said "Kill all Muppets, they're taking human jobs" and his publicist goes "John, you really need to delete that tweet" and he does, you can show a screenshot of it to prevent revisionist history.
- icebraining 7y agoWe're not talking about using the API, but whether to prefer copying the tweet as a screenshot+text or just the text.
- eru 7y agoYes. And you could even quote the page with all the twitter styling. Ie quote the HTML and CSS instead of just the tweet, if you really want that twitter look and feel.
- syshum 7y agoSame reason we use Archiving services
- notatoad 7y agodoesn't the default twitter embed include the original text of the tweet in the embed code, and then just dynamically load in the like/retweet counts and branding? at least that's the way it looks when they load on a ridiculously slow internet connection, i've never actually looked at the embed code.
- icebraining 7y agoYes, you're right. Of course, images and quoted tweets also get loaded dynamically, and the text may be hard to understand without those.
- donatj 7y agoThe number of links I come across from dead link shortening services is too damn high.
- dredmorbius 7y agoThe most frustrating case for me is Readability, whcih swapped out the original links to articles with its own link shortener, then went titsup.com Even migrating those to Pocket (which I hope doesn't do similarly, though it remains all but useless), I've got hundreds of link-shortened articles I need to track down, one by one.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- eru 7y agoWhy not? If computational resources keep getting cheaper exponentially (even at a low rate), keeping eg 1 GiB around forever only costs a finite amount of money.
- Tomte 7y agoSpace gets cheap. But the namespace for user names gets ever more crowded.
- notatoad 7y agonot just the namespace, but the content-space. a service like twitter thives on a feeling if immediacy and involvement, and if you were to constantly be coming across dead accounts (whether the owner is deceased or just otherwise left twitter) i think it would detract from the usefulness of twitter. whether the accounts are moved to the internet archive or some twitter-hosted archive, the value in twitter is not in old tweets. i think most people would be better off if all of twitter had an automatic expiry.
- donatj 7y agoOn a site that only actively presents the newest content, there’s no way you would be constantly coming across dead accounts. I also find the insinuation that dead users provide no value absurd. Aside from current events, the human condition doesn’t really change, which is why we can still enjoy books written hundreds of years ago.
- zaarn 7y agoThere is a limit to the cost of computational resources, the cost would decrease until a certain limit and then that cost will apply until the heat death of the universe.
- eru 7y agoYes. Though in our case I feel justified in using the simpler model of just assuming exponential shrinkage forever, because I assume that the end of twitter as a company (or the Internet) will happen before the heat death of the universe. (Similar to how we often treat integers as unit-sized in asymptotic analysis of algorithms, even though we know that we need a logarithmic number of bits for truly large numbers.)