14 ms·

Twitter account deletions on 'pause' after outcry

175 points by herendin2 7y ago

dang 7y ago
Original thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21644230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21644230
atticmanatee 7y ago
It never ceases to amaze me how Twitter is so unprepared for anything they do. This was something Facebook did a few years ago Even Google+ (rest in peace) had a similar feature. How could they have forgotten that dead people may have used their platform, and living relatives would be upset? Either Twitter is completely run by amateurs - since its inception - or by people who just don’t care. Which one is worst, I wonder?
- undefined3840 7y ago
  It’s pretty disappointing. Their share price has been completely flat since IPO. I’m surprised shareholders have not revolted against Jack being a part time CEO. Clearly there needs to be some dedicated focus to clean up the app. So much potential to be so much better.
  - echelon 7y ago
    Vine could have easily beaten TikTok. It was already well positioned.
    - rahuldottech 7y ago
      TikTok didn't even exist back then. It's essentially a Vine replacement + extras.
  - fphilipe 7y ago
    It has always amazed me how one can be a part time CEO, let alone CEO at two companies simultaneously. How would a board even allow that?
    - emptybottle 7y ago
      Part time board
    - caymanjim 7y ago
      CEOs aren't that busy. That's what they hire people for. The most successful people aren't running around like maniacs all the time. They are organized, they delegate, and they focus. How much of your day is spent actually working? How much is spent on pointless meetings, status updates, and busywork? CEOs don't have to waste their time on other peoples' priorities. Board members work far, far less. To them, it's the CEOs that look like they're busy all the time.
      - C1sc0cat 7y ago
        I think You mean Chair - the CEO absolutely should be busy
        dmix 7y ago
        It’s still possible to delegate a lot of the CEO day to day stuff and be available for all important directional and strategy stuff. Co-CEOs is also a thing. Having half a talented persons attention is better than zero. Whether they should still be the show piece CEO vs the background mastermind is up for debate though.
  - ganzuul 7y ago
    Twitter, Facebook, and similar might be of interest because of power and knowledge. If you are already super rich then making another billion or two may be less important than say analytics of how some popular uprising goes. My pet theory is that Imgur is actually what the NSA needs all that diskspace in Utah for. :o)
  - adventured 7y ago
    > It’s pretty disappointing. Their share price has been completely flat since IPO. I’m surprised shareholders have not revolted against Jack being a part time CEO. It's not disappointing, it's amazing that it's worth $24 billion now. A fair value is less than half that, and even at a 50% reduction that'd be at a obscenely generous 30-40 PE. The premise of the outcome being disappointing supposes that there is anything that could have reasonably been done to meaningfully bolster the share price during that time. As opposed to Twitter in reality being a mature, slow growth, second tier social network (which is what it will always be no matter who is running it). Dorsey has done a great job fixing the operational disaster that Twitter was previously. The reason the Twitter stock has been flat since the IPO, is because it was comically overvalued at the IPO, not primarily because it has been operated poorly since then. Based on its operating results contrasted with now, Twitter should have been worth a minimum of 3/4 less at its IPO than it was (probably more reasonably it should have been worth ~90% less at IPO, and worth a minimum of 50% less right now). 2015 | revenue $2.2b | op expenses $1.9b | op income -$450m 2018 | revenue $3b | op expenses $1.6b | op income $453m The disaster that Dorsey inherited, he fixed. Flipping operating income by a positive $900 million in three years. A spectacular outcome for a business doing $3b in sales. Twitter is still an independent business today solely because of the operational improvements that Dorsey made to push Twitter into sound profitability. If not for that, Twitter would have already been forced into selling itself (which was a common discussion prior to the dramatic improvement in operational results). Boost sales $800m and drop operating expenses by $300m. That's as good as it is going to get for Twitter as a business conceptually. There is no scenario where it's going to be the next giant social network or a juggernaut like Facebook, there is no high growth scenario waiting to be discovered. The very nature of Twitter guarantees that can never happen, it can't attract enough participants to that style of social broadcast & consumption.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      Yeah. Maybe it's a failure of imagination on my part but it feels like Twitter pretty much is what Twitter is. It's a broadcast medium for people for whom that has value, which is very useful for some of us and not at all useful for many others. People understandably get up in arms when Twitter tries to make the timeline too heavily sponsored. There's no reason to believe subscriptions would work without tanking the user numbers. Twitter has actually already made changes that make it more useful for its core audience. Increased character counts etc., for example, has allowed Twitter to essentially replace microblogging--or even short-form blogging generally.
- mike_hock 7y ago
  I mean, Twitter is an anus-to-web content delivery system, so it's a bit fucked up to live so much of your life on Twitter that you expect it to stay up and immortalize you after you die. But fair enough, Twitter should understand their cattle better.
- nindalf 7y ago
  This is uncharitable, IMO. It is not fair or reasonable to accuse a group of people of amateurism without knowing or understanding the constraints they’re working under. You compare Twitter with Facebook but Facebook has 9X or so employees. Presumably that means that while a feature like memorialisation gets worked on at Facebook, there isn’t enough manpower to work on it at Twitter. They’re too busy working on the core parts, keeping the lights on. But again, there could be even more constraints that I’m not aware of and you’re not aware of. Please please please let’s not sit on our ergonomic chairs and ask “why don’t you just” without understanding their perspective. Let’s assume good intent and reasonable competence. Of course we look smarter and more competent by accusing someone of being the opposite, but we should resist the urge.
  - kkarakk 7y ago
    After 7 years in tech, i've learnt it's not like dealing with real humans. You're dealing with a business engine - never assume good intent or competence when trying to reason out why a product arrived at it's current level of success or failure
    - nindalf 7y ago
      Ah yes, the Littlefinger approach. “What’s the worst reason someone could have for doing the things they do and acting they way they act?” Notice you still haven’t said how Twitter is supposed to do everything Facebook does but with 1/9th the number of employees. You and everyone else have directly assumed that Twitter has decides not to work on memorialisation because they are malicious or incompetent ... when it’s possible that they just didn’t have enough people to work on it.
      - adambyrtek 7y ago
        With product development it's not about having "enough people" to do everything, it's about having the right priorities and choosing what to focus on. We could discuss if this feature should have been prioritised or not, but claiming that Twitter is this little understaffed company that cannot be expected to implement something like that is a bit disingenuous.
- softwarelimits 7y ago
  I am absolutely sure a pro like you can provide a much better site with a better service - please do!
- matwood 7y ago
  People think that thinking through technical issues is hard, but thinking through issues dealing with people can make technical issues seem like child's play. This isn't just Twitter that botches thinking through the people aspect of changes. We see this happen to all sorts of companies across all industries.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
echelon 7y ago
I wonder what the real reason for account deletions is. Could it be possible they have overflowed their primary / foreign key allocation necessary to support further user growth? Depending on their internal architecture, a migration to a wider key might not be feasible within the time horizon they have. Maybe it's easier to delete accounts? If they have weird sharding and a lot of microservices, this might be their only way out without shutting off registrations - and they'd never do that. Or maybe they have metrics that show new users skip signing up when their desired name is unavailable. Can a Twitter engineer speak more to this?
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  I doubt it’s something that interesting. I’ve read it’s mostly a legal thing regarding the original terms and conditions accepted by the user.
  - cheald 7y ago
    What's with the rash of accounts with hex/base64 names today? They've been popping up all over.
    - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
      Im not sure what the other anonymous cowards are doing but I’m just not very creative and did: head /dev/urandom | shasum When creating a throwaway.
    - kkarakk 7y ago
      Having an account name like that just makes me completely skip any opinion a person has on social media.It's probably just some convoluted logic for a throwaway shitposting account
- Maxion 7y ago
  No I highly doubt it. This is most likely as they say a GDPR issue. Per the GDPR they'll have to keep track of which users have agreed to which version of the ToS and Privacy Policy and make sure that they only process their data in accordance. This is a PITA, much easier to deem accounts inactive and delete their data. They've probably been contacted by the data commissioner of some EU country and asked nicely to comply with the GDPR. A second, somewhat related issue, is that these inactive accounts might also be used by all the russian state trolls. It's much harder to detect when old accounts start doing suspicious things than brand new ones, especially if you don't have a robust process in place for flagging inactive users.
Sendotsh 7y ago
I understand why some people are upset about it (Eg due to accounts of deceased people), but I was really REALLY hoping to snap my first name which was registered by a European person 10 years ago, has 0 followers, and has never posted. I definitely feel like they could compromise and at least delete those blatantly unused ones.
- cryptoz 7y ago
  Not posting on twitter doesn't mean the account is unused. Lots of people make accounts and follow people and are DAU but never post.
  - jdnenej 7y ago
    Twitter always bans my accounts if I dont post or interact.
    - kkarakk 7y ago
      You must not be interacting with it in ANY way at all. I periodically use twitter to sign up for stuff at max and worst i've gotten is a compulsory password reset
  - manigandham 7y ago
    Activity isn't based on posting. You have to at least login in the past 6 months.
- fossuser 7y ago
  Yep - I was looking forward to getting my name username too. The user has no tweets, has followed nothing and done nothing since registering 2013. I hope they end up doing it.
- lilyball 7y ago
  They haven't scrapped their plans for this. They said they'll put it on pause until they've come up with a tool for memorializing accounts. So presumably accounts that are legitimately not going used will still eventually free up. Assuming of course that the account is truly idle and not being used to read without every interacting.
avian 7y ago
Did Twitter already delete inactive accounts in the past? When I created my account in 2008 my preferred handle was taken by an empty account that seemingly never posted anything. With this recent news about account deletions I was curious if maybe I could get it, so I checked it again. I was surprised to see that it’s now a very active account with a “joined in” date in 2014. So it looks like the old inactive one was deleted at some point and then the handle was re-registered by someone else. Either that or the “joined in” date isn’t accurate.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  My understanding is that twitter employees were able to manually delete an inactive account in the past to free up the handle for use. I know a couple people who got their preferred handles that way.
- SyneRyder 7y ago
  I'm sure they've at least proposed it before - some years ago I setup a recurring reminder to tweet on each of my Twitter accounts every six months "to prevent account deletion".
- paulintrognon 7y ago
  Maybe the first user just deleted his/her account.
vinclou 7y ago
I'm I the only one who dont get it. Why would anyone care about an account of a dead man?
pentae 7y ago
I really sometimes wonder if it would be a net negative or net benefit to humanity if we could just shut down Twitter. I don't use it but I can't remember the last time I heard something positive happening on there. From my standpoint it's all just trolls, hate, arguments, trump, drama and angry mobs using the platform for censorship.
- cryptozeus 7y ago
  That is because you are not using the platform but watching the news. Guess what is going to be on the news ? Only the outcry. Twitter has matured in last few years and is a fantastic platform if you know whom to follow. People crying about Twitter are not there to connect or learn from others, they are just there to cry and harass others.
  - rimliu 7y ago
    Maybe it just looks like a great platform? It gives that nice illusion of communication, engagement, and activity. But would you be really worse off without all that?
  - syshum 7y ago
    That is part of the problem but not the biggest one Twitter is filled with controversy because most of the "news" people that fan the flames use Twitter has their primary message platform, This is why twitter is talked about more than Reddit, or Facebook or any others. The activists that pretend they are journalists are all on twitter, all talking to each other, and rage baiting the mobs
- shinryuu 7y ago
  Datapoint of one. I recently landed a freelance gig thanks to Twitter. I’m sure there are many positive things happening. You don’t hear about them as loudly.
- lgeorget 7y ago
  That's also due to the news bias. If you never take the train yourself and only listen to the news, you can get the impressions that they crash or arrive late all the time and wonder why railway companies are still allowed to run...
pmontra 7y ago
What they mean about GDPR compliance is a mistery. GDPR doesn't apply to deceased persons: Recital 27 > This Regulation does not apply to the personal data of deceased persons. > Member States may provide for rules regarding the processing of personal data of deceased persons. Each country has its own rules. This is a summary https://www.twobirds.com/en/in-focus/general-data-protection-regulation/gdpr-tracker/deceased-persons https://www.twobirds.com/en/in-focus/general-data-protection... However the tweets of a deceased person can contain personal data of an alive person. How do they handle that when the author can't agree to changes of policies anymore? But how can FB's memorialized accounts handle that?
- tragic 7y ago
  The GDPR angle is that this was why they decided to indiscriminately delete inactive accounts. Deceased users are the reason they're delaying it, not the reason they're doing it.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Twitter is targeting inactive accounts which just happen to include dead users not the other way around.
- anticensor 7y ago
  Easy problem: If heirs do not explicitly consent within 3 months of death, consider the consent retroactively revoked.
hartror 7y ago
Darn had my eye on a new username.
crusty511 7y ago
Maybe Twitter will start charging a fee to allow a person to keep a username for n years.
cal97g 7y ago
I actually really hope they continue with this. I have old twitter accounts associated to myself that I have no access to. There's nothing bad on there, but I'd still like them deleted.
vectorEQ 7y ago
honestly i am a bit surprised why it would be an issue to delete content from a user who is no longer a user... it's kind of in the name of the thing. a user is generally 'able to use' the thing, hence `user`... if someones dead, they are not a user anymore. i think its a bit silly people are claiming disk space and resources for their deceased loved ones and heroes on some other people's service / servers. it seems even indecent to request such a thing... its a free service. that being said it would likely be trivial to add something like isActivelyViewed as a condition not to delete an account. if a lot of people view a page still it could be considered active. despite the account not being used anymore. If no one looks at it, delete it ...
K0SM0S 7y ago
This makes me realize that from now on, most human beings will probably increasingly be "memorialized" online. I can't help but see in this a new form of modernized, digitalized mortuary ritual, comparable to all the things we humans have been doing with our deads for millennia. Egyptian tombs sought to preserve the body; now with big-tech tombs we seek to preserve the mind, what's left of it, what has been revealed by the deceased. I bet this is just the beginning of that. The work of historians is changing, fast, in this fledging computing era. Think that, from now on, we may be increasingly able to replay then-dead-but-real people in real situations as if it were just another virtual world. Which leads to this suggestion: maybe all the data held by big tech companies should be released for public research (public datasets) upon one's death, after anonymization etc. of course (and maybe a 'wait' period of 10 years, or a full generation or more, whatever precautions are necessary). The point being to learn cumulatively from all our deceased brothers and sisters, make them count forever in the great study of humanity and the cosmos. Of course people should choose for themselves (including delays and anonymity), like some have donor cards, may prefer incineration, etc.
- freeflight 7y ago
  That's very idealized, right now we still struggle with having big tech even acknowledge its actually our data [0] and not completely and only theirs the moment we give it to them willingly or often enough unwillingly. At our current trajectory, it looks much more like we are heading into a cyberpunk Esque dystopia in which people are not just only commoditized through their labor, but also their data value. So instead of post-privacy for big data projects that could serve all of humanity, we end up with data oligopolies hoarding the "gold" in neatly segregated silos to control its scarcity and thus value. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/11/tim-berners-lee-web-inventor-save-internet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/11/tim-berne...
  - K0SM0S 7y ago
    > That's very idealized Agreed, as we speak. This is why I generally think we ought to take control back of our data, massively, as citizens. And devs and the tech community in general are front and center to lead the charge, obviously. It's a long road. Years, decades probably. But eventually we must get there. We may have sacrificed the first generations in that regard because we honestly build as we go, we can't anticipate everything. But now that we're here, that we see that we know, it's time to stop deploring what is, and start building what should be. IMHO... This isn't 'holier-than-thou' at all but very humbly calling for all of us to wake up and start creating tomorrow's solutions to these problems.
golemotron 7y ago
> The social network said it now would not remove accounts until it had a process for "memorialising" dead users on the network. With corporate personhood this should apply to inactive business accounts too.
corodra 7y ago
Was this some halfass pr stunt to artificially boost their engagement numbers for the quarter? Something for their shareholders?
arnaudsm 7y ago
They could have a threshold for deletion, only deleting account with <1k followers. This would spare accounts with real historical value.
- dmix 7y ago
  Or a way to mark accounts as memorialized. Or we can just use archive sites to access old data. But they’re always slow and don’t let you search it properly.
- Shank 7y ago
  “Sorry, your daughter has less than 1,000 followers, and has no real historical significance. Her account will be deleted and reclaimed as a result following the memorialization process.”
- syshum 7y ago
  This is not about Historical Value.
  - Thorrez 7y ago
    Some people care about historical value. Consider the previous BBC post about it: > So too would accounts set up specifically as an archive, such as @POTUS44, a collection of all the tweets made by President Barack Obama while in office. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50567751 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50567751
emiliovesprini 7y ago
As far as I can tell, there are two systems for meaningful names (as opposed to "arbitrary" ones like phone numbers or 4chan IDs): 1. A first-come-first-serve system like Twitter. I'd list drawbacks but this comment section is full of them. 2. A lease system like domain names, whose drawbacks are best explained in this tweet by @devonzuegel: > Domain names really hold you hostage. As soon as you've shared a link > from that domain, you have two options when it comes up for renewal: > (1) Pay the ransom for that domain registration, or > (2) Break the internet, specifically the part linking to your own > content Does anyone know of another way to do meaningful names?
- legohead 7y ago
  what do you mean by meaningful? you can just allow people to choose whatever username they want, that's a system...that nobody seems to allow for whatever reason. people have the same names in real life and we've learned to deal with it. twitter already has a verified system to deal with imposters for high profile accounts where it would matter. blizzard (battlenet) lets you choose any username but tags on a number for everyone. so there's bob#1234, bob#2342 etc. and then it hides the number for display purposes. that seems a decent compromise.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    Or drop the alpha chars altogether and just go numeric. It worked for CompuServe. Everyone's ID was an octal number. 72167,4531 for example. That way there is no overlap, and nobody is slighted when they find out that their name is taken.
    - thiagomgd 7y ago
      Compuwhat? sorry, never heard about it. (which might or not be related to this decision) ICQ uses a number, but yeah, how many people still use it?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
conston 7y ago
This is one major benefit of having a decentralized blockchain. You don't have one entity that can decide one day to shut your account down because they don't agree with you or your policies. I they is why I am really doing most of my social interactions on Keybase which is connected with stellar. Its like what telegram should be with super duper privacy and without all the S*amers.
privacywiki 7y ago
No, please proceed Twitter!!

175 points by herendin2 7y ago

dang 7y ago

Original thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21644230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21644230

It never ceases to amaze me how Twitter is so unprepared for anything they do. This was something Facebook did a few years ago Even Google+ (rest in peace) had a similar feature. How could they have forgotten that dead people may have used their platform, and living relatives would be upset? Either Twitter is completely run by amateurs - since its inception - or by people who just don’t care. Which one is worst, I wonder?

undefined3840 7y ago
It’s pretty disappointing. Their share price has been completely flat since IPO. I’m surprised shareholders have not revolted against Jack being a part time CEO. Clearly there needs to be some dedicated focus to clean up the app. So much potential to be so much better.
- echelon 7y ago
  Vine could have easily beaten TikTok. It was already well positioned.
  - rahuldottech 7y ago
    TikTok didn't even exist back then. It's essentially a Vine replacement + extras.
- fphilipe 7y ago
  It has always amazed me how one can be a part time CEO, let alone CEO at two companies simultaneously. How would a board even allow that?
  - emptybottle 7y ago
    Part time board
  - caymanjim 7y ago
    CEOs aren't that busy. That's what they hire people for. The most successful people aren't running around like maniacs all the time. They are organized, they delegate, and they focus. How much of your day is spent actually working? How much is spent on pointless meetings, status updates, and busywork? CEOs don't have to waste their time on other peoples' priorities. Board members work far, far less. To them, it's the CEOs that look like they're busy all the time.
    - C1sc0cat 7y ago
      I think You mean Chair - the CEO absolutely should be busy
      - dmix 7y ago
        It’s still possible to delegate a lot of the CEO day to day stuff and be available for all important directional and strategy stuff. Co-CEOs is also a thing. Having half a talented persons attention is better than zero. Whether they should still be the show piece CEO vs the background mastermind is up for debate though.
- ganzuul 7y ago
  Twitter, Facebook, and similar might be of interest because of power and knowledge. If you are already super rich then making another billion or two may be less important than say analytics of how some popular uprising goes. My pet theory is that Imgur is actually what the NSA needs all that diskspace in Utah for. :o)
- adventured 7y ago
  > It’s pretty disappointing. Their share price has been completely flat since IPO. I’m surprised shareholders have not revolted against Jack being a part time CEO. It's not disappointing, it's amazing that it's worth $24 billion now. A fair value is less than half that, and even at a 50% reduction that'd be at a obscenely generous 30-40 PE. The premise of the outcome being disappointing supposes that there is anything that could have reasonably been done to meaningfully bolster the share price during that time. As opposed to Twitter in reality being a mature, slow growth, second tier social network (which is what it will always be no matter who is running it). Dorsey has done a great job fixing the operational disaster that Twitter was previously. The reason the Twitter stock has been flat since the IPO, is because it was comically overvalued at the IPO, not primarily because it has been operated poorly since then. Based on its operating results contrasted with now, Twitter should have been worth a minimum of 3/4 less at its IPO than it was (probably more reasonably it should have been worth ~90% less at IPO, and worth a minimum of 50% less right now). 2015 | revenue $2.2b | op expenses $1.9b | op income -$450m 2018 | revenue $3b | op expenses $1.6b | op income $453m The disaster that Dorsey inherited, he fixed. Flipping operating income by a positive $900 million in three years. A spectacular outcome for a business doing $3b in sales. Twitter is still an independent business today solely because of the operational improvements that Dorsey made to push Twitter into sound profitability. If not for that, Twitter would have already been forced into selling itself (which was a common discussion prior to the dramatic improvement in operational results). Boost sales $800m and drop operating expenses by $300m. That's as good as it is going to get for Twitter as a business conceptually. There is no scenario where it's going to be the next giant social network or a juggernaut like Facebook, there is no high growth scenario waiting to be discovered. The very nature of Twitter guarantees that can never happen, it can't attract enough participants to that style of social broadcast & consumption.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Yeah. Maybe it's a failure of imagination on my part but it feels like Twitter pretty much is what Twitter is. It's a broadcast medium for people for whom that has value, which is very useful for some of us and not at all useful for many others. People understandably get up in arms when Twitter tries to make the timeline too heavily sponsored. There's no reason to believe subscriptions would work without tanking the user numbers. Twitter has actually already made changes that make it more useful for its core audience. Increased character counts etc., for example, has allowed Twitter to essentially replace microblogging--or even short-form blogging generally.
mike_hock 7y ago
I mean, Twitter is an anus-to-web content delivery system, so it's a bit fucked up to live so much of your life on Twitter that you expect it to stay up and immortalize you after you die. But fair enough, Twitter should understand their cattle better.
nindalf 7y ago
This is uncharitable, IMO. It is not fair or reasonable to accuse a group of people of amateurism without knowing or understanding the constraints they’re working under. You compare Twitter with Facebook but Facebook has 9X or so employees. Presumably that means that while a feature like memorialisation gets worked on at Facebook, there isn’t enough manpower to work on it at Twitter. They’re too busy working on the core parts, keeping the lights on. But again, there could be even more constraints that I’m not aware of and you’re not aware of. Please please please let’s not sit on our ergonomic chairs and ask “why don’t you just” without understanding their perspective. Let’s assume good intent and reasonable competence. Of course we look smarter and more competent by accusing someone of being the opposite, but we should resist the urge.
- kkarakk 7y ago
  After 7 years in tech, i've learnt it's not like dealing with real humans. You're dealing with a business engine - never assume good intent or competence when trying to reason out why a product arrived at it's current level of success or failure
  - nindalf 7y ago
    Ah yes, the Littlefinger approach. “What’s the worst reason someone could have for doing the things they do and acting they way they act?” Notice you still haven’t said how Twitter is supposed to do everything Facebook does but with 1/9th the number of employees. You and everyone else have directly assumed that Twitter has decides not to work on memorialisation because they are malicious or incompetent ... when it’s possible that they just didn’t have enough people to work on it.
    - adambyrtek 7y ago
      With product development it's not about having "enough people" to do everything, it's about having the right priorities and choosing what to focus on. We could discuss if this feature should have been prioritised or not, but claiming that Twitter is this little understaffed company that cannot be expected to implement something like that is a bit disingenuous.
softwarelimits 7y ago
I am absolutely sure a pro like you can provide a much better site with a better service - please do!
matwood 7y ago
People think that thinking through technical issues is hard, but thinking through issues dealing with people can make technical issues seem like child's play. This isn't just Twitter that botches thinking through the people aspect of changes. We see this happen to all sorts of companies across all industries.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

echelon 7y ago

I wonder what the real reason for account deletions is. Could it be possible they have overflowed their primary / foreign key allocation necessary to support further user growth? Depending on their internal architecture, a migration to a wider key might not be feasible within the time horizon they have. Maybe it's easier to delete accounts? If they have weird sharding and a lot of microservices, this might be their only way out without shutting off registrations - and they'd never do that. Or maybe they have metrics that show new users skip signing up when their desired name is unavailable. Can a Twitter engineer speak more to this?

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
I doubt it’s something that interesting. I’ve read it’s mostly a legal thing regarding the original terms and conditions accepted by the user.
- cheald 7y ago
  What's with the rash of accounts with hex/base64 names today? They've been popping up all over.
  - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
    Im not sure what the other anonymous cowards are doing but I’m just not very creative and did: head /dev/urandom | shasum When creating a throwaway.
  - kkarakk 7y ago
    Having an account name like that just makes me completely skip any opinion a person has on social media.It's probably just some convoluted logic for a throwaway shitposting account
Maxion 7y ago
No I highly doubt it. This is most likely as they say a GDPR issue. Per the GDPR they'll have to keep track of which users have agreed to which version of the ToS and Privacy Policy and make sure that they only process their data in accordance. This is a PITA, much easier to deem accounts inactive and delete their data. They've probably been contacted by the data commissioner of some EU country and asked nicely to comply with the GDPR. A second, somewhat related issue, is that these inactive accounts might also be used by all the russian state trolls. It's much harder to detect when old accounts start doing suspicious things than brand new ones, especially if you don't have a robust process in place for flagging inactive users.

Sendotsh 7y ago

I understand why some people are upset about it (Eg due to accounts of deceased people), but I was really REALLY hoping to snap my first name which was registered by a European person 10 years ago, has 0 followers, and has never posted. I definitely feel like they could compromise and at least delete those blatantly unused ones.

cryptoz 7y ago
Not posting on twitter doesn't mean the account is unused. Lots of people make accounts and follow people and are DAU but never post.
- jdnenej 7y ago
  Twitter always bans my accounts if I dont post or interact.
  - kkarakk 7y ago
    You must not be interacting with it in ANY way at all. I periodically use twitter to sign up for stuff at max and worst i've gotten is a compulsory password reset
- manigandham 7y ago
  Activity isn't based on posting. You have to at least login in the past 6 months.
fossuser 7y ago
Yep - I was looking forward to getting my name username too. The user has no tweets, has followed nothing and done nothing since registering 2013. I hope they end up doing it.
lilyball 7y ago
They haven't scrapped their plans for this. They said they'll put it on pause until they've come up with a tool for memorializing accounts. So presumably accounts that are legitimately not going used will still eventually free up. Assuming of course that the account is truly idle and not being used to read without every interacting.

avian 7y ago

Did Twitter already delete inactive accounts in the past? When I created my account in 2008 my preferred handle was taken by an empty account that seemingly never posted anything. With this recent news about account deletions I was curious if maybe I could get it, so I checked it again. I was surprised to see that it’s now a very active account with a “joined in” date in 2014. So it looks like the old inactive one was deleted at some point and then the handle was re-registered by someone else. Either that or the “joined in” date isn’t accurate.

kevingadd 7y ago
My understanding is that twitter employees were able to manually delete an inactive account in the past to free up the handle for use. I know a couple people who got their preferred handles that way.
SyneRyder 7y ago
I'm sure they've at least proposed it before - some years ago I setup a recurring reminder to tweet on each of my Twitter accounts every six months "to prevent account deletion".
paulintrognon 7y ago
Maybe the first user just deleted his/her account.

vinclou 7y ago

I'm I the only one who dont get it. Why would anyone care about an account of a dead man?

pentae 7y ago

I really sometimes wonder if it would be a net negative or net benefit to humanity if we could just shut down Twitter. I don't use it but I can't remember the last time I heard something positive happening on there. From my standpoint it's all just trolls, hate, arguments, trump, drama and angry mobs using the platform for censorship.

cryptozeus 7y ago
That is because you are not using the platform but watching the news. Guess what is going to be on the news ? Only the outcry. Twitter has matured in last few years and is a fantastic platform if you know whom to follow. People crying about Twitter are not there to connect or learn from others, they are just there to cry and harass others.
- rimliu 7y ago
  Maybe it just looks like a great platform? It gives that nice illusion of communication, engagement, and activity. But would you be really worse off without all that?
- syshum 7y ago
  That is part of the problem but not the biggest one Twitter is filled with controversy because most of the "news" people that fan the flames use Twitter has their primary message platform, This is why twitter is talked about more than Reddit, or Facebook or any others. The activists that pretend they are journalists are all on twitter, all talking to each other, and rage baiting the mobs
shinryuu 7y ago
Datapoint of one. I recently landed a freelance gig thanks to Twitter. I’m sure there are many positive things happening. You don’t hear about them as loudly.
lgeorget 7y ago
That's also due to the news bias. If you never take the train yourself and only listen to the news, you can get the impressions that they crash or arrive late all the time and wonder why railway companies are still allowed to run...

pmontra 7y ago

What they mean about GDPR compliance is a mistery. GDPR doesn't apply to deceased persons: Recital 27 > This Regulation does not apply to the personal data of deceased persons. > Member States may provide for rules regarding the processing of personal data of deceased persons. Each country has its own rules. This is a summary https://www.twobirds.com/en/in-focus/general-data-protection-regulation/gdpr-tracker/deceased-persons https://www.twobirds.com/en/in-focus/general-data-protection... However the tweets of a deceased person can contain personal data of an alive person. How do they handle that when the author can't agree to changes of policies anymore? But how can FB's memorialized accounts handle that?

tragic 7y ago
The GDPR angle is that this was why they decided to indiscriminately delete inactive accounts. Deceased users are the reason they're delaying it, not the reason they're doing it.
zamadatix 7y ago
Twitter is targeting inactive accounts which just happen to include dead users not the other way around.
anticensor 7y ago
Easy problem: If heirs do not explicitly consent within 3 months of death, consider the consent retroactively revoked.

hartror 7y ago

Darn had my eye on a new username.

crusty511 7y ago

Maybe Twitter will start charging a fee to allow a person to keep a username for n years.

cal97g 7y ago

I actually really hope they continue with this. I have old twitter accounts associated to myself that I have no access to. There's nothing bad on there, but I'd still like them deleted.

vectorEQ 7y ago

honestly i am a bit surprised why it would be an issue to delete content from a user who is no longer a user... it's kind of in the name of the thing. a user is generally 'able to use' the thing, hence `user`... if someones dead, they are not a user anymore. i think its a bit silly people are claiming disk space and resources for their deceased loved ones and heroes on some other people's service / servers. it seems even indecent to request such a thing... its a free service. that being said it would likely be trivial to add something like isActivelyViewed as a condition not to delete an account. if a lot of people view a page still it could be considered active. despite the account not being used anymore. If no one looks at it, delete it ...

K0SM0S 7y ago

This makes me realize that from now on, most human beings will probably increasingly be "memorialized" online. I can't help but see in this a new form of modernized, digitalized mortuary ritual, comparable to all the things we humans have been doing with our deads for millennia. Egyptian tombs sought to preserve the body; now with big-tech tombs we seek to preserve the mind, what's left of it, what has been revealed by the deceased. I bet this is just the beginning of that. The work of historians is changing, fast, in this fledging computing era. Think that, from now on, we may be increasingly able to replay then-dead-but-real people in real situations as if it were just another virtual world. Which leads to this suggestion: maybe all the data held by big tech companies should be released for public research (public datasets) upon one's death, after anonymization etc. of course (and maybe a 'wait' period of 10 years, or a full generation or more, whatever precautions are necessary). The point being to learn cumulatively from all our deceased brothers and sisters, make them count forever in the great study of humanity and the cosmos. Of course people should choose for themselves (including delays and anonymity), like some have donor cards, may prefer incineration, etc.

freeflight 7y ago
That's very idealized, right now we still struggle with having big tech even acknowledge its actually our data [0] and not completely and only theirs the moment we give it to them willingly or often enough unwillingly. At our current trajectory, it looks much more like we are heading into a cyberpunk Esque dystopia in which people are not just only commoditized through their labor, but also their data value. So instead of post-privacy for big data projects that could serve all of humanity, we end up with data oligopolies hoarding the "gold" in neatly segregated silos to control its scarcity and thus value. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/11/tim-berners-lee-web-inventor-save-internet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/11/tim-berne...
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  > That's very idealized Agreed, as we speak. This is why I generally think we ought to take control back of our data, massively, as citizens. And devs and the tech community in general are front and center to lead the charge, obviously. It's a long road. Years, decades probably. But eventually we must get there. We may have sacrificed the first generations in that regard because we honestly build as we go, we can't anticipate everything. But now that we're here, that we see that we know, it's time to stop deploring what is, and start building what should be. IMHO... This isn't 'holier-than-thou' at all but very humbly calling for all of us to wake up and start creating tomorrow's solutions to these problems.

golemotron 7y ago

> The social network said it now would not remove accounts until it had a process for "memorialising" dead users on the network. With corporate personhood this should apply to inactive business accounts too.

corodra 7y ago

Was this some halfass pr stunt to artificially boost their engagement numbers for the quarter? Something for their shareholders?

arnaudsm 7y ago

They could have a threshold for deletion, only deleting account with <1k followers. This would spare accounts with real historical value.

dmix 7y ago
Or a way to mark accounts as memorialized. Or we can just use archive sites to access old data. But they’re always slow and don’t let you search it properly.
Shank 7y ago
“Sorry, your daughter has less than 1,000 followers, and has no real historical significance. Her account will be deleted and reclaimed as a result following the memorialization process.”
syshum 7y ago
This is not about Historical Value.
- Thorrez 7y ago
  Some people care about historical value. Consider the previous BBC post about it: > So too would accounts set up specifically as an archive, such as @POTUS44, a collection of all the tweets made by President Barack Obama while in office. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50567751 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50567751

emiliovesprini 7y ago

As far as I can tell, there are two systems for meaningful names (as opposed to "arbitrary" ones like phone numbers or 4chan IDs): 1. A first-come-first-serve system like Twitter. I'd list drawbacks but this comment section is full of them. 2. A lease system like domain names, whose drawbacks are best explained in this tweet by @devonzuegel: > Domain names really hold you hostage. As soon as you've shared a link > from that domain, you have two options when it comes up for renewal: > (1) Pay the ransom for that domain registration, or > (2) Break the internet, specifically the part linking to your own > content Does anyone know of another way to do meaningful names?

legohead 7y ago
what do you mean by meaningful? you can just allow people to choose whatever username they want, that's a system...that nobody seems to allow for whatever reason. people have the same names in real life and we've learned to deal with it. twitter already has a verified system to deal with imposters for high profile accounts where it would matter. blizzard (battlenet) lets you choose any username but tags on a number for everyone. so there's bob#1234, bob#2342 etc. and then it hides the number for display purposes. that seems a decent compromise.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Or drop the alpha chars altogether and just go numeric. It worked for CompuServe. Everyone's ID was an octal number. 72167,4531 for example. That way there is no overlap, and nobody is slighted when they find out that their name is taken.
  - thiagomgd 7y ago
    Compuwhat? sorry, never heard about it. (which might or not be related to this decision) ICQ uses a number, but yeah, how many people still use it?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

conston 7y ago

This is one major benefit of having a decentralized blockchain. You don't have one entity that can decide one day to shut your account down because they don't agree with you or your policies. I they is why I am really doing most of my social interactions on Keybase which is connected with stellar. Its like what telegram should be with super duper privacy and without all the S*amers.

privacywiki 7y ago

No, please proceed Twitter!!