Thank you for elaborating. I'm actually more sympathetic to preserving identifiers now! I do think Twitter could handle this better. One problem with your dist

Thank you for elaborating. I'm actually more sympathetic to preserving identifiers now! I do think Twitter could handle this better. One problem with your distinction between names and identifiers is that, for Twitter, they're largely the same. And, Twitter lets any user change their name AND identifier at will. The history on Twitter is already badly muddled; this doesn't change much, except for a handful of high-profile accounts that people want to keep as memorials. Twitter, I think, is not the right venue for that. They should make these accounts available for archival, or spin them off into a separate namespace, but I don't believe it makes sense for Twitter to keep inactive accounts preserved as they are indefinitely, just because the whole twitter namespace is already in such a flux (and it's not a good venue for memorializing the deceased). Still, thanks for clarifying and changing my mind somewhat.