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Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

101 points by miduil 6y ago

adamrezich 6y ago
the only reason one could be concerned about/afraid of this is if they recognize that the window of politically acceptable thought is shifting faster than ever these days, such that today's seemingly levelheaded opinion could be cause for cancellation years down the road. that should be the actual cause for concern, not the fact that things that were publicly posted to the Web are being archived.
nanna 6y ago
Honestly, I wish tweets were treated like verbal exchanges more than written. Not everything that is said needs to be recorded for perpetuity. If a politician or someone powerful tweets, then sure it might be in someone's interest to record it. Good luck to them. But unless you're someone that people really care about - it should be fine to just delete your tweet for good. If that means something problematic was tweeted but lost, then so be it.
- entropie 6y ago
  But tweets can be important. Who decides whats important and therefore needs to be archived and what not? No one. In the digital age harddrive capacity is basicially infinite so we save everything.
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  This opinion always reads to me as: "I want to be able to speak in public without fear of consequence." That's never been the case and I don't know why anybody thinks it ever has. Digital technology created infallible memory, to be sure, but memory isn't a new thing.
  - mdoms 6y ago
    This is an incredibly toxic way to think about conversation.
    - EvanAnderson 6y ago
      Thinking before I speak and having consideration for how my words might be interpreted in the future is "toxic"? Words you say to others have consequences. It makes sense to take that into consideration. That seems pragmatic and polite to me.
      - coldpie 6y ago
        The ability to broadcast some random thought you have to everyone on the planet, publicly archived and attached to your name, for all of eternity, is a new ability. We've never had it before, and we're discovering the consequences of that. I think it's reasonable to have some disagreement about how that ability should be handled without reducing that disagreement to whether or not words have consequences (obviously they do).
        EvanAnderson 6y ago
        I don't think there is any useful conversation to be had re: "forgetting" that public data. It's a matter of fact. Once data is public it's public. There no magical "forgettable" bits for special classes of digital data. Deleting copies pof data from public and quasi-public forums isn't practically possible, short of taking away everybody's general purpose computer. I don't think that's going to happen (and I certainly wouldn't want it to). I think it's just a world we have to live with. I don't particularly like it, but I don't have a choice in the matter.
      - harperlee 6y ago
        On one hand, that's true. On the other hand, 10 years down the road, all you have is 140 characters, and you lose the whole context in which something was written. You know, "Qu'on me donne 6 lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre" and all that.
      - showerst 6y ago
        In this context, we're specifically talking about young people, who are _literally not yet wired_ to properly evaluate consequences. It doesn't mean they get a pass for anything, but surely at some point in your life you've said/done something that wouldn't pass with modern standards, particularly if it can be cherry picked to the word.
  - jowsie 6y ago
    The bigger issue is most of us said/did dumb shit 20+ years ago, but luckily there was no widespread put everything on the internet movement so we get judged by how we are now, not how we was as kids. While I agree people should be held responsible for things they say/do, I also think that at this exact moment in history, people give little to no thought to the idea that people change/grow as they age. Just look at Jenna Marbles on YouTube, she's in self exile because she wore too much fake tan in a video from 10 years ago.
    - wott 6y ago
      > The bigger issue is most of us said/did dumb shit 20+ years ago, but luckily there was no widespread put everything on the internet movement Well, I found some of my conversations on BBSs or Fidonet from over 25 years ago are now on the Web... So what you say was right as long as it was indeed just 'said', but as soon as something was written and/or recorded somewhere, it may resurface on the Internet one-day, even though it was never intended to appear on the Internet.
    - crocsarecool 6y ago
      Agreed! I don’t even know stuff is wrong or insensitive sometimes. Someone recently told me not to say the word “Jew.” I wasn’t saying it in a bad way - we were discussing a friend who is Jewish, but I didn’t know just saying the word “Jew” could possibly be taken badly. When I was younger, I said something about a “Jap.” I honestly was just trying to take a shortcut by saying Jap instead of the full “Japanese” like saying burger instead of hamburger. I got a shock when I was told that was bad.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  I suggest email for such a use case. To have public conversations is to open the door to public criticism in perpetuity of what was discussed. https://definitions.uslegal.com/n/new-york-times-rule/ https://definitions.uslegal.com/n/new-york-times-rule/ "New York Times rule is a commonsense rule of ethical conduct that a person should not do anything arguably newsworthy in public or in private that one would mind having reported on the front page of a major newspaper. The rule ultimately protects defamatory falsehood. New York Times rule is also known as New York Times test or New York Times v. Sullivan rule."
  - SamBam 6y ago
    > or in private. Not sure how email is an answer. It sound like the rule is "don't do/say it at all, if you didn't want it to be public."
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      In a sense. My point is, you cannot have public conversations and then be aghast when they are stored or captured for later retrieval and critique. That's not a logistics and storage issue, that's a breakdown of critical thinking and nuance in the public sphere (where rational participants would view a tweet or tweet discussion contextually and within the time it occurred, as opposed to present day outrage porn fuel). The archiving should happen, even if the corpus must go into cold storage ("unavailable to the public") until a time more reasonable, civil discourse over the contents can occur, but those who participate in online conversations should do so cautiously for obvious reasons. Tangentially, "never put something in writing you wouldn't want to see on the front page of a newspaper" is just good life advice. Have a phone call or in person meeting instead.
    - throwawayboise 6y ago
      It used to be that a private conversation with another person was private. At worst, it was "one person's word against another" so you could operate on a basis of "don't write it down" if you wanted something to be private. Not sure how much longer that will be the case. People will soon be walking around with the personal equivalant of a police officer's body camera, always on, recording every moment and every interaction with another person. I would be reluctant, and probably refuse to talk to anyone wearing such a device, but it won't be long before it's not even obvious.
- chrisdone 6y ago
  The Economist stylized this as “tweets are appraised as speech, but punished as writing.”
- tw04 6y ago
  But they aren't and won't ever be, and people should stop treating them like they are. It's no different than going to your local public square full of 200 people holding camcorders, and making a bunch of stupid statements. Did we all do stupid stuff when we were younger: absolutely. Would I want the entire world to see what I did as a teenager and judge me for it? Absolutely not. Which is EXACTLY why I personally think society should just not allow people under about the age of 25 to even be on social media in the first place. I know, I know, that will never happen because insert reason - but if we don't want everyone's actions to be recorded in perpetuity we should probably stop allowing them to post those actions in a forum that's open to the entire world and easily recorded. You can make laws until you're blue in the face, it's not going to stop an individual from saving whatever stupid thing you said or did and leaking it anonymously should the moment present itself.
  - wmichelin 6y ago
    This is why Snapchat became popular, and everyone seems to have forgotten the value in that feature-set. Instagram blatantly cloned half of the Snapchat feature-set and Snapchat itself has also gone to shit.
  - jelsisi 6y ago
    One of the first things I did when I graduated from high school was delete my twitter account. It was in an effort to get myself together and become more focused in school. Seeing people's careers damaged by tweets when they were kids makes me feel more and more that deleting my account was one of the best decisions I have made. If I ever have kids, I'll make a concerted effort with other parents to prevent them from joining any social media before they turn 16.
    - throwawayboise 6y ago
      > If I ever have kids, I'll make a concerted effort with other parents to prevent them from joining any social media before they turn 16 Honestly that seems unlikely. If all their friends are on some platform they will find a way to be on it also. Best you can do is really try to educate them on how badly things can boomerang and that the internet never forgets. But even at 16, most kids don't have the life experience and perspective to really understand this.
- contravariant 6y ago
  Perhaps, but is it really all that surprising that something not merely said but broadcast to the entire world is remembered in perpetuity?
- saon 6y ago
  This kind of thing can never be materially accomplished though. Whenever you post something publicly to the internet, any recipient can back it up indefinitely, separately from the origin network. This is a fundamental material reality. No amount of legislation or centralized control of the content can overcome it. Ultimately people will have to culturally/collectively get over everyone's internet past, change their own behavior after understanding this new reality, and deal with the consequences of their speech. Even if it were possible, having the ability to remove all copies of past speech would probably produce worse social outcomes. I think I'd rather deal with a person's complicated history, than a history that has been selectively revised to deceive me. Private, perishable communication is only possible peer-to-peer, through a secure tunnel or network you own, with a person you trust to delete it. The same applies to verbal speech honestly, if you tell somebody something in confidence, it's up to them not to tell anybody else. People just need to accept that using twitter is like making a press release and not like talking to some friends.
- lifthrasiir 6y ago
  The very presence of retweets and likes means they can't ever be treated like verbal conversations. It is a written record mistaken as ephermeral one, period.
dustinmoris 6y ago
What are the legal implications of this in regards to the right of being forgotten, copyright laws or even the simple issue of moderation? For example if someone posts a hateful tweet or some extremist content (e.g. photos of terror, etc.) which goes against the law (and therefore gets taken down by Twitter) is it not reprehensible if archive.org is re-publishing such content?
- mvzvm 6y ago
  The reprehensible act is the tweet. Keeping records and archives of what people do in a public forum is not.
  - secondcoming 6y ago
    But what is not considered reprehensible today may be considered reprehensible tomorrow.
  - dustinmoris 6y ago
    I disagree. Twitter often takes content down which is very problematic, including of very serious sexual and criminal nature and even other non criminal content such as self harming content by children or other people who go through troubling times. Not everything is a Donald Trump tweet and I see serious problems by a blanket unmoderated archive.
bern4444 6y ago
I wonder how this will jive with GDPR/CCPA right to be forgotten laws. If a person has the right to be forgotten, I can't imagine that this decision will be allowed to continue for so long. Does the person have to ask for their information to be deleted under these laws? If so, this might be an additional avenue or good next step for protection laws.
- adolph 6y ago
  Non-EU data processors are subject to the GDPR if their business customer (data controller) is, according to the triggers mentioned above. To give an example: an online retailer based in the US advertises its products at Google AdWords and targets consumers in the EU and therefore falls within the scope of the GDPR. If the retailer uses the services of a cloud provider to manage its EU customer information, hosting of such data in the cloud will also trigger applicability of the GDPR. The cloud vendor must comply with the (limited) GDPR obligations for data processors. https://www.eu-rep.global/blog/article/applicability-of-the-eu-gdpr-to-non-eu-companies/ https://www.eu-rep.global/blog/article/applicability-of-the-... No. The CCPA does not apply to nonprofit organizations or government agencies. https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa
- gorkish 6y ago
  I really fail to see how these laws should or could realistically apply to information that is published publicly. It's reasonable to expect they have something to say about the expectations and rights that a user of a platform ought to be entitled to in their interaction with that platform. However it's rather another thing to follow that this permission should extend to anybody who legally can copy or retain that information under the tenants of fair use or first sale doctrine. This is akin to saying that an author could reasonably "unpublish" an article or a book because they somehow retain the ability to control dissemination of every copy of thier work in perpetuity. That is an absolutely ludicrous notion.
  - ivan_gammel 6y ago
    >This is akin to saying that an author could reasonably "unpublish" an article or a book because they somehow retain the ability to control dissemination of every copy of thier work in perpetuity No, it is not the same. An author of a published book has intention to share it with the public and understands how the system works: you would not expect from this person to make any assumptions about the right to recall all the copies. An author of a post in social media may not recognize the fact, that the actual audience is beyond what he or she expected and that he or she is not in control of the access to this publication. The intentions and expectations are very different, and it is not the fault of social media users that they did not understand how to protect their privacy when living the digital life. The example with "public forum" is a good one here, because speaking in public offline (e.g. having a conversation with friends or addressing a crowd) does not imply that the exact words or other details will be remembered and recorded, on the contrary, without special effort taken by participants any conversation is not recorded by default. That said, even if they are formally in their right and logically it makes sense that whatever is posted with public visibility should be expected to be copied and backed up, those archives are still attacking the privacy and should be regulated by law. There's much more public interest in that than in preserving some tweets, because they may appear important for history. After all, we spent thousands of years without recorded evidence of what people talked about and we are doing just fine.
abhayhegde 6y ago
I wonder if that is really necessary. Sure, some accounts (like politicians) may need to be preserved until their words may are no longer significant, but why keep the random tweets of irrelevant accounts.
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  The present doesn't know what the future will find valuable. Put another way: Tomorrow's noteworthy person may be today's nobody.
- progval 6y ago
  It's sometimes easier to archive everything than to find/decide what deserves to be archived.
fireeyed 6y ago
I wonder whether they will be able to archive deleted tweets. [1] [1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/02/politics/kfile-neera-tanden-deleted-tweets-slamming-gop/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/02/politics/kfile-neera-tanden-d...
booleandilemma 6y ago
I can’t say I’m particularly excited about this. People are going to tweet things at 15 years old that they’re going to regret at 30. Why should there be a permanent record of everything that was ever tweeted? It just comes across as obsessive and black mirror-y.
scandox 6y ago
Never tweet. It may be meant ironically but it's a really excellent piece of advice to keep in mind, even as you do in fact tweet.
- offtop5 6y ago
  Well said, I stopped using Reddit and Twitter because I realized a few things. First arguing with other angry people all day has never accomplished anything. Second no matter what you say, in 10 or 20 years it might be absurdly offensive and that can destroy your entire life. The dumbest thing you ever said at 19 is a part of your identity even when you're 42. But that only applies to the internet. If I said something really horrible to you at a bar, the worst that will happen is I'll probably just get kicked out. I say that on Twitter, you can destroy my career for the rest of my life
  - themarkn 6y ago
    It does seem like people ought to just think more about the permanence of what we put online and act accordingly. There is no way to guarantee ephemerality for anything you send to another person online. They can always record or whatever in some way. We have to act like this stuff is entered into the permanent record and be OK with that. There is nothing we can do to 100% prevent stuff being recorded somewhere. I agree we’d all be better off not judged on our younger attempts at “edginess” and stuff we said while figuring out who we are in our teens. But at a certain point we have to accept that posting anything online anywhere is _publishing_ and if you _published_ a racist letter to the editor at 19, instead of said something offensive at a party, there is a different judgement there & it’s justified. I do think in time the answer “I’ve grown a lot since that time and regret those tweets” is going to become more acceptable & people will be judged more on recent stuff they say and do.
    - showerst 6y ago
      I wonder if we aren't at a bit of a unique moment in that: 1. Norms around speech have changed quite a bit in a fairly short amount of time. 2. For the first time, we have a group of adults who were largely on the internet as young people. I think kids today are being raised to be much more cognizant of what they post online, (and what they say in general) so we just had this window from like 96-2015 or so where people where encouraged to post just about anything casually to the internet, and yet south-park style offensive comments were still ok for many kids. Obviously there's always going to be some edgy-kids saying stupid stuff, and I daresay _most_ young people will say something regrettable if you record them for long enough, but this might be a really large cohort.
vxNsr 6y ago
Well I guess I’ll be forgetting my account creds.
snicksnak 6y ago
Of course this will get weaponized, if it isn't already. We've seen time and time again that a vile old tweet in the wrong hands can be very powerful, it's a ticking time bomb. Think 5 or even 10+ years down the road, some of the kids who are edgy on twitter today might go in to politics or hold some other high level position. I don't think the current climate is going to cool down anytime soon, but maybe something like this will either lead to mutually assured destruction or, what I'm hoping for, old tweets losing their power in the long run.
- showerst 6y ago
  I suspect that as a larger and larger percent of the population has a cringey internet past to look back on, the power of old tweets will fade somewhat. It'll take a while though, and of course depends on how vile the past actions are.
  - jelsisi 6y ago
    I feel like this is an optimistic take. I know a strong number of people that have never thought up a controversial opinion in their life. They will always have that power over the rest of us.
    - showerst 6y ago
      I see it sort of like pot smoking. In about a two decades, we went from "probably the most dangerous drug in the United States today" (Reagan), to "I smoked but I didn't inhale" (Clinton) to "Of course I inhaled, that was the point." (Obama). It's not that pot suddenly epically skyrocketed in the voting-age population, it's just that enough people either had smoked pot, been around those who did, or watched media that made light of it to realize it wasn't a 100% mark of evil.
  - KiranRao0 6y ago
    I wish I held that view. My view is that the majority of people will self-censoring and be too afraid of saying anything remotely controversial.
iJohnDoe 6y ago
Is this really necessary? People need to be careful what they post online, but come on. Do they really need to archive every tweet? Seems like they are taking their mission too far. Archiving every post from Usenet dating channels from 20+ years, every tweet, etc. Seems a bit excessive at this point. This also can’t help with the social cooling.
- causasui 6y ago
  Whether or not every tweet in existence should be archived is irrelevant. The fact is they can be, so they should be treated as though they will be. Saying "no please don't" will never stop something that is technologically possible from happening. Murphy's law applies here and everywhere in tech (and frankly, in most areas of life).
  - the_local_host 6y ago
    Even if obtaining old tweets was theoretically always possible, actually facilitating this seems like a combination of poor judgment and obsessive hoarding. If the "smattering of tweets" means everyone's tweets will be publicly available in perpetuity, then this is a downright inhumane policy, and should not be pursued by any organization worthy of respect.
  - EvanAnderson 6y ago
    Thank you for articulating this. I was trying to, and failing miserably.
ajayyy 6y ago
To clarify: Archive Team IS NOT Archive.org. Archive team is a loose collection of volunteers, you can learn more and help out at https://archiveteam.org https://archiveteam.org or by joining their channel on IRC.
- larrik 6y ago
  I'm not seeing any reason on the site to think otherwise, can you elaborate?
  - ajayyy 6y ago
    Archive team just uploads data to archive.org. See the note at the footer of https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/
- dang 6y ago
  Thanks—we've changed the title above to that of the page. Submitted title was "Archive.org is archiving every tweet". The word "smattering" implies much less than "every". What's the actual situation?
buss 6y ago
Well I guess it's good that they're also going to be archiving Jason Scott's mean and abusive tweets. How archive.org doesn't reign in his behavior when he is such a publicly well known figure is beyond me.
kmfrk 6y ago
Datasets like these feel like a recording of every conversation in a coffee shop: technically public, but practically private for the most part. Feels super gross to see.
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  How has Twitter ever been "practically private"? We're talking about tweets-- not direct messages.
  - harperlee 6y ago
    If 10 people follow you, then you are talking with family, not broadcasting to a nation, in practice. The audience can change when years pass.
    - fabatka 6y ago
      But even then you know your tweets can be read by anybody. If a platform is fundamentally public, I don't understand how can anyone use it as a form of private communication.
      - harperlee 6y ago
        Well it's human nature, really. You are not constantly stepping back and rationally evaluating the present moment. If you have a small bunch of followers and you start a conversation with them, the topic can evolve towards more sensitive matters. Kind of like with normalization of deviance in privacy terms. You just focus on the content of the conversation. As soon as you are answering to anyone, your mind focuses on only that person who said something to you. Criminals post Facebook photos with evidence of their crimes constantly, as another example.
        fabatka 6y ago
        Thanks, I can see your point better. I guess my real concern is about Twitter being considered the default communication channel for many people. I mean it is perfect for getting updates from orgs/teams the quickest way possible, but to use it as a forum... for me it is incomprehensible.
paxys 6y ago
It's weird to see the backlash against this when people here are the first to speak out about the need to preserve the internet. Like it or not, Tweets are part of the historical record, and I welcome this move.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
> Total Items 396,027 I don't think this is every tweet.
- JosephRedfern 6y ago
  In this context, an item appears to be a multi-gigabyte "megawarc" archive, rather than an individual tweet.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
sto_hristo 6y ago
There is no escape from cancellation. 500 years from now, someone running for a mayor of some colony somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy will have his aspirations crushed because of something their great*5 grandfather wrote on twitter.
rowanseymour 6y ago
This reminds me I'm due a visit to https://tweetdelete.net/ https://tweetdelete.net/...
- PastaMonster 6y ago
  I don't think you're getting it. It will not work. A fresh start is to delete the account and create a new new one.
baby 6y ago
Oh no
hexandcube 6y ago
If that's true, I'm deleting my Twitter account.
pasttense01 6y ago
Basically people should be posting anonymously on the internet (via distinct handles with no connection with one's real name), as is done in Hacker News (although a small percent do post enough details in their posts to connect with their real name). Lots of us started out posting with our real names in the last century (on Usenet for example) and after a while realized how poor an idea this was.
- ghaff 6y ago
  For the most part, if I don't want something linked to my name, I don't write it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
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gentleman11 6y ago
This is a bit tangential, but I wish we weren’t seeing links to tweets showing up as hn stories. It’s not a legitimate news source, and it bans people left and right for nothing because they have such serious botting and conspiracy theory problems
- paxys 6y ago
  HN isn't just for discussing "legitimate news sources" (whatever that even means). People can post anything they want from any source.
  - gentleman11 6y ago
    You can’t say anything of substance in 280 characters, or find room to cite references. It’s just a bunch of disembodied statements meant to go viral to build peoples followings or get people mad, with no meaningful discussion back and forth (for the same reasons). Maybe I’m just getting old, but Twitter seems like a bad way to get and share information, even without the random bans. Apologies if I just haven’t seen the good parts of Twitter yet
    - paxys 6y ago
      That is debatable (I personally don't agree with your view at all), but regardless people are still allowed to post and discuss meaningless content here.
      - gentleman11 6y ago
        I’m not talking about being allowed, I’m talking more about spending the extra moment to find a non Twitter information source before submitting articles, and to hesitate before upvoting a Twitter link when there are som many other great stories under new
    - chocolateboy 6y ago
      > You can’t say anything of substance in 280 characters Your preceding comment is 247 characters.
oytis 6y ago
A good reminder not to put things on other people's computers if you don't want these things to be on other people's computers.
oytis 6y ago
Clicked a couple of items - only metadata is available, other items are "access restricted". I wonder how it works.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
fireattack 6y ago
Does anyone test its completeness, especially for the older date? Also, i can't seem to be able to download the actual data (only the matadata), it says "Files marked with [lock icon] are not available for download." at https://archive.org/download/archiveteam_twitter_20210316071043_3aaac8e0 https://archive.org/download/archiveteam_twitter_20210316071....
elric 6y ago
A couple of years ago, I discovered that archive.org had archived an ancient (1998ish) personal web page of mine. Back when the internet was a smaller, safer and simpler place. It contained a bunch of personally identifiable information, including a phone number and an address. It took me months to have it removed from their archive. They are extremely (deliberately?) slow to respond to emails. They ignore EU law (right to be forgotten, and in this case GDPR on account of the PII). The domain no longer exists, and my registrar doesn't keep records older than 10 years because of GDPR, so I couldn't use that as a way to prove the page was actually mine. In the end I had to send them a DMCA takedown notice, which only worked because the page footer had a "Copyright Elric $lastname" notice. After another goodly while they finally "removed" the page. I'm sure they didn't actually delete anything, but only flagged the page not to be public. If you have archived content which you can't conclusively prove is yours, you're pretty much screwed. And it seems like you can no longer prevent them from scraping your content, as they no longer respects robots.txt. I suspect their crawlers aren't nice enough to tell your their actual identity either.
- mids_hn 6y ago
  I had screwed up by explicitly stating a Creative Commons license on the page, so I'm certain that it's hopeless. Fuck the Archive team, they can burn in hell. They are the epitome of lawful evil.
- zorpner 6y ago
  > The domain no longer exists, and my registrar doesn't keep records older than 10 years because of GDPR, so I couldn't use that as a way to prove the page was actually mine. Wait, are you complaining that they wouldn't take down a page immediately upon your request with no proof that it actually belonged to you?
  - elric 6y ago
    In a reductionist sort of way, I guess I am. But they should probably ask for permission before archiving stuff forevermore. Or at least make it easier to block them.
f38zf5vdt 6y ago
It seems the whole world will have to relearn why forgiveness was once a virtue the hard way. In the near term, it's causing a bifurcation of society into people who exist and had an opinion versus those who didn't, or those who didn't _yet_. In time it seems like the former is just getting larger and larger. Imagine how the field of mathematics would have evolved if we simply cast aside those who had ever failed to solve a math problem correctly. It needs to be okay for people to make mistakes, otherwise we will never grow as a race.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
drivingmenuts 6y ago
Or, and here's a revolutionary thought, we teach people to think before they open their goddamn idiot pieholes? Impossible, I know, but still a goal worth aiming at.
miduil 6y ago
This makes it really easy to retrieve all previous tweets for certain accounts just by accessing this URL: https://web.archive.org/web/%2A/https://twitter.com/colorofberlin/status/%2A https://web.archive.org/web/%2A/https://twitter.com/colorofb... What's kind of worrying is also that most people who retrieve the artifacts are bots, so clearly becomes an important data source for others.
bityard 6y ago
In 2021, I am a little surprised and amused to see so many people who seem to be shocked (shocked!) that the things they post on the Internet might get archived forever. Especially on HN, where technological literacy tends to be a at least a little bit higher than than the average tweeter. Even back in the early days, it was a common-sense rule of thumb that you never put something on the Internet that you wouldn't want written in the newspaper about you, even in "private" forums such as IRC channels and email. Let alone something as public as twitter.

101 points by miduil 6y ago

the only reason one could be concerned about/afraid of this is if they recognize that the window of politically acceptable thought is shifting faster than ever these days, such that today's seemingly levelheaded opinion could be cause for cancellation years down the road. that should be the actual cause for concern, not the fact that things that were publicly posted to the Web are being archived.

nanna 6y ago

Honestly, I wish tweets were treated like verbal exchanges more than written. Not everything that is said needs to be recorded for perpetuity. If a politician or someone powerful tweets, then sure it might be in someone's interest to record it. Good luck to them. But unless you're someone that people really care about - it should be fine to just delete your tweet for good. If that means something problematic was tweeted but lost, then so be it.

entropie 6y ago
But tweets can be important. Who decides whats important and therefore needs to be archived and what not? No one. In the digital age harddrive capacity is basicially infinite so we save everything.
EvanAnderson 6y ago
This opinion always reads to me as: "I want to be able to speak in public without fear of consequence." That's never been the case and I don't know why anybody thinks it ever has. Digital technology created infallible memory, to be sure, but memory isn't a new thing.
- mdoms 6y ago
  This is an incredibly toxic way to think about conversation.
  - EvanAnderson 6y ago
    Thinking before I speak and having consideration for how my words might be interpreted in the future is "toxic"? Words you say to others have consequences. It makes sense to take that into consideration. That seems pragmatic and polite to me.
    - coldpie 6y ago
      The ability to broadcast some random thought you have to everyone on the planet, publicly archived and attached to your name, for all of eternity, is a new ability. We've never had it before, and we're discovering the consequences of that. I think it's reasonable to have some disagreement about how that ability should be handled without reducing that disagreement to whether or not words have consequences (obviously they do).
      - EvanAnderson 6y ago
        I don't think there is any useful conversation to be had re: "forgetting" that public data. It's a matter of fact. Once data is public it's public. There no magical "forgettable" bits for special classes of digital data. Deleting copies pof data from public and quasi-public forums isn't practically possible, short of taking away everybody's general purpose computer. I don't think that's going to happen (and I certainly wouldn't want it to). I think it's just a world we have to live with. I don't particularly like it, but I don't have a choice in the matter.
    - harperlee 6y ago
      On one hand, that's true. On the other hand, 10 years down the road, all you have is 140 characters, and you lose the whole context in which something was written. You know, "Qu'on me donne 6 lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre" and all that.
    - showerst 6y ago
      In this context, we're specifically talking about young people, who are _literally not yet wired_ to properly evaluate consequences. It doesn't mean they get a pass for anything, but surely at some point in your life you've said/done something that wouldn't pass with modern standards, particularly if it can be cherry picked to the word.
- jowsie 6y ago
  The bigger issue is most of us said/did dumb shit 20+ years ago, but luckily there was no widespread put everything on the internet movement so we get judged by how we are now, not how we was as kids. While I agree people should be held responsible for things they say/do, I also think that at this exact moment in history, people give little to no thought to the idea that people change/grow as they age. Just look at Jenna Marbles on YouTube, she's in self exile because she wore too much fake tan in a video from 10 years ago.
  - wott 6y ago
    > The bigger issue is most of us said/did dumb shit 20+ years ago, but luckily there was no widespread put everything on the internet movement Well, I found some of my conversations on BBSs or Fidonet from over 25 years ago are now on the Web... So what you say was right as long as it was indeed just 'said', but as soon as something was written and/or recorded somewhere, it may resurface on the Internet one-day, even though it was never intended to appear on the Internet.
  - crocsarecool 6y ago
    Agreed! I don’t even know stuff is wrong or insensitive sometimes. Someone recently told me not to say the word “Jew.” I wasn’t saying it in a bad way - we were discussing a friend who is Jewish, but I didn’t know just saying the word “Jew” could possibly be taken badly. When I was younger, I said something about a “Jap.” I honestly was just trying to take a shortcut by saying Jap instead of the full “Japanese” like saying burger instead of hamburger. I got a shock when I was told that was bad.
toomuchtodo 6y ago
I suggest email for such a use case. To have public conversations is to open the door to public criticism in perpetuity of what was discussed. https://definitions.uslegal.com/n/new-york-times-rule/ https://definitions.uslegal.com/n/new-york-times-rule/ "New York Times rule is a commonsense rule of ethical conduct that a person should not do anything arguably newsworthy in public or in private that one would mind having reported on the front page of a major newspaper. The rule ultimately protects defamatory falsehood. New York Times rule is also known as New York Times test or New York Times v. Sullivan rule."
- SamBam 6y ago
  > or in private. Not sure how email is an answer. It sound like the rule is "don't do/say it at all, if you didn't want it to be public."
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    In a sense. My point is, you cannot have public conversations and then be aghast when they are stored or captured for later retrieval and critique. That's not a logistics and storage issue, that's a breakdown of critical thinking and nuance in the public sphere (where rational participants would view a tweet or tweet discussion contextually and within the time it occurred, as opposed to present day outrage porn fuel). The archiving should happen, even if the corpus must go into cold storage ("unavailable to the public") until a time more reasonable, civil discourse over the contents can occur, but those who participate in online conversations should do so cautiously for obvious reasons. Tangentially, "never put something in writing you wouldn't want to see on the front page of a newspaper" is just good life advice. Have a phone call or in person meeting instead.
  - throwawayboise 6y ago
    It used to be that a private conversation with another person was private. At worst, it was "one person's word against another" so you could operate on a basis of "don't write it down" if you wanted something to be private. Not sure how much longer that will be the case. People will soon be walking around with the personal equivalant of a police officer's body camera, always on, recording every moment and every interaction with another person. I would be reluctant, and probably refuse to talk to anyone wearing such a device, but it won't be long before it's not even obvious.
chrisdone 6y ago
The Economist stylized this as “tweets are appraised as speech, but punished as writing.”
tw04 6y ago
But they aren't and won't ever be, and people should stop treating them like they are. It's no different than going to your local public square full of 200 people holding camcorders, and making a bunch of stupid statements. Did we all do stupid stuff when we were younger: absolutely. Would I want the entire world to see what I did as a teenager and judge me for it? Absolutely not. Which is EXACTLY why I personally think society should just not allow people under about the age of 25 to even be on social media in the first place. I know, I know, that will never happen because insert reason - but if we don't want everyone's actions to be recorded in perpetuity we should probably stop allowing them to post those actions in a forum that's open to the entire world and easily recorded. You can make laws until you're blue in the face, it's not going to stop an individual from saving whatever stupid thing you said or did and leaking it anonymously should the moment present itself.
- wmichelin 6y ago
  This is why Snapchat became popular, and everyone seems to have forgotten the value in that feature-set. Instagram blatantly cloned half of the Snapchat feature-set and Snapchat itself has also gone to shit.
- jelsisi 6y ago
  One of the first things I did when I graduated from high school was delete my twitter account. It was in an effort to get myself together and become more focused in school. Seeing people's careers damaged by tweets when they were kids makes me feel more and more that deleting my account was one of the best decisions I have made. If I ever have kids, I'll make a concerted effort with other parents to prevent them from joining any social media before they turn 16.
  - throwawayboise 6y ago
    > If I ever have kids, I'll make a concerted effort with other parents to prevent them from joining any social media before they turn 16 Honestly that seems unlikely. If all their friends are on some platform they will find a way to be on it also. Best you can do is really try to educate them on how badly things can boomerang and that the internet never forgets. But even at 16, most kids don't have the life experience and perspective to really understand this.
contravariant 6y ago
Perhaps, but is it really all that surprising that something not merely said but broadcast to the entire world is remembered in perpetuity?
saon 6y ago
This kind of thing can never be materially accomplished though. Whenever you post something publicly to the internet, any recipient can back it up indefinitely, separately from the origin network. This is a fundamental material reality. No amount of legislation or centralized control of the content can overcome it. Ultimately people will have to culturally/collectively get over everyone's internet past, change their own behavior after understanding this new reality, and deal with the consequences of their speech. Even if it were possible, having the ability to remove all copies of past speech would probably produce worse social outcomes. I think I'd rather deal with a person's complicated history, than a history that has been selectively revised to deceive me. Private, perishable communication is only possible peer-to-peer, through a secure tunnel or network you own, with a person you trust to delete it. The same applies to verbal speech honestly, if you tell somebody something in confidence, it's up to them not to tell anybody else. People just need to accept that using twitter is like making a press release and not like talking to some friends.
lifthrasiir 6y ago
The very presence of retweets and likes means they can't ever be treated like verbal conversations. It is a written record mistaken as ephermeral one, period.

dustinmoris 6y ago

What are the legal implications of this in regards to the right of being forgotten, copyright laws or even the simple issue of moderation? For example if someone posts a hateful tweet or some extremist content (e.g. photos of terror, etc.) which goes against the law (and therefore gets taken down by Twitter) is it not reprehensible if archive.org is re-publishing such content?

mvzvm 6y ago
The reprehensible act is the tweet. Keeping records and archives of what people do in a public forum is not.
- secondcoming 6y ago
  But what is not considered reprehensible today may be considered reprehensible tomorrow.
- dustinmoris 6y ago
  I disagree. Twitter often takes content down which is very problematic, including of very serious sexual and criminal nature and even other non criminal content such as self harming content by children or other people who go through troubling times. Not everything is a Donald Trump tweet and I see serious problems by a blanket unmoderated archive.

bern4444 6y ago

I wonder how this will jive with GDPR/CCPA right to be forgotten laws. If a person has the right to be forgotten, I can't imagine that this decision will be allowed to continue for so long. Does the person have to ask for their information to be deleted under these laws? If so, this might be an additional avenue or good next step for protection laws.

adolph 6y ago
Non-EU data processors are subject to the GDPR if their business customer (data controller) is, according to the triggers mentioned above. To give an example: an online retailer based in the US advertises its products at Google AdWords and targets consumers in the EU and therefore falls within the scope of the GDPR. If the retailer uses the services of a cloud provider to manage its EU customer information, hosting of such data in the cloud will also trigger applicability of the GDPR. The cloud vendor must comply with the (limited) GDPR obligations for data processors. https://www.eu-rep.global/blog/article/applicability-of-the-eu-gdpr-to-non-eu-companies/ https://www.eu-rep.global/blog/article/applicability-of-the-... No. The CCPA does not apply to nonprofit organizations or government agencies. https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa
gorkish 6y ago
I really fail to see how these laws should or could realistically apply to information that is published publicly. It's reasonable to expect they have something to say about the expectations and rights that a user of a platform ought to be entitled to in their interaction with that platform. However it's rather another thing to follow that this permission should extend to anybody who legally can copy or retain that information under the tenants of fair use or first sale doctrine. This is akin to saying that an author could reasonably "unpublish" an article or a book because they somehow retain the ability to control dissemination of every copy of thier work in perpetuity. That is an absolutely ludicrous notion.
- ivan_gammel 6y ago
  >This is akin to saying that an author could reasonably "unpublish" an article or a book because they somehow retain the ability to control dissemination of every copy of thier work in perpetuity No, it is not the same. An author of a published book has intention to share it with the public and understands how the system works: you would not expect from this person to make any assumptions about the right to recall all the copies. An author of a post in social media may not recognize the fact, that the actual audience is beyond what he or she expected and that he or she is not in control of the access to this publication. The intentions and expectations are very different, and it is not the fault of social media users that they did not understand how to protect their privacy when living the digital life. The example with "public forum" is a good one here, because speaking in public offline (e.g. having a conversation with friends or addressing a crowd) does not imply that the exact words or other details will be remembered and recorded, on the contrary, without special effort taken by participants any conversation is not recorded by default. That said, even if they are formally in their right and logically it makes sense that whatever is posted with public visibility should be expected to be copied and backed up, those archives are still attacking the privacy and should be regulated by law. There's much more public interest in that than in preserving some tweets, because they may appear important for history. After all, we spent thousands of years without recorded evidence of what people talked about and we are doing just fine.

abhayhegde 6y ago

I wonder if that is really necessary. Sure, some accounts (like politicians) may need to be preserved until their words may are no longer significant, but why keep the random tweets of irrelevant accounts.

EvanAnderson 6y ago
The present doesn't know what the future will find valuable. Put another way: Tomorrow's noteworthy person may be today's nobody.
progval 6y ago
It's sometimes easier to archive everything than to find/decide what deserves to be archived.

fireeyed 6y ago

I wonder whether they will be able to archive deleted tweets. [1] [1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/02/politics/kfile-neera-tanden-deleted-tweets-slamming-gop/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/02/politics/kfile-neera-tanden-d...

booleandilemma 6y ago

I can’t say I’m particularly excited about this. People are going to tweet things at 15 years old that they’re going to regret at 30. Why should there be a permanent record of everything that was ever tweeted? It just comes across as obsessive and black mirror-y.

scandox 6y ago

Never tweet. It may be meant ironically but it's a really excellent piece of advice to keep in mind, even as you do in fact tweet.

offtop5 6y ago
Well said, I stopped using Reddit and Twitter because I realized a few things. First arguing with other angry people all day has never accomplished anything. Second no matter what you say, in 10 or 20 years it might be absurdly offensive and that can destroy your entire life. The dumbest thing you ever said at 19 is a part of your identity even when you're 42. But that only applies to the internet. If I said something really horrible to you at a bar, the worst that will happen is I'll probably just get kicked out. I say that on Twitter, you can destroy my career for the rest of my life
- themarkn 6y ago
  It does seem like people ought to just think more about the permanence of what we put online and act accordingly. There is no way to guarantee ephemerality for anything you send to another person online. They can always record or whatever in some way. We have to act like this stuff is entered into the permanent record and be OK with that. There is nothing we can do to 100% prevent stuff being recorded somewhere. I agree we’d all be better off not judged on our younger attempts at “edginess” and stuff we said while figuring out who we are in our teens. But at a certain point we have to accept that posting anything online anywhere is _publishing_ and if you _published_ a racist letter to the editor at 19, instead of said something offensive at a party, there is a different judgement there & it’s justified. I do think in time the answer “I’ve grown a lot since that time and regret those tweets” is going to become more acceptable & people will be judged more on recent stuff they say and do.
  - showerst 6y ago
    I wonder if we aren't at a bit of a unique moment in that: 1. Norms around speech have changed quite a bit in a fairly short amount of time. 2. For the first time, we have a group of adults who were largely on the internet as young people. I think kids today are being raised to be much more cognizant of what they post online, (and what they say in general) so we just had this window from like 96-2015 or so where people where encouraged to post just about anything casually to the internet, and yet south-park style offensive comments were still ok for many kids. Obviously there's always going to be some edgy-kids saying stupid stuff, and I daresay _most_ young people will say something regrettable if you record them for long enough, but this might be a really large cohort.

vxNsr 6y ago

Well I guess I’ll be forgetting my account creds.

snicksnak 6y ago

Of course this will get weaponized, if it isn't already. We've seen time and time again that a vile old tweet in the wrong hands can be very powerful, it's a ticking time bomb. Think 5 or even 10+ years down the road, some of the kids who are edgy on twitter today might go in to politics or hold some other high level position. I don't think the current climate is going to cool down anytime soon, but maybe something like this will either lead to mutually assured destruction or, what I'm hoping for, old tweets losing their power in the long run.

showerst 6y ago
I suspect that as a larger and larger percent of the population has a cringey internet past to look back on, the power of old tweets will fade somewhat. It'll take a while though, and of course depends on how vile the past actions are.
- jelsisi 6y ago
  I feel like this is an optimistic take. I know a strong number of people that have never thought up a controversial opinion in their life. They will always have that power over the rest of us.
  - showerst 6y ago
    I see it sort of like pot smoking. In about a two decades, we went from "probably the most dangerous drug in the United States today" (Reagan), to "I smoked but I didn't inhale" (Clinton) to "Of course I inhaled, that was the point." (Obama). It's not that pot suddenly epically skyrocketed in the voting-age population, it's just that enough people either had smoked pot, been around those who did, or watched media that made light of it to realize it wasn't a 100% mark of evil.
- KiranRao0 6y ago
  I wish I held that view. My view is that the majority of people will self-censoring and be too afraid of saying anything remotely controversial.

iJohnDoe 6y ago

Is this really necessary? People need to be careful what they post online, but come on. Do they really need to archive every tweet? Seems like they are taking their mission too far. Archiving every post from Usenet dating channels from 20+ years, every tweet, etc. Seems a bit excessive at this point. This also can’t help with the social cooling.

causasui 6y ago
Whether or not every tweet in existence should be archived is irrelevant. The fact is they can be, so they should be treated as though they will be. Saying "no please don't" will never stop something that is technologically possible from happening. Murphy's law applies here and everywhere in tech (and frankly, in most areas of life).
- the_local_host 6y ago
  Even if obtaining old tweets was theoretically always possible, actually facilitating this seems like a combination of poor judgment and obsessive hoarding. If the "smattering of tweets" means everyone's tweets will be publicly available in perpetuity, then this is a downright inhumane policy, and should not be pursued by any organization worthy of respect.
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  Thank you for articulating this. I was trying to, and failing miserably.

ajayyy 6y ago

To clarify: Archive Team IS NOT Archive.org. Archive team is a loose collection of volunteers, you can learn more and help out at https://archiveteam.org https://archiveteam.org or by joining their channel on IRC.

larrik 6y ago
I'm not seeing any reason on the site to think otherwise, can you elaborate?
- ajayyy 6y ago
  Archive team just uploads data to archive.org. See the note at the footer of https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/
dang 6y ago
Thanks—we've changed the title above to that of the page. Submitted title was "Archive.org is archiving every tweet". The word "smattering" implies much less than "every". What's the actual situation?

buss 6y ago

Well I guess it's good that they're also going to be archiving Jason Scott's mean and abusive tweets. How archive.org doesn't reign in his behavior when he is such a publicly well known figure is beyond me.

kmfrk 6y ago

Datasets like these feel like a recording of every conversation in a coffee shop: technically public, but practically private for the most part. Feels super gross to see.

EvanAnderson 6y ago
How has Twitter ever been "practically private"? We're talking about tweets-- not direct messages.
- harperlee 6y ago
  If 10 people follow you, then you are talking with family, not broadcasting to a nation, in practice. The audience can change when years pass.
  - fabatka 6y ago
    But even then you know your tweets can be read by anybody. If a platform is fundamentally public, I don't understand how can anyone use it as a form of private communication.
    - harperlee 6y ago
      Well it's human nature, really. You are not constantly stepping back and rationally evaluating the present moment. If you have a small bunch of followers and you start a conversation with them, the topic can evolve towards more sensitive matters. Kind of like with normalization of deviance in privacy terms. You just focus on the content of the conversation. As soon as you are answering to anyone, your mind focuses on only that person who said something to you. Criminals post Facebook photos with evidence of their crimes constantly, as another example.
      - fabatka 6y ago
        Thanks, I can see your point better. I guess my real concern is about Twitter being considered the default communication channel for many people. I mean it is perfect for getting updates from orgs/teams the quickest way possible, but to use it as a forum... for me it is incomprehensible.

paxys 6y ago

It's weird to see the backlash against this when people here are the first to speak out about the need to preserve the internet. Like it or not, Tweets are part of the historical record, and I welcome this move.

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TedDoesntTalk 6y ago

> Total Items 396,027 I don't think this is every tweet.

JosephRedfern 6y ago
In this context, an item appears to be a multi-gigabyte "megawarc" archive, rather than an individual tweet.
deleted 6y ago
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sto_hristo 6y ago

There is no escape from cancellation. 500 years from now, someone running for a mayor of some colony somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy will have his aspirations crushed because of something their great*5 grandfather wrote on twitter.

rowanseymour 6y ago

This reminds me I'm due a visit to https://tweetdelete.net/ https://tweetdelete.net/...

PastaMonster 6y ago
I don't think you're getting it. It will not work. A fresh start is to delete the account and create a new new one.

baby 6y ago

Oh no

hexandcube 6y ago

If that's true, I'm deleting my Twitter account.

pasttense01 6y ago

Basically people should be posting anonymously on the internet (via distinct handles with no connection with one's real name), as is done in Hacker News (although a small percent do post enough details in their posts to connect with their real name). Lots of us started out posting with our real names in the last century (on Usenet for example) and after a while realized how poor an idea this was.

ghaff 6y ago
For the most part, if I don't want something linked to my name, I don't write it.
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gentleman11 6y ago

This is a bit tangential, but I wish we weren’t seeing links to tweets showing up as hn stories. It’s not a legitimate news source, and it bans people left and right for nothing because they have such serious botting and conspiracy theory problems

paxys 6y ago
HN isn't just for discussing "legitimate news sources" (whatever that even means). People can post anything they want from any source.
- gentleman11 6y ago
  You can’t say anything of substance in 280 characters, or find room to cite references. It’s just a bunch of disembodied statements meant to go viral to build peoples followings or get people mad, with no meaningful discussion back and forth (for the same reasons). Maybe I’m just getting old, but Twitter seems like a bad way to get and share information, even without the random bans. Apologies if I just haven’t seen the good parts of Twitter yet
  - paxys 6y ago
    That is debatable (I personally don't agree with your view at all), but regardless people are still allowed to post and discuss meaningless content here.
    - gentleman11 6y ago
      I’m not talking about being allowed, I’m talking more about spending the extra moment to find a non Twitter information source before submitting articles, and to hesitate before upvoting a Twitter link when there are som many other great stories under new
  - chocolateboy 6y ago
    > You can’t say anything of substance in 280 characters Your preceding comment is 247 characters.

oytis 6y ago

A good reminder not to put things on other people's computers if you don't want these things to be on other people's computers.

oytis 6y ago

Clicked a couple of items - only metadata is available, other items are "access restricted". I wonder how it works.

deleted 6y ago
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fireattack 6y ago

Does anyone test its completeness, especially for the older date? Also, i can't seem to be able to download the actual data (only the matadata), it says "Files marked with [lock icon] are not available for download." at https://archive.org/download/archiveteam_twitter_20210316071043_3aaac8e0 https://archive.org/download/archiveteam_twitter_20210316071....

elric 6y ago

A couple of years ago, I discovered that archive.org had archived an ancient (1998ish) personal web page of mine. Back when the internet was a smaller, safer and simpler place. It contained a bunch of personally identifiable information, including a phone number and an address. It took me months to have it removed from their archive. They are extremely (deliberately?) slow to respond to emails. They ignore EU law (right to be forgotten, and in this case GDPR on account of the PII). The domain no longer exists, and my registrar doesn't keep records older than 10 years because of GDPR, so I couldn't use that as a way to prove the page was actually mine. In the end I had to send them a DMCA takedown notice, which only worked because the page footer had a "Copyright Elric $lastname" notice. After another goodly while they finally "removed" the page. I'm sure they didn't actually delete anything, but only flagged the page not to be public. If you have archived content which you can't conclusively prove is yours, you're pretty much screwed. And it seems like you can no longer prevent them from scraping your content, as they no longer respects robots.txt. I suspect their crawlers aren't nice enough to tell your their actual identity either.

mids_hn 6y ago
I had screwed up by explicitly stating a Creative Commons license on the page, so I'm certain that it's hopeless. Fuck the Archive team, they can burn in hell. They are the epitome of lawful evil.
zorpner 6y ago
> The domain no longer exists, and my registrar doesn't keep records older than 10 years because of GDPR, so I couldn't use that as a way to prove the page was actually mine. Wait, are you complaining that they wouldn't take down a page immediately upon your request with no proof that it actually belonged to you?
- elric 6y ago
  In a reductionist sort of way, I guess I am. But they should probably ask for permission before archiving stuff forevermore. Or at least make it easier to block them.

f38zf5vdt 6y ago

It seems the whole world will have to relearn why forgiveness was once a virtue the hard way. In the near term, it's causing a bifurcation of society into people who exist and had an opinion versus those who didn't, or those who didn't _yet_. In time it seems like the former is just getting larger and larger. Imagine how the field of mathematics would have evolved if we simply cast aside those who had ever failed to solve a math problem correctly. It needs to be okay for people to make mistakes, otherwise we will never grow as a race.

deleted 6y ago
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drivingmenuts 6y ago

Or, and here's a revolutionary thought, we teach people to think before they open their goddamn idiot pieholes? Impossible, I know, but still a goal worth aiming at.

miduil 6y ago

This makes it really easy to retrieve all previous tweets for certain accounts just by accessing this URL: https://web.archive.org/web/%2A/https://twitter.com/colorofberlin/status/%2A https://web.archive.org/web/%2A/https://twitter.com/colorofb... What's kind of worrying is also that most people who retrieve the artifacts are bots, so clearly becomes an important data source for others.

bityard 6y ago

In 2021, I am a little surprised and amused to see so many people who seem to be shocked (shocked!) that the things they post on the Internet might get archived forever. Especially on HN, where technological literacy tends to be a at least a little bit higher than than the average tweeter. Even back in the early days, it was a common-sense rule of thumb that you never put something on the Internet that you wouldn't want written in the newspaper about you, even in "private" forums such as IRC channels and email. Let alone something as public as twitter.