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I've been wanting my real name as Twitter handle but someone took it in 2012, posted one tweet and never used it again. Six months or one month is too short an
by naet 3y ago
I've been wanting my real name as Twitter handle but someone took it in 2012, posted one tweet and never used it again.
Six months or one month is too short and would definitely damage the platform. But I wouldn't hate erasing accounts that have over 5-10 years without activity (and maybe with less than 20-50 total tweets).
- r721 3y agoWhy even erase accounts at all? Just rename them to randomized names with a prefix.
- jzig 3y agoHow do you find the account again?
- Dylan16807 3y agoA link to a tweet would do it. And if they're in any lists, those lists could show the old name too. You could also keep the old name (or most of it) as the start of the new name.
- MallocVoidstar 3y agoTumblr's method is to append "-blog" to the account name. Still discoverable.
- numpad0 3y agoSome inactive users are legit dead with friends still on the platform. It’ll be very mean to erase records of such accounts.
- mvdtnz 3y agoI don't agree with this perspective. People die and the world keeps turning. We don't stop renting out homes that now-deceased people lived in, we don't keep their phone numbers active, we don't keep their bank accounts open and active indefinitely or keep their employment agreements current. I don't see why a twitter username is so sacred.
- simonw 3y agoWe don't round up every existing record of that person and set fire to them either.
- mvdtnz 3y agoI wonder if your gym will feel the same way about your reserved locker after you pass?
- kwhitefoot 3y agoYour locker at the gym isn't a record of your interactions with other people.
- yawpitch 3y agoThose are false equivalencies… a home changing hands doesn’t wipe out the entire world’s memory of every meal that now-deceased person ever had with friends in that house, every saved voice message on their still-grieving lover’s phone, all trace of their money and assets, or all the accounting entries and signatures on contracts they made during their employment history. The username isn’t sacred… how that human user impacted others, and how the recycling of their account and its history would affect other humans, that’s what — should be — sacred. And it’s not like Twitter is materially harmed by inactive accounts or have a demonstrable need to recycle usernames… they aren’t doing this to recover inactive usernames, they’re doing it (exclusively) to apply pressure to infrequent users to either view advertising or pay for an increasingly meaningless blue icon.
- numpad0 3y agoI’m suspecting they’ve stopped caring about spam accounts, and spam account has started putting tolls on either their backend or the namespace. The amount of spams named in Docker style format is insane since the buyout.
- allarm 3y agoWhat are you talking about? It’s not about the username, it’s about the whole history of tweets, including conversations. I assume it’s quite easy to see why removing the conversation history of a deceased person might be considered bad by those who knew them.
- duskwuff 3y ago> But I wouldn't hate erasing accounts that have over 5-10 years without activity (and maybe with less than 20-50 total tweets). Better yet, do it based on the number of interactions (replies/likes/retweets) on the account's tweets. If people interacted with an account when it was alive, it's worth keeping.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoThe popularity of something has no bearing on its validity, especially on social media where the signal-to-noise ratio sucks. Example: an autistic man joins a social media platform to share his ideas/research/whatever, he has no friends IRL, he doesn't do well with interacting with others, but his output is useful if someone were to find it. I find all kinds of very useful information obsessively documented by folks who have very little in the way of social skills, marketing or interest to reach vast sums of people. By your logic, a video of someone falling in public in a funny way that gets a few million views is more meaningful than a fix for a niche piece of software, or a mod for an obscure piece of old hardware.
- jzb 3y agoWhat’s the cutoff? Just how popular does my dead friend’s account need to have been so it doesn’t get memory holed?