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Imagine if something like twitter existed for the entire 21st century. Yeah, we have books and articles describing those times but they're almost always elite or intentionally elevated perspectives. I could see myself getting lost for days in historical tweets from regular people shitposting around the spanish-american war.
Services such as this cannot delete a tweet from other services or people who archive them or even just take a screenshot. You still have to assume that anything to post on Twitter will be public forever.
That's generally a good assumption to make, it's definitely the case for HN. But finding someone's old tweets is orders of magnitudes easier via Twitter's advanced search, than to try to retroactively find them via Google and hope one of the disparate social-media-mirroring sites have captured them. Even Internet Archive will only have a spotty record of someone's timeline -- and IA won't capture the /with_replies endpoint since that requires being logged in.
Services such as this cannot delete a tweet from other services or people who archive them or even just take a screenshot. You still have to assume that anything to post on Twitter will be public forever.
Simultaneously, this may be a cry for help, something far beyond simply asking for mental help.
I deleted all my tweets once but still have a count of 3 tweets. Where are these shadow tweets, and how do I eliminate them??
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very true. Once it's out there, content can't be deleted. Can't see any type of benefit to these services, besides for those who wish to automate their tasks.
The benefit is risk reduction, not absolutism. You make it hard for lazy people with a bone to pick to find your old Tweets. You also increase the ambiguity (was this screenshot faked?) and costs for someone trying to uncover old Tweets at scale.
For people who use Reddit, deleted comments only remove the username and not the content, making it trivial to trace back the original poster. If you delete posts/comments regularly use Shreddit which overwrites the content before deleting it making this trace back much more difficult. https://github.com/x89/Shreddit
> deleted comments only remove the username and not the content Source? I just tried posting something and deleting it for myself. I don't even see '[deleted]' or anything in the thread. It's just gone completely. The permalink says "there doesn't seem to be anything here" (like it does for empty threads or subreddits). No mention of my username nor the content anywhere that I can find.
Reddit internally saves post deletions but not post edits, so if you really want to delete something you should edit it to some nonsense before you delete it.
Of course, the best way to protect yourself is to never post anything compromising in the first place because there are already a lot of services out there that cache everything, but I think it's a good practice to follow if you're going to delete anyway.