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Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

bbc.com

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Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#51

Post by fooqux »

55555 wrote: post #46
notatoad wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Archive team seems like the appropriate end for these accounts. Maintaining accounts for deceased people for the remainder of the lifespan of the internet is not really a sustainable thing.

maintaining accounts for deceased people for the remainder of the lifespan of Twitter is probably sustainable, though.

To what end? You already assume Twitter has a shorter lifespan than the internet. Are you going to be upset when Twitter dies, removing not just all the accounts of live people, but dead people as well?

Also, Twitter may disagree with you on its lifespan. I wouldn't, but I do believe that unless they do start archiving, it will reduce its lifespan, perhaps considerably.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#52

Post by dehrmann »

herendin2 wrote: post #5
dehrmann wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt they'd free up the usernames. Username reuse has problems with reputation hijacking, either for paid likes, spam, or making it look like the user said something they didn't. It also creates a bad experience with historic @users in tweets, and no one wants that bad PR tweets pretending to be from someone deceased.

What you said is true, but they will free up old usernames FTA- "previously unavailable usernames will start coming up for grabs after the 11 December cut-off"

Color me incorrect. I wish them luck with that.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#53

Post by Yolta »

echelon wrote: post #45
riffic wrote: post #41

Time for a regular reminder that Twitter's namespace is the sole property of Twitter, Inc.

We should really get about replacing it. How's Mastodon holding up? I could never get over the ridiculous name or "toots", but if it scales we should really be using it instead. Another thing that shocks me is that ads actually pay for Twitter. How did they build such a massive company (expensive employees and outsized market cap) on ad revenue? It seems like the wrong demographics for ads to actually work and persua…

Mastodon is holding up just fine and growing rapidly, the atmosphere is much nicer and every few weeks, there's a massive influx of new users whenever Twitter is upsetting its user base.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#54

Post by riffic »

echelon wrote: post #45
riffic wrote: post #41

Time for a regular reminder that Twitter's namespace is the sole property of Twitter, Inc.

We should really get about replacing it. How's Mastodon holding up? I could never get over the ridiculous name or "toots", but if it scales we should really be using it instead. Another thing that shocks me is that ads actually pay for Twitter. How did they build such a massive company (expensive employees and outsized market cap) on ad revenue? It seems like the wrong demographics for ads to actually work and persua…

The Fediverse (which Mastodon is just one particular implementation of) is shockingly healthy right now. I surmise that it will look quite a bit different once you have, oh, a bbc.com implementing its underlying protocol and pumping out content onto it. At that point who knows what'll happen.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#55

Post by mc3 »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #6

> In future, the firm said it would also look at accounts where people have logged in but don't "do anything" on the platform. Yes, Twitter is going to purge a lot of accounts, the same accounts Twitter boasted about having pre IPO in order to fake growth.

> The cull will not affect Twitter's reported user numbers, as the firm bases its usage level only on users who log-in at least once a day. According to its latest earnings report, from September, Twitter has 145m "monetisable" daily active users (users who come into contact with Twitter's advertising on a daily basis).

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#56

Post by mc3 »

codetrotter wrote: post #9
Nextgrid wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A solution could be to make the usernames available after a random period of time (for up to a year), so popular usernames aren't released all at once to be grabbed by a squatter. With a staggered release this at least allows the chance for someone legitimate to stumble upon the username before a squatter arrives.

If squatting Twitter names becomes even marginally profitable you can be sure that squatters will be setting up bots that will monitor the availability of deactivated usernames that were popular in the past and that as soon as these are released they will be taken. A delay of the kind you suggested will not stop the bot writers.

Yes better to put the account names up for auction and bring in some revenue.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#57

Post by kingofpandora »

IronWolve wrote: post #50

I wish they would clean up the honeypots that keep adding people. I report and block about a dozen fake accounts that add me with an account created within 30 days. I know 1 guy who actually fell for a honeypot, even sent her money. Its gotta be profitable for scammers with as bad as its getting.

Are we calling those "honeypots" these days?

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#58

Post by prawn »

rb808 wrote: post #27
rahuldottech wrote: post #10

I wonder what will happen to the twitter accounts of folks who have passed away? Eg. Aaron Swartz: https://twitter.com/aaronsw https://twitter.com/aaronsw_hv > The cull will include users who stopped posting to the site because they died - unless someone with that person's account details is able to log-in. Yeah, this is bad. EDIT ---- Archive Team is making an effort to archive twitter accounts of dead users. Please…

I worked with a guy who died of a heart attack. Every year LinkedIn asks me to congratulate him having worked X+N years at the company. You have to wonder when they'll give up.

I follow an acquaintance on Twitter who set up an auto-tweet while he was alive. Now, after his death, he still tweets whenever the weather drops below a certain temperature in Scotland.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#59

Post by geofft »

prawn wrote: post #58
rb808 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with a guy who died of a heart attack. Every year LinkedIn asks me to congratulate him having worked X+N years at the company. You have to wonder when they'll give up.

I follow an acquaintance on Twitter who set up an auto-tweet while he was alive. Now, after his death, he still tweets whenever the weather drops below a certain temperature in Scotland.

Now I'm wondering what your acquaintance's tech stack is, and more generally, what the most reliable way to keep running scheduled jobs after death is - since Twitter won't remove accounts that still log in, I kind of want to set up a cronjob to keep my username active for as long as I can. (Assume that the job itself doesn't change, i.e., there's no need to move away from a deprecated API.)

Maybe Lambda + CloudWatch Events? AWS probably won't go away for decades.

Does your credit card automatically close when your death is reported to the financial system, or can you direct it to stay open in your will + set aside a bit of money to pay off the couple-cent bill in perpetuity?

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#60

Post by jcims »

mc32 wrote: post #13
throw_m239339 wrote: post #6

> In future, the firm said it would also look at accounts where people have logged in but don't "do anything" on the platform. Yes, Twitter is going to purge a lot of accounts, the same accounts Twitter boasted about having pre IPO in order to fake growth.

That sucks! I have an account. I log in but I never post. I only use it to follow some interesting accounts —that is all. I don’t contact customer service i don’t feign outrage I don’t virtue signal I don’t post memes... it’s by all means passive. WTF, I just want to follow some accounts which disseminate useful information.

The best type of twitter account is the one that brings eyeballs to the platform. Yours is the second best. You're fine.
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