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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

#71

Post by stOneskull »

mc32 wrote: post #28
hombre_fatal wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter will begin deleting accounts that have been inactive for more than six months, unless they log in before an 11 December deadline.

I’m responding to my parent poster who quotes: “In future, the firm said it would also look at accounts where people have logged in but don't "do anything" on the platform.” I guess it depends on what “don’t do anything” translates to in Twitterspeak.

Maybe "on the platform" should be emphasised. Like if you just use your twitter account to log into another site or something.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#73

Post by sircastor »

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 have a friend who passed away from cancer a few of years ago. I still get these notifications for him. I was trying to call someone recently and my phone suggested my dad who has been gone for a couple of years. We need a better mechanism to gracefully transition accounts of individuals.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#74

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

sircastor wrote: post #73
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 have a friend who passed away from cancer a few of years ago. I still get these notifications for him. I was trying to call someone recently and my phone suggested my dad who has been gone for a couple of years. We need a better mechanism to gracefully transition accounts of individuals.

This is kinda like the 'isMalicious' bit proposal on TCP / IP.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#75

Post by prawn »

geofft wrote: post #59
prawn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There was a case of a military veteran recently in the States who lay dead on his kitchen floor for up to three years. He was still getting some sort of pension/payment and the rent was getting auto-paid from that. They only found him because of a check on tenants in a building/area who weren't drawing any water.

In a case like that, I suppose a debit card or credit card with an automatic transfer would stay active for some time.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#76

Post by Laforet »

fooqux wrote: post #51
55555 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is why I really don't like the recent trend of third party sites dynamically embedding tweets on their own page when a screenshot plus direct link could have sufficed. The internet has already lost a great deal of its past with many historical image hosts that went down or rogue (looking at you Photobucket). Why are people making the same mistake again?

BTW Facebook have had the option to memorialize the profile of the deceased for a while. Things seems to have worked out fine for them.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#77

Post by jeromegv »

kick wrote: post #63
paul7986 wrote: post #42

Are there any Twitter folks here... how can i can access to my 12 year old account? I lost the email its associated with and really would like to regain access! Has anyone been able to recover their account that was in this state?

If you remember what the email was, check for if it's ever been in a data breach, then run a password cracker on the hash.

Wow this is quite smart. Never thought of that

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#78

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#79

Post by jijji »

symplee wrote: post #4

Wow, this is happening on December 11th? That seems rather abrupt. Why not freeze and hide the accounts instead of deleting? I.e. don't push any tweets to them, or anything else computationally intensive. Then when they log in again, have them click a button to "catch up." Probably not as profitable as annoying a lot of surprised users who try and log in after Dec 12...

The fact that twitter has a size limit of 280 bytes (used to be 140 bytes), they are probably trying to free up some inodes to save some disk space, as greedy as it sounds.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#80

Post by Mirioron »

riffic wrote: post #54
echelon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

I hope this never happens. It's rare that something doesn't become worse when it becomes mainstream online.

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