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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

#81

Post by TurningCanadian »

philliphaydon wrote: post #64
geofft wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not sure it would matter if the CC was closed or not. If you're running a Lambda a few times a day you would fall into the free tier for... ever until they change the free tier. So the question would be does your account stay active despite an expired credit card which is never invoked cos you never put your account into debt?

What if AWS changes their privacy policy

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#82

Post by sytelus »

While talking with my parents I realized how little of their generation is available to us. What did they eat in there travels? Where? What music did they listen to? What kind of cloths did they wear? I have a few fragments of photos, anecdots and not much more. I was thinking about how highly detailed memories of our generation would be available to future generations. Facebook, Twitter etc are in a way digital monuments of our entire generation. Looking at these misguided arbitrary corporate decisions of culling data isn't comforting. Archive.org is trying to do its best but there needs be better efforts in preserving memories of who passed away and we need to be more sensitive about that even though they are going to produce ad click revenues.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#83

Post by dissidents »

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"

Twitter handles are worth a lot of money and hackers have spent much effort to steal them. See

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/how-i...

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/twitt...

Amazing if Twitter is just going to release valuable namespaces worth millions all on the same day.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#84

Post by eru »

prawn wrote: post #75
geofft wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> They only found him because of a check on tenants in a building/area who weren't drawing any water.

Wow. Some leaky faucets or automatic plant watering system would have kept him undiscovered for even longer.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#85

Post by eru »

notatoad wrote: post #44
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…

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.

Why not?

If computational resources keep getting cheaper exponentially (even at a low rate), keeping eg 1 GiB around forever only costs a finite amount of money.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#86

Post by eru »

Laforet wrote: post #76
fooqux wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why a screenshot? That would mess with screenreaders.

Tweets are text, so quote them as text?

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#87

Post by eru »

jijji wrote: post #79
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.

Why would they store each tweet as one file on an inode limited file system?

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#88

Post by dijit »

eru wrote: post #84
prawn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> They only found him because of a check on tenants in a building/area who weren't drawing any water. Wow. Some leaky faucets or automatic plant watering system would have kept him undiscovered for even longer.

It’s rare but not unheard of for people to be found decades after death.

https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/10/29/inenglish/1572340728_79...

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#89

Post by shard972 »

sytelus wrote: post #82

While talking with my parents I realized how little of their generation is available to us. What did they eat in there travels? Where? What music did they listen to? What kind of cloths did they wear? I have a few fragments of photos, anecdots and not much more. I was thinking about how highly detailed memories of our generation would be available to future generations. Facebook, Twitter etc are in a way digital monu…

Have you tried reading a book? I don't see how an old facebook timeline is going to provide a lot of insight about a culture in the past compared to what we already do with books and to some extent movies.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#90

Post by eru »

mc3 wrote: post #56
codetrotter wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Donate the revenue to some charity, if the auction would be a PR problem otherwise.

Eg https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html

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