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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

#101

Post by robjan »

Mirioron wrote: post #80
riffic wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's pubsub so if you don't like the BBC's content then you just don't follow them.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#102

Post by Tomte »

eru wrote: post #85
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.

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.

Space gets cheap. But the namespace for user names gets ever more crowded.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#103

Post by Springtime »

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…

The issue I've seen with archive efforts that end up on the Internet Archive whether by IA via Archive Team is problems with infinite scroll (and other forms of dynamically loading content via JS), at least in my experience. Though I recall one WARC archiving tool that could achieve it (I believe it required the user to manually scroll the page during the capture).

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#104

Post by jlgaddis »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #62
CKN23-ARIN wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Twitter potentially bears liability by hosting them into the future, and is only willing to bear that liability if you agree to their terms.

Citation needed. If they receive a copyright takedown request and don't act on it, then they're liable. Otherwise I don't see where liability comes into play. Please cite court cases showing websites are liable for content posted by its users. Nobody is using Twitter to archive copyrighted material.

Indeed.

This is the exact purpose of Section 230 and why it is so important to preserve it.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#105

Post by bfirsh »

This is actually useful for me. The name of my new company is taken by a 10 year old account that has never tweeted, and I haven’t managed to find somebody at Twitter who can get the name for me.

Does anybody know what’s going to happen to the names? Are they going to become available to register on 11th Dec? I hope somebody isn’t waiting there with a dictionary to squat them all...

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#106

Post by jlgaddis »

CKN23-ARIN wrote: post #40
unityByFreedom wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that make sense? Why should a privacy policy be retroactive on things I already posted?

Because Twitter potentially bears liability by hosting them into the future, and is only willing to bear that liability if you agree to their terms.

Except that Section 230 explicitly states that they don't bear liability.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#107

Post by someonehere »

I worked at Twitter back in the early days. I left because I had an inkling there were tons of fake accounts and bot accounts. I thought at some point this would nosedive the company because Facebook’s growth at the time was all about how many active users they had. Twitter seemed to have too many accounts that weren’t justifiably real.

A few years later I Had conversation at another job with coworkers and told them how easy it was to fake followers with $40. Sure enough I found a site that promised a certain amount of followers for $40. I paid the $40 and went from a couple dozen followers to 4,000 over the course of a few days. I think for an extra $60 I could have them retweet something for me as well. At that point I knew my suspicions were correct and knew I made the right choice to leave.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#108

Post by goshx »

bfirsh wrote: post #105

This is actually useful for me. The name of my new company is taken by a 10 year old account that has never tweeted, and I haven’t managed to find somebody at Twitter who can get the name for me. Does anybody know what’s going to happen to the names? Are they going to become available to register on 11th Dec? I hope somebody isn’t waiting there with a dictionary to squat them all...

You just gave out the idea to someone to do just that

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#109

Post by notatoad »

Tomte wrote: post #102
eru wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Space gets cheap. But the namespace for user names gets ever more crowded.

not just the namespace, but the content-space. a service like twitter thives on a feeling if immediacy and involvement, and if you were to constantly be coming across dead accounts (whether the owner is deceased or just otherwise left twitter) i think it would detract from the usefulness of twitter.

whether the accounts are moved to the internet archive or some twitter-hosted archive, the value in twitter is not in old tweets. i think most people would be better off if all of twitter had an automatic expiry.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#110

Post by notatoad »

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…

doesn't the default twitter embed include the original text of the tweet in the embed code, and then just dynamically load in the like/retweet counts and branding?

at least that's the way it looks when they load on a ridiculously slow internet connection, i've never actually looked at the embed code.

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