Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 266 posts

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#171

Post by Gibbon1 »

dijit wrote: post #88
eru wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

More humorously I remember reading about a German guy that forgot where he parked his car and it sat in an office garage for 20 years or something.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#172

Post by syshum »

t-writescode wrote: post #49
syshum wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Wow, this is happening on December 11th? That seems rather abrupt. Just in time for Christmas, image wanting to look back over your deceased father tweets on the holiday only to discover Twitter black-holed them for you... it never cease to amaze how incompetent management is at Large corporations, it seems the bigger a company gets more incompetent is management becomes

It’s good that they’re giving notice so you can download them. It is not Twitter’s responsibility to archive for all eternity.

I always love comments like this.

At no point did I say they have a responsibility to archive them for all eternity.

Further giving people 2 weeks of notice over a heavy holiday period were most people are consumed with other activities is not "giving notice"

Further still it is just bad optics, PR is not about legal responsibility, not about technically being right, it is about how it looks to normal everyday people. Moves this like look bad to normal everyday people.

It is moronic to pull a move like this over the year end holidays. They have chosen this because they think it will fly under the radar, that they can do it while everyone is busy with other things. I have a feeling this is going to back fire on them spectacularly

Which is great because personally I think twitter is a net negative for society and its collapse will be good for humanity

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#173

Post by AstralStorm »

xg15 wrote: post #129

I find it interesting that what Twitter is doing here would have been absolute standard procedure in any small forum 10 years ago - yet everyone seems to panic when Twitter does it. I think the reaction shows how much the internet has changed - and, to be honest - how much the tech crowd has been seduced by the idea that all data should be around forever. I think this is a great descision by Twitter in terms of user…

The difference being that content posted to forum from a deleted account is still accessible unless explicitly removed - just marked as from deleted user, while Twitter feed or post is not.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#174

Post by thombat »

rimliu wrote: post #137
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…

I have the opposite opinion on culling the data. This "preserve everything" attitude just smells like digital hoarding to me. Especially in the context of Twitter, which is mostly the noise with rare blips of the signal. And even in those cases the signal often is very specific to that moment in time and not that important later. The vision of a huge pile of digital trash with a few gold nuggets inside has zero appea…

My wife has started making photobooks of significant family events, having observed that having an arbitrarily large pile of digital photos that never get curated or culled actually means we're less likely to revisit our past.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#176

Post by vthriller »

syshum wrote: post #170
eru wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why a screenshot? That would mess with screenreaders. Tweets are text, so quote them as text?

Why would is mess with Screen readers? the Alt tag has been a thing for a long time.

Why then embed tweet as an image if you're going to copy its text anyway?

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#177

Post by xrisk »

majewsky wrote: post #148
ajcodez wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every Aaron there are thousands of people who signed up, took a great all letters no numbers username, never posted, and never came back.

They could have the rule be "all inactive accounts with less than X followers".

who determines X? How is that fair to X-1?

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#178

Post by marcosdumay »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #171
dijit wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

More humorously I remember reading about a German guy that forgot where he parked his car and it sat in an office garage for 20 years or something.

There was a building in my city that was constructed in the 70's to be a shopping mall, but the owner got bankrupt in the meanwhile, and the building was repurposed into a parking lot that run for a couple of years.

By 2014 is was imploded. There were around 30 cars still parked there.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#179

Post by corobo »

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...

Yeah honestly I understand all of the negative effects people are saying but I’ll be so glad if the username I want is released from the user that signed up, tweeted once, got hit by a spam virus in 2011, never tweeted again.

I’ve even got a few reminders in my calendar to check on the username availability on the 11th and 12th. Really hoping it’s a full on user delete rather than just making them inactive

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#180

Post by GrumpyNl »

flurdy wrote: post #143

This is awfull. 6 months is too short for any account. I can understand the need to cull some never really used accounts. There are a lot of never really logged on accounts filling up the space. So some weeding of those is understandable. But not ones that have been used but not that active any more. E.g. dead, seriously ill in hospital, backpacking for a year or travelling to Mars. Or simple just stopped tweeting fo…

I have received the email.
Post reply on HN