Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#251

Post by kretor » Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 2:43 AM UTC

eggsome wrote: post #118

echelon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, is this really happening? Can you confirm or post evidence? This is a big deal if so.

I can't provide proof, but I _know_ that I tweeted @adom_dev around the time of it's kickstarter and one of the Baldurs Gate EE devs about gemrb around the time they announced that project. Both tweets are gone.

I don't think those tweets are gone.

The "Tweets & replies" section of your profile (https://twitter.com/eggsome/with_replies ) has two tweets that seem to match your description:

https://twitter.com/eggsome/status/228459378859180032

https://twitter.com/eggsome/status/189888249500680192

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#252

Post by eru » Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 3:23 AM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #231

ryanmercer wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So when twitter changes an API, or is down, and someone happens upon your page they can still see what you intended to include. Also if you're documenting something like John Smith said "Kill all Muppets, they're taking human jobs" and his publicist goes "John, you really need to delete that tweet" and he does, you can show a screenshot of it to prevent revisionist history.

We're not talking about using the API, but whether to prefer copying the tweet as a screenshot+text or just the text.

Yes. And you could even quote the page with all the twitter styling. Ie quote the HTML and CSS instead of just the tweet, if you really want that twitter look and feel.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#253

Post by eru » Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 3:26 AM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #141

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.

There is a limit to the cost of computational resources, the cost would decrease until a certain limit and then that cost will apply until the heat death of the universe.

Yes. Though in our case I feel justified in using the simpler model of just assuming exponential shrinkage forever, because I assume that the end of twitter as a company (or the Internet) will happen before the heat death of the universe.

(Similar to how we often treat integers as unit-sized in asymptotic analysis of algorithms, even though we know that we need a logarithmic number of bits for truly large numbers.)

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#254

Post by jijji » Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 5:01 AM UTC

eru wrote: post #87

jijji wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

it was sarcasm, but anyone who takes twitter seriously should have their head checked

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#255

Post by jijji » Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 5:03 AM UTC

hendi_ wrote: post #92

jijji wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They neither store each tweet in a single file, nor is is 140 bytes but 140 characters (think ASCII vs UTF-8)

it was sarcasm, and it was never implied that each tweet was stored as a single inode.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#256

Post by Frondo » Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 5:15 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #236

Frondo wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I'm looking for something more than "it's possible to do this." Or rather, I don't think there's a need to go to such an extent to preserve old usernames and histories. I think it'd be sufficient to let archivists at whatever data they wanted, and return the names to the churn.

They're not names, they're identifiers. There is absolutely no shortage of those and Twitter threads in their original form have all kinds of uses. Court cases, keeping the web in one piece, reference material, claims of prior art and so on. The archives can not be searched and that makes them much harder to use for that purpose. Our company is pretty handy in digging up stuff but you'd be surprised how much of the w…

Thank you for elaborating. I'm actually more sympathetic to preserving identifiers now!

I do think Twitter could handle this better. One problem with your distinction between names and identifiers is that, for Twitter, they're largely the same. And, Twitter lets any user change their name AND identifier at will. The history on Twitter is already badly muddled; this doesn't change much, except for a handful of high-profile accounts that people want to keep as memorials.

Twitter, I think, is not the right venue for that. They should make these accounts available for archival, or spin them off into a separate namespace, but I don't believe it makes sense for Twitter to keep inactive accounts preserved as they are indefinitely, just because the whole twitter namespace is already in such a flux (and it's not a good venue for memorializing the deceased).

Still, thanks for clarifying and changing my mind somewhat.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#257

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 5:57 AM UTC

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.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#258

Post by lazyjones » Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 7:41 AM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #235

lazyjones wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, it's problematic for me - my Twitter account is up for grabs and someone might impersonate me, assisted by several mentions of the account on old pages.

Why is your account up for grabs? Are you unable to login and confirm you're active?

I'm not active and haven't been for several years ever since Twitter started asking for phone numbers obnoxiously.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#259

Post by eru » Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 8:22 AM UTC

jijji wrote: post #254

eru wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

it was sarcasm, but anyone who takes twitter seriously should have their head checked

Oh, ok.

Storing each tweet as one file might even make sense. But you need to pick a filesystem that supports that use case at scale, if you are twitter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir is a good example of how this can make sense---at least at a small local scale.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#260

Post by icebraining » Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 9:16 AM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #258

icebraining wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is your account up for grabs? Are you unable to login and confirm you're active?

I'm not active and haven't been for several years ever since Twitter started asking for phone numbers obnoxiously.

Yeah, seems like they have a habit of suspending accounts and asking for numbers. I've been lucky until now.

Seems like you can contact support to get it active again without having to give out your phone, but I understand if you'd rather not use the platform at all.