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Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

bbc.com

11–20 of 266 posts

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#11
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...

I imagine the goal is to free up handles for new users.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#12
post #3
post #2

If the usernames free up, I wonder if this going to lead to something synonymous to domain squatting?

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.

I imagine they want to free up accounts that never did anything. You should be able to safely make a handle available after deleting an account if it has never tweeted, has not been tweeted at, and hasn’t logged in in a long time.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#13

> In future, the firm said it would also look at accounts where people have logged in but don't "do anything" on the platform. Yes, Twitter is going to purge a lot of accounts, the same accounts Twitter boasted about having pre IPO in order to fake growth.

That sucks!

I have an account. I log in but I never post. I only use it to follow some interesting accounts —that is all. I don’t contact customer service i don’t feign outrage I don’t virtue signal I don’t post memes... it’s by all means passive.

WTF, I just want to follow some accounts which disseminate useful information.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#14
post #13

> In future, the firm said it would also look at accounts where people have logged in but don't "do anything" on the platform. Yes, Twitter is going to purge a lot of accounts, the same accounts Twitter boasted about having pre IPO in order to fake growth.

That sucks! I have an account. I log in but I never post. I only use it to follow some interesting accounts —that is all. I don’t contact customer service i don’t feign outrage I don’t virtue signal I don’t post memes... it’s by all means passive. WTF, I just want to follow some accounts which disseminate useful information.

I think that counts as doing something

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#15
post #13

> In future, the firm said it would also look at accounts where people have logged in but don't "do anything" on the platform. Yes, Twitter is going to purge a lot of accounts, the same accounts Twitter boasted about having pre IPO in order to fake growth.

That sucks! I have an account. I log in but I never post. I only use it to follow some interesting accounts —that is all. I don’t contact customer service i don’t feign outrage I don’t virtue signal I don’t post memes... it’s by all means passive. WTF, I just want to follow some accounts which disseminate useful information.

That represents probably the overwhelming majority of Twitter usage. Your account will be fine.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#18
post #13

> In future, the firm said it would also look at accounts where people have logged in but don't "do anything" on the platform. Yes, Twitter is going to purge a lot of accounts, the same accounts Twitter boasted about having pre IPO in order to fake growth.

That sucks! I have an account. I log in but I never post. I only use it to follow some interesting accounts —that is all. I don’t contact customer service i don’t feign outrage I don’t virtue signal I don’t post memes... it’s by all means passive. WTF, I just want to follow some accounts which disseminate useful information.

They probably have ways of getting the metric usage for lurkers

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#19

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…

Seems like they could avoid this problem, keep old accounts, and still free up the namespace by just renaming all these accounts @_archived_originalname (or something better).

Maybe with some kind of process to re-activate the account under the original name (or a new one if it has since been taken). And some kind of hands-on resolution process for people who accidentally got deactivated. Feels tractable.

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