They've already started deleting old tweets for some reason. I only tweeted 4 times and the 2 oldest tweets are gone :(
Are they gone or just held in cold storage?
Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users
131–140 of 266 posts
Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users
#132Earlier 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)
Also pictures/videos attached to the tweet
Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users
#133This 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
I mean domain squatting has been a thing since the inception of the net. Not too far off to think this will happen over and over again.
Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users
#134There are so many now deceased person's account which contains very interesting, and are definitely considered as an important historical material. These historical materials will be lost on this move.
Yes, we can't expect the for-profit companies to preserve the history. But these are so hard to preserve.
Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users
#135Earlier 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?
"The AWS free tier will expire 12 months from the date of when you first sign up."
Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users
#136While 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…
That hit me recently - was sat in an airport the other side of the world having just sent my mum a WhatsApp saying we were through security and sharing some snaps from that leg of the journey.
Even within my lifetime, that'd have been a £10 phonecall and a postcard that might or might not arrive in a week or so. It took 20 seconds to have an immediate, searchable, chronological update on what we'd done and where we were. Incredible.
That being said, if Google Photos and WhatsApp go the way of the dodo, we're a bit screwed.
Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users
#137While 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 appeal to me.
Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users
#138Earlier 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.
You're missing the point.
Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users
#139They've already started deleting old tweets for some reason. I only tweeted 4 times and the 2 oldest tweets are gone :(
Are they really deleting the tweets and data, or are they just hiding them from plain view?
It seems that deleting any old data is a negative for the company. Data is the new oil, right.
Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users
#140I'm wondering about those users who are under govt clamped internet shutdown since months and were not able to login since months e.g. Kashmir (Indian Administered) where internet shutdown is continuing since Aug 5 2019?