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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

#141

Post by zaarn »

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.

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.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#142

Post by gerikson »

prawn wrote: post #75
geofft wrote: post #59

Earlier 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…

There was a case of a military veteran recently in the States who lay dead on his kitchen floor for up to three years. He was still getting some sort of pension/payment and the rent was getting auto-paid from that. They only found him because of a check on tenants in a building/area who weren't drawing any water. In a case like that, I suppose a debit card or credit card with an automatic transfer would stay active f…

Similar very recent case in Sweden:

https://www.thelocal.se/20191119/man-found-dead-in-stockholm...

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#143

Post by flurdy »

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 for a while or permanently. I am sure many now dormant accounts have tweets linked from pages across the internet.

I do hate services that recycle usernames. So open for abuse.

I have a couple that is merely business or project related that tweet once per year if that. They should not be deleted.

I also have a few that I just created to demo something. After a year or so I can not argue against them being deleted.

I registered a few accounts for my kids, who are still too young to use it but thought I'd ensure they have the option of choosing their name as their handle. Never tweeted, so probably a prime candidate for deletion. Unfortunately.

I/we don't know the criteria they use specifically internally to decide who might get deleted. But I hope it is some sort of scoring based on several criteria. Not just when they last logged in. like:

* how many tweets have they sent

* where the account used over time, not just after registering

* last login

* how many times did they login

* does it have a profile picture

* detailed profile

* have they requested not to be deleted

* are any of their tweets backlinked from other sites

* have x followers

* following/followers is more than x

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#144

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#145

Post by flurdy »

wilg wrote: post #19
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…

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.

Don't like that idea. There are a lot of direct links across the internet to tweets that would get broken if the handle was renamed.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#146

Post by flurdy »

eggsome wrote: post #17

They've already started deleting old tweets for some reason. I only tweeted 4 times and the 2 oldest tweets are gone :(

That may not be intentional. Or permanent.

They may have had an accidental data loss. But more likely it is data that is rarely read so not stored in a hot cache near your edge.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#148

Post by majewsky »

ajcodez wrote: post #111
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…

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".

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#150

Post by fyfy18 »

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 feel that you are over thinking this. The email I received (apparently I have a lot of accounts I registered for demos but no longer use) says this:

"you need to log in and follow the on-screen prompts before Dec. 11, 2019, otherwise your account will be removed from Twitter."

So they are sending the email to all inactive accounts, and leaving it up to the owner to perform an action if they want to continue to using it. Apart from the rather short timeframe, it seems like a good way to handle it.

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