Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-pr…
Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users
#261I'd be ok with it if they preserved the history, timestamped the change of ownership and made sure that from the page of the current registrant you could backtrack to the history of the account over time. That would be an acceptable middle-ground, maybe even show (#2) or so behind the name linking to the account history to indicate the nth re-incarnation of that particular account. That way all the old content would remain linked and you'd be able to find out if someone has re-purposed an account right up front.