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Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

bbc.com

91–100 of 266 posts

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#91
post #34

Earlier 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.

The only thing twitter does is store and retrieve tweets. Giving 1 month notice before deleting a large set of them seems to be a short.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#92
post #79
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...

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)

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#93

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.

It may not be for content, but for user data analysis without consent.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#94
In April of 2011 I made a twitter account to post wherever I had updates to post on a certain subject. I haven't had updates to post in a few years on that subject (I last posted in 2017) but I don't think I should have my account culled.

EDIT: And it doesn't even make any sense. It's a publishing platform. The author already agreed to anything necessary.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#95
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you remember what the email was, check for if it's ever been in a data breach, then run a password cracker on the hash.

Wow this is quite smart. Never thought of that

When I was younger, it was a fun hobby to help people with.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What if AWS changes their privacy policy

What sort of change?

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#97
post #82

While 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…

> arbitrary corporate decisions

There was a HN thread about an open source Twitter implemented in Haskell with the full stack in one page (it's called something specific) and that made me think that maybe decentrialisation is really just having decentrialised habits.

If you can figure out storage, the rest is all just done on the client side. It would kind of be like a exodus back to 1997, when everyone just slapped together some HTML and had a web page (I think; back then I was playing SC2 and didn't know what HTML was).

I thought of this example yesterday: Often people lament something like "the master craftsmen are all old, what would happen in the next generation". But I think the next generation is busy inventing the craft independently. Much like leathercraft or book binding on Reddit. I do think people can get lazy because of YouTwitFace. But I do think that a lazy person can become very efficient and prolific precisely because of revolt against their self-imposed boredom.

It does not require a lot of people (e.g.: archive.org) to make a rather large difference. GNU/Linux and the rest are examples of that 90% viewers/lurkers, 9% interaction, 1% creators. I don't know if I am misquoting that, but maybe people should be active in choosing what they preserve. That is, you are your own 100%; there is no 90-9-1 with regards to your legacy. You have to store it yourself.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#99
post #2

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

On the other hand, my username (arp242) is already "squatted" by an account that never tweeted or had any other apparently activity. I don't use Twitter much, but people have erroneously "mentioned" this account on a few occasions.

Re: Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users

#100
post #45
post #41

Time for a regular reminder that Twitter's namespace is the sole property of Twitter, Inc.

We should really get about replacing it. How's Mastodon holding up? I could never get over the ridiculous name or "toots", but if it scales we should really be using it instead. Another thing that shocks me is that ads actually pay for Twitter. How did they build such a massive company (expensive employees and outsized market cap) on ad revenue? It seems like the wrong demographics for ads to actually work and persua…

Mastodon instances randomly disappear forever too which doesn't solve the issue with Twitter deleting inactive accounts, unfortunately.
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