Marc Andreessen suddenly deletes all his tweets, goes on Twitter break | Hacker News Reader

Marc Andreessen suddenly deletes all his tweets, goes on Twitter break

techcrunch.com

85 pointssmb0680 comments

There's a bot that's captured the last 70,000 of Andreessen's tweets: https://twitter.com/pmarca_retweet

What I find a little bizarre is that the @pmarca account is still listed as having 189 tweets, yet only the Pinned Tweet showed. Earlier last night, his account was listed as having 100K+ tweets and still only showed the Pinned tweet: https://twitter.com/2bluesc/status/779821454531497985

Is this just a caching issue on Twitter's side? I was hoping it'd be a new level of profile privacy: hide all your tweets, but allow for the publishing of the pinned tweet.

Yeah it would be nice if social networks had a 'lockdown' button so all your public stuff can be hidden mid-controversy or if you were a target of harassment and/or otherwise inquisitive folks.

The real question is, how did he do this without running into rate limits? What app did he use? Which portfolio company's elevated API access did he commandeer? #APIPrivilege

Can't you just make your account private as a "lockdown" feature?

I believe that existing followers will still see be able to see the timeline

If you're @pmarca I imagine you can get someone on the phone at Twitter pretty easily who will delete them for you.

He used this (http://jmp.sh/ZYKGAMx) to delete all tweets at once.

Pretty sure it's just a technical issue. I once did the same thing and I believe it showed me as having some tweets left.

Perhaps there's an event-driven best-effort microservice providing an eventually-consistent tally, and it's missing a few events.

The tweet graph database has a persistent edge count cache but it's not designed to handle posts or deletions any faster than a human can produce them.

If you RT something from a banned/deleted account it stays in your "tweets sent" but isn't visible in your feed.

Source: ran a very popular (and later, banned) Twitter account

I think that is to do with Twitter's architecture - they actually copy each tweet into each followers feed when you post something.

Handling deletes must be a pain, which is why I think just hide them

In case you're curious what tool he used to delete them: deletealltweets.com

The only reason I know is because that software auto-tweeted "I am deleting all my tweets using ..." and then got deleted a few seconds later.

interesting, apparently the software doesn't unlike "the likes", so we can still see all 267k likes https://twitter.com/pmarca/likes

Is deleting account the only option here?

Does this service handle more than 3,200 tweets or are all such apps limited to this number by Twitter? I've been looking for a safe and reliable service - depending on who buys Twitter.

Either that or he has something to do with the possible upcoming sale/buy of twitter?

This is my guess. He probably knows a sale is happening and doesn't want to provide value to the new owner. Probably because he has a competitive portfolio company or something.

That sounds petty and spiteful in a way I wouldn't expect from him, especially so publicly.

Also, as valuable as his presence is, I can't imagine a buyer of the size needed to buy Twitter would be like "we'll give you n Billion, but only if pmarca stays on point"

Perhaps Facebook is interested and Marc decided to stop tweeting to avoid conflicts?

Not sure why he would delete the (public) history, though.

> That sounds petty and spiteful in a way I wouldn't expect from him, especially so publicly.

He was pretty notorious for blocking anyone with an opposing viewpoint on Twitter, so this seems in line with that.

More likely because he might be involved in a company that would have a quiet period related to a potential sale

This is nonsense.

Could a buyer get access to his direct messages?

This could be a legitimate concern of his. But I would guess that even if he were to delete everything, Twitter would still have permanently archived undeleted copies (Facebook does that apparently).

I'm tempted to speculate in this direction, too, although we don't really know anything yet. If he's connected with any investor group, portfolio company, etc. that might be looking at doing something with Twitter, it's easier if he drops out of lots of random conversations now, rather than having to engage or ignore any further stuff that's pointed his way.

I suspect he feels there's a conflict of interest with his business and twitter. I bet he's somehow involved in twitter's buyout/takeover. Twitter is going private or someone is buying it and Andreessen is somehow involved. My guess.

Twitter is here to stay they just have to figure out how to make it work better and make it pay. I think going private is the best way to innovate without having to look over your shoulder for unhappy investors. Just look at WeChat for ideas.

"Twitter is here to stay"

Want to take bets on that?

I def won't bet on "stay".

I liked that pmarca always retweeted @pmarca tweets that were positive and negative towards him. Basically unfiltered viewpoints from opposite angles.

I've heard that he has a large ego, but behaviour like that, plus the fact that he routinely 'likes' and retweets messages from people outside the tech elite circle (myself included) seems to disprove that... or is that just MY ego now kicking into conformance rationalisation mode?!?!? ;-)

He also blocked pretty much anyone who got under his skin. Those he blocked were no longer able to see the stupid shit he said without special effort. In that way, it was an effective way of silencing critics.

Is that so bad? If he's on twitter to follow news or to have conversations that he enjoys or to promote himself, why allow that platform to be a way to criticise you? I certainly don't want a section of my phone or desktop to be devoted to all of the mean things said about me. I certainly wouldn't want such a thing hooked up to push notifications

Because it's not "turn off notifications from this person". It's "hide my tweets from this person, but only when they're logged in" which is a particularly useless (not to mention misleading) form of "security".

The point isn't security, though, it's happiness. It's basically "These person's tweets make me upset, and so I'm going to not interact with them", which is a very basic form of boundary-setting which is thankfully supported by Twitter.

Ah yes, I forgot about his rapid blocking of dissenters. Then again, I don't allow particularly obnoxious people into my household either, so I can't really blame anyone for not electing not to put up with abuse/complaints/harrassment if they don't wish to.

Once again, I am guessing it is a battle of egos - nothing irritates the ego more than being silenced when it feels it has something to say. :) [NB - not directed at you directly, just a general observation of the Twitterverse]

I completely agree with you. I'm all for muting. The issue is the semantics of blocking in Twitter, which prevents those blocked from seeing subsequent tweets.

You end up with situations where public figures can limit their audience to only those who agree with them, which isn't healthy for anyone.

Especially pathetic are the blockers that continue to discuss the people they blocked.

If the tweets were being retweeted, then they were being filtered unless every tweet was retweeted equally.

I am thinking perhaps sheer volume prohibits that. But I appreciate that he curates the tweets he sees/receives and gives equal weight to the pro and neg ones.

I follow many artists and public figures who ONLY retweet the positive stuff, and that tends to reduce my respect for them somewhat. At least address some of the less good stuff from time to time so that we know you don't live in some sort of Polyanna rose-coloured world.

Well, all that careful curation has now been fully filtered away.

I didn't realize how busy he was on Twitter until he retweeted one of my tweets. I have little visibility on social media so I was surprised to get noticed.

Right after last week's South park made quitting Twitter a plot point. Interesting.

And if I member correctly his profile pic its a South Park style drawing of himself[0].

[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/529529964178075648/7rgC...

I've always liked the ability to "follow" anyone on Twitter. Unlike Facebook which I see as a way to communicate with friends and family, Twitter allows me to follow interesting people who might post interesting and insightful thoughts on topics I'm interested in. Then they limit it to the length of an SMS so I can get no more than a sound bite. I basically abandoned the platform as a waste of time.

I have loved twitter for the same reason. It has allowed me to face conversations with and forge friendships with people that I otherwise would not have met in my daily life.

Is 140 characters enough to call them conversations? I would expound on the virtues of precise arguments and establishing context, but im@140

You are not limited to one single tweet only. I've had multiple, meaningful conversations that span across multiple tweets. As many as needed to convey the message - not limited to just 140.

The fact one has to convey a thought over multiple tweets shows the stupidity of the limit.

My thoughts exactly

How is it different from having to convey a thought over multiple sentences?

Vastly different unless the multiple sentences has a character limit. Multiple sentences tend to get lumped together in a group, let's call it a paragraph, and is easy to read in total. A thought spread out over multiple tweets with spacing between each, and in some cases broken up by other tweets, is difficult to read and follow. We'll skip over the problem of actually following a multi-person discussion in this manner.

Bummer that guy had some notably annoying tweets

I wonder if those bots that preserve pmarca's tweets run afoul of twitter policy. Twitter previously shutdown a service that preserved tweets that were deleted by politicians.

I think that if you have a verified account, you shouldn't be able to delete tweets. This would be a decent tradeoff for being recognized as a public figure, of which I think deletion of content runs afoul of.

I'm sorry but I don't agree. In my opinion, everyone on a platform should have equal rights, within their user class (user, staff, admin, etc)

Your comment contradicts itself since mods themselves have more power than regular users.

Life is never fair and people are never equal.

That's a tremendously bad idea - what happens if you post something e.g. wrongly accusing someone less famous of something?

Then you eat crow and post a retraction, which also can't be deleted.

The other alternative is to not have a verified account, then you can post whatever you want and then, ahem, delete it.

Twitter recently OK'd it again--Politwhoops. Unfortunately the group that runs it, the Sunlight Foundation, is itself in the process of shutting down.

What's that? Sunlight is shutting down?!

Sunlight Labs is shutting down. After trying and failing to recruit a compelling Executive Director, the Sunlight Foundation is investigating merging with some other nonprofit.

Here's the note from their board chair:

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2016/09/20/statement-fro...

Labs is shutting down now, and the other aspects of Sunlight may or may not find a home in some other institutions.

This bot used to archive his "tweetstorms" (whose origin coincides with the invention of that word)

https://mobile.twitter.com/pngmarca

but it looks like it stopped working some time ago.

I wonder if it's due to their censorship policy lately. Facebook seems to have been doing the same to a lesser degree, but not so openly.

really? damn. one of the best. one time I replied to a tweet and he responded a few seconds later. it's like he was connected to the twittersphere 24/7

Sounds awful for him.

I honestly wondered when he slept.

I'm guessing he had a team of people working his twitter account at a16z. It was a good marketing technique for the firm.

Not a bad idea if you ask me.

Marc is probably the only guy on Twitter who could get away with typing up a whole story in parts on that site.

Last fall ( october 2015 ) twitter started mandating your real mobile number (sms confirmation) to logon, so I deleted my account. I think I had over a 1,000 followers, so what. The case of anonymity was taken away last year. I suspect with Twitter being for sale, that the sale of 'confirmed live humans' to target for their interest and profile is more valuable then millions of anonymous.

I deleted all of my facebook accounts more than 5+ years ago. About the same time they went to 'real id'.

These days you can't even open an account on google without your mobile phone. I was amazed running youtube on my samsung that it let me create a google account, which is mandatory to run youtube, without a mobile, then the next night I ran the youtube again and it asked for my phone number, so I deleted the android youtube,

Much of the developer tools now require your credit-card just to download, ... funny that they're going way beyond 'real id' to 'Real Orwell'. With the credit card, they can link your FICO, and that is worth some real money, to know a person interest, and net worth.

I suspect in time that people who refuse to give out their mobile numbers and credit cards will be denied developer privileges. I think the line of reasoning goes that 'code' is too valuable to give to the anonymous people.

Long ago Zuckerberg said "Only an idiot would use Facebook", I concur, using computer since 1960's, I started with punch card on OS/360 IBM, most mostly machine language, then jumped to APL in 1970, then Unix mid 70's. Since day one, I never used my real-name for anything online (tcp-ip), to this day I find it a privilege to google my own name and find nothing. I think that Marc has just joined this club, the club of freedom knowing that they know nothing.

Don't give them anything, not your real name, not your phone ( tracking device ), not your credit-card ( scores,IRS ). Now in China they give a number to every citizen indicating his worthiness, the FICO or credit score in USA is much the same, its always been an indication of a well behaved citizen, a lemming.

Let's hope now with all his money that Marc finds a life, maybe he can go live on some mountain and become spiritual and disconnect from all electronic device for a time, and learn the real meaning of being human.

> Last fall ( october 2015 ) twitter started mandating your real mobile number (sms confirmation) to logon

Can you provide more info on what you mean? I use Twitter every day and I've never given them my phone number.

I believe Google only requires a phone number if you're using a proxy, and for good reason: they've had a ton of abuse from proxies.

You can buy some PVAs from someone on Fiverr using bitcoin if you really want to stay anonymous, or if you try hard enough you could probably find an unblocked proxy, or use a library or something.

Twitter has never asked for my phone number, including for the account I created just this week. I'm in the US. Perhaps it's different elsewhere?

Did the same with Twitter. I still have my Facebook account though I do not use it, since it is restricted to my closest friendS.

Twitter is losing its most valuable assets - those that drove the most engagement.

The outrage engine is still up and running. Worry not.

It was always just a fad.

Twitter revealed an unmet need for global stream-of-consciousness and lowered the bar for online participation to the lowest currently known setting.

I think it is a bit like that curse "May you get what you wish for". So now after people got the global stream-of-consciousness in tidbits of 140 character with lowest bar for online participation, they are thinking "This is a terrible. Who would want this..."

> online participation

More like a cheap way for journalists AKA "contributors" to source their articles AKA "blogposts".

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