Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com