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Comment by rahuldottech | Hacker News Reader

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 see these links:

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1199459588594176000

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScbCbDZEPfxPCqOLRvo...

https://www.archiveteam.org/

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This was my first thought at reading the headline before clicking through. Thank you for sharing the form from archive team.

My first thought was Hal Finney, whose account I occasionally browse for a reminder of what twitter was like 10 years ago.

https://twitter.com/halfin

>Harold Thomas Finney II (May 4, 1956 – August 28, 2014) was a developer for PGP Corporation, and was the second developer hired after Phil Zimmermann. In his early career, he was credited as lead developer on several console games. He also was an early bitcoin contributor and received the first bitcoin transaction from bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto [1]

This is only one example. So many historical figures gone to free up some vanity names.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist...

"working"

"Just back from walking the dogs"

"Running bitcoin"

This is kind of how I use Twitter, lol. I use it as a place to post a random thought, what I'm thinking about, what I'm doing, etc. I don't post much, but I've been trying to get in the habit of posting more.

I worked with a guy who died of a heart attack. Every year LinkedIn asks me to congratulate him having worked X+N years at the company. You have to wonder when they'll give up.

I follow an acquaintance on Twitter who set up an auto-tweet while he was alive. Now, after his death, he still tweets whenever the weather drops below a certain temperature in Scotland.

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 Events? AWS probably won't go away for decades.

Does your credit card automatically close when your death is reported to the financial system, or can you direct it to stay open in your will + set aside a bit of money to pay off the couple-cent bill in perpetuity?

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?

Any change that prompts you to re-accept?

Just like twitters in this instance.

I think in the case of AWS, your services would continue to run as long as your bill is settled. It would only affect you if you logged in.

So if you fell under the free tier then I'm curious if it would continue to run indefinitely.

"The AWS free tier will expire 12 months from the date of when you first sign up."

Some AWS usage is part of the free tier even after 12 months. "The Lambda free tier does not automatically expire at the end of your 12 month AWS Free Tier term, but is available to both existing and new AWS customers indefinitely." - https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/

I made some Alexa skills years ago that are still up running on Lambda. They've never been used enough to get me charged.

He probably used IFTTT.

I've tried ifttt. The Twitter recipes will stop in a few months for me. Have to go in and turn it in manually every so often. Just trying to repost from Twitter at a location to WordPress. ymmv

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 for some time.

> They only found him because of a check on tenants in a building/area who weren't drawing any water.

Wow. Some leaky faucets or automatic plant watering system would have kept him undiscovered for even longer.

It’s rare but not unheard of for people to be found decades after death.

https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/10/29/inenglish/1572340728_79...

More humorously I remember reading about a German guy that forgot where he parked his car and it sat in an office garage for 20 years or something.

There was a building in my city that was constructed in the 70's to be a shopping mall, but the owner got bankrupt in the meanwhile, and the building was repurposed into a parking lot that run for a couple of years.

By 2014 is was imploded. There were around 30 cars still parked there.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/man-forgets-...

Similar very recent case in Sweden:

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

If you setup IFTTT then until that stops running which could be never??

Unfortunately, API tokens are not the same as user logins, and very easy to separate out from user activity. Depends on some policy whim to be counted or not as user activity. Not dependable afterlife.

I have a friend who passed away from cancer a few of years ago. I still get these notifications for him. I was trying to call someone recently and my phone suggested my dad who has been gone for a couple of years. We need a better mechanism to gracefully transition accounts of individuals.

This is kinda like the 'isMalicious' bit proposal on TCP / IP.

I still get a reminder in Facebook to celebrate the birthday of a buddy who passed in 2007...

I realize you probably don't want to for personal reasons, but have you removed your father from your phone book?

I didn't remove mine for the longest time, though his number has long been reused by someone else; I only did when I finally got a notice that that person joined Signal and Telegram. Too spooky to see "[your father] has joined Signal!"

I think there is a Russian Black Mirror reboot where this is the premise of the first episode.

LinkedIn has a "report a member as deceased" page that puts the member's account into a commemorative state. Some people might find updates like those to be a painful reminder.

Thanks I did that, took less than 24hrs to remove. Kinda sad now as he's just disappeared, rather than someone I'm still connected to.

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.

> Twitter said the effort is not, as had been suggested by some users on the network, an attempt to free up usernames.

> The site said it was because users who do not log-in were unable to agree to its updated privacy policies.

That.. makes sense, but is almost suspiciously proactive.

6 months is quite a bold number, much harsher than domain names would do. I’d get like two years which is probably still tens of millions.

That’s a lot of potential digital content that will go dark.

Does that make sense? Why should a privacy policy be retroactive on things I already posted?

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.

Then don't analyze those records... such nonsense.

Indeed.

This is the exact purpose of Section 230 and why it is so important to preserve it.

Except that Section 230 explicitly states that they don't bear liability.

Does European privacy law have the same provision? They are removing non-US accounts first, after all.

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.

As long as the id is okay the user name of a link does not matter

https://twitter.com/flurdy/status/1199290001143582721

Wow, I did not know that! I was worried about which tweet of mine you had found! :)

I regularly visit Adam West's feed. I knew Adam and going to see some of his corny posts (like Moose Wayne) are an occasional comfort and not only remind me of him but remind me of watching the tv series as a child with my late father.

Sadly, I've noticed that DMs don't seem to be forever on twitter as all of our private messages to each other are all gone, the bulk were gone before he even passed away.

Given his account is verified I would hope that Twitter keeps that content as long as the service survives, but for those with family and friends that have passed that weren't high profile, they may also take comfort in going through then posts of those accounts and this is kinda blah.

I get it from a cost view, it costs money to keep all of that data but I somewhat feel that a company that has user created content is socially obligated to maintain that content as long as they continue to have that product or until the user wants it removed whichever comes first.

The issue I've seen with archive efforts that end up on the Internet Archive whether by IA via Archive Team is problems with infinite scroll (and other forms of dynamically loading content via JS), at least in my experience. Though I recall one WARC archiving tool that could achieve it (I believe it required the user to manually scroll the page during the capture).

The Internet Archive uses various Web archiving technologies and processes to capture Web-based resources and is working to improve them on an ongoing basis. This includes support for sites/pages that support infinite scroll via JS. If you have specific requests, bug reports, issues, please send them to info@archive.org and we will try to do better.

Why is it bad? Why should dead people take up usernames? What will happen in 50 years, half of good usernames will be taken by graveyard dwellers?

I don't care about their usernames. Just their content.

Twitter won't exist that long

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".

who determines X? How is that fair to X-1?

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.

maintaining accounts for deceased people for the remainder of the lifespan of Twitter is probably sustainable, though.

To what end? You already assume Twitter has a shorter lifespan than the internet. Are you going to be upset when Twitter dies, removing not just all the accounts of live people, but dead people as well?

Also, Twitter may disagree with you on its lifespan. I wouldn't, but I do believe that unless they do start archiving, it will reduce its lifespan, perhaps considerably.

This is why I really don't like the recent trend of third party sites dynamically embedding tweets on their own page when a screenshot plus direct link could have sufficed. The internet has already lost a great deal of its past with many historical image hosts that went down or rogue (looking at you Photobucket). Why are people making the same mistake again?

BTW Facebook have had the option to memorialize the profile of the deceased for a while. Things seems to have worked out fine for them.

Why a screenshot? That would mess with screenreaders.

Tweets are text, so quote them as text?

Why would is mess with Screen readers? the Alt tag has been a thing for a long time.

Why then embed tweet as an image if you're going to copy its text anyway?

So when twitter changes an API, or is down, and someone happens upon your page they can still see what you intended to include.

Also if you're documenting something like John Smith said "Kill all Muppets, they're taking human jobs" and his publicist goes "John, you really need to delete that tweet" and he does, you can show a screenshot of it to prevent revisionist history.

We're not talking about using the API, but whether to prefer copying the tweet as a screenshot+text or just the text.

Yes. And you could even quote the page with all the twitter styling. Ie quote the HTML and CSS instead of just the tweet, if you really want that twitter look and feel.

Same reason we use Archiving services

doesn't the default twitter embed include the original text of the tweet in the embed code, and then just dynamically load in the like/retweet counts and branding?

at least that's the way it looks when they load on a ridiculously slow internet connection, i've never actually looked at the embed code.

Yes, you're right. Of course, images and quoted tweets also get loaded dynamically, and the text may be hard to understand without those.

The number of links I come across from dead link shortening services is too damn high.

The most frustrating case for me is Readability, whcih swapped out the original links to articles with its own link shortener, then went titsup.com

Even migrating those to Pocket (which I hope doesn't do similarly, though it remains all but useless), I've got hundreds of link-shortened articles I need to track down, one by one.

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.

Space gets cheap. But the namespace for user names gets ever more crowded.

not just the namespace, but the content-space. a service like twitter thives on a feeling if immediacy and involvement, and if you were to constantly be coming across dead accounts (whether the owner is deceased or just otherwise left twitter) i think it would detract from the usefulness of twitter.

whether the accounts are moved to the internet archive or some twitter-hosted archive, the value in twitter is not in old tweets. i think most people would be better off if all of twitter had an automatic expiry.

On a site that only actively presents the newest content, there’s no way you would be constantly coming across dead accounts.

I also find the insinuation that dead users provide no value absurd. Aside from current events, the human condition doesn’t really change, which is why we can still enjoy books written hundreds of years ago.

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.

Yes. Though in our case I feel justified in using the simpler model of just assuming exponential shrinkage forever, because I assume that the end of twitter as a company (or the Internet) will happen before the heat death of the universe.

(Similar to how we often treat integers as unit-sized in asymptotic analysis of algorithms, even though we know that we need a logarithmic number of bits for truly large numbers.)

Why is that bad? Most people probably wouldn't want their twitter account to be their most lasting legacy.

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