Twitter account deletions on 'pause' after outcry
bbc.com
bbc.com
I definitely feel like they could compromise and at least delete those blatantly unused ones.
The user has no tweets, has followed nothing and done nothing since registering 2013.
I hope they end up doing it.
Assuming of course that the account is truly idle and not being used to read without every interacting.
The inactive accounts that people are worried about losing are the ones that used to be active, or which were significant enough to make a lot of people follow them. However, the bulk of inactive accounts probably have very few (<10) statuses posted or followers, and deleting those is likely to be uncontroversial.
If I choose to squat the now freed up @foobar handle and not do anything with it, next year they can move my inactive version to @inactive:2020:foobar and free up @foobar again for the next person interested in using it.
Any way they solve this, there is a danger of people using bots to mass-squat liberated names to offer them for sale. I don't see any very good way around this. Possibly to give first pick to users with long-standing accounts that share a nontrivial common substring with the liberated handle. For example, if my current Twitter name is @firstname_lastname, and I really want @firstname, I think it might make sense to prioritize me over @random_bot_204safhq23.
(my relatives also didnt tweet very often but when they did they were amazing)
In the era of cloud computing, how expensive would it be to make an account readonly and store the paltry data it created in a cached location somewhere?
All of their tech decisions feel really reactive nowadays
The real cost of doing something like this is doing user research to figure out the set of human behaviors around the memorialization process, deciding where in the product to make the functionality available, training material for how it escalates up to human support teams, and what other things are on the team's plate at the same time.
Personally the permanence of internet content is terrifying and by far the worst aspect of it. Potentially there are people like me who would be at the table whenever "what to do with accounts of dead people" is discussed, strongly advocating for deletion. Lacking clear consensus they just left the decision until it had to be made.
As a firstname user, life isn't easy when it comes to notification spam b/c people think that putting a space between first and lastname still gets sent to the correct user. I've basically stopped checking them.
(And all that because Github and Gitlab are both case-insensitive when matching @mentions.)
I created a Twitter account in 2012 and it was immediately put in “private mode” because I didn’t want to post anything; ±7 years later the account is still empty, no posts, no followers, nada. The only reason I created that account was to prevent cybersquatting over my short-and-simple username (which I have to clarify is not “guessmyname”). I’ve done the same thing in other popular websites which I also never use, aside from signing in once in a while to keep the account “active”.
Can you imagine if I release my Twitter account, after almost a decade of constant cultivation of my other professional profiles (GitHub, GitLab, LinkedIn, etc) and then someone starts posting malicious messages to make my username look bad? People will quickly associate these messages with other accounts on the Internet with the same name. I don’t want to take that risk, and I guess other people with inactive Twitter/Facebook/Gmail/etc accounts are the same.
EDIT: 1'. Twitter has rules and procedures against impersonation: https://help.twitter.com/forms/impersonation though I don't know how effective they are if you are not going by a real name but by an Internet handle that you claim is unique.
2. If you have such an important personal brand to protect, your Twitter account should not be in private mode. It should be public, with a public tweet explaining that you are really you but are choosing not to use Twitter, and where to find you instead.
3. If you have such an important personal brand to protect, you presumably have something interesting to say. Twitter is not a bad platform to say it.
All in all, if they take away your squatted Twitter handle, I wouldn't feel bad for you. Certainly not without a lot more information about why your brand is so special. And, well, if you can keep them from doing it by logging in once every six months, it seems that that is something you can shoulder to protect your brand.
the odds of, at a minimum, any given twitter profile being at least wildly off-brand for your namespace colliding persona are still very high. this looks like a legitimate edge case anxiety to me.
This isn’t that big of a deal at all.
Plus all you have to do is login once in a while to keep it active as far as Twitter is concerned. I think 6 months is way too aggressive though.
Sorry, but do you actually believe this? In my experience, nearly everyone who talks about their "personal brand" is some variation of a dull-as-dishwater marketing drone. Be a human, not a brand.
I believe it to the extent that if the person "cultivates" GitHub and GitLab profiles, presumably they at least have new releases of interesting features to announce, for whatever software they develop there.
As for Twitter’s enforcement, it doesn’t shut down Elon Musk bitcoin scammers but it does shut down women complaining about the revolting DMs they get from men.
That's kinda easy, you create a real account and verify it/link it in all your other profiles.
Real class move btw, I hope GPs account gets deleted soon. (And then the flood of people having nothing better to do than destroy some nobody's reputation on social media comes in I guess...)
> Can you imagine if I release my Twitter account, after almost a decade of constant cultivation of my other professional profiles (GitHub, GitLab, LinkedIn, etc) and then someone starts posting malicious messages to make my username look bad?
I thought they'd linked their Twitter account on their other professional profiles.
That's just what you want us to think!
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previously unavailable usernames will start coming up for grabs after the 11 December cut-off - though Twitter said it would be a gradual process, beginning with users outside of the US.
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Btw this is not at stake in this situation anyway, since you would just need to log into your account and accept the new ToS.
Even if your wildest dreams came true and someone started posting crap using your alias on twitter, still no one would care.
That said, should there be some sort of central internet registry where we all registered our unique usernames which will be the same and reserved on every platform?
This reminds me of the days of EFNet where you would fight to have a username. If you stopped using it/disconnected, it was fair game.
I don't think someone would start posting malicious messages to make you look bad. They would just use it for themselves, with their own profile pic and would be obvious it's not you.
After that, make a links/contact section on your website to list all your accounts. Post a note that anything not on the list is an imposter or someone coincidentally using the same name as you (which does happen, especially when you naively pick a four-letter name.)
Anyone still conflating a false account with you with one step to verify it as a fake will be acting in bad faith regardless.
Congratulations, you _are_ the very cybersquatter you feared so much.
we use online names as public certificates. we're doomed to this race.
You aren't entitled to a certain username on every service simply because you happened to be the first to register it on one service.
It has been an issue for several decades.
Oh no, you'll be just like everyone else under the sun who has to use different names in different places. You aren't special and no-one really cares.
Come on now.
If someone uses the same username in multiple places, and another site has a user with the same name, it’s easy to assume they are the same person. If there is a risk of impersonation or confusion with another account, it’s fair to try to protect your reputation by registering an account in that name and not posting, especially if you are well-known in some internet circles.
Easy, sure, but you’re probably wrong.
No, no it is not. Not at all... You are one of the lucky people who managed to get your chosen handle on those sites.
My preferred handle (givennamesurname) got registered in 2008 on twitter and hasn't done anything since (no tweets, no profile, etc).
On instagram, both (givennamesurname) and (givenname_surname) are taken, so I went with (surname_givenname).
The only real way to get around this is to just list your social media / accounts on your personal website. Then prove that you own it on keybase with gpg or whatever.
> it’s fair to try to protect your reputation by registering an account in that name and not posting,
If you stay on top of / are aware of every new service. I was 12 in 2008 and wasn't concerned about name squatting.
If you want an easily defended but unique identity, pick something that isn't short-and-simple, and you'll have less competition.
If nothing this has stopped me from again creating accounts on these platforms couple of times I was tempted to.
Deleting accounts with lots of content and followers, only because there was no tweet for a few month, is just dumb.
Twitter said many times that the removals would not free up the namespace, those names would still be unavailable for use
It sat like that for several years until lo and behold, they do release usernames under the right circumstances (see @sequoia now). I just want to know what made them release the name to @sequoia and not me (don't answer that :p).
This was something Facebook did a few years ago Even Google+ (rest in peace) had a similar feature. How could they have forgotten that dead people may have used their platform, and living relatives would be upset?
Either Twitter is completely run by amateurs - since its inception - or by people who just don’t care. Which one is worst, I wonder?
Co-CEOs is also a thing.
Having half a talented persons attention is better than zero. Whether they should still be the show piece CEO vs the background mastermind is up for debate though.
My pet theory is that Imgur is actually what the NSA needs all that diskspace in Utah for. :o)
It's not disappointing, it's amazing that it's worth $24 billion now. A fair value is less than half that, and even at a 50% reduction that'd be at a obscenely generous 30-40 PE.
The premise of the outcome being disappointing supposes that there is anything that could have reasonably been done to meaningfully bolster the share price during that time. As opposed to Twitter in reality being a mature, slow growth, second tier social network (which is what it will always be no matter who is running it).
Dorsey has done a great job fixing the operational disaster that Twitter was previously. The reason the Twitter stock has been flat since the IPO, is because it was comically overvalued at the IPO, not primarily because it has been operated poorly since then. Based on its operating results contrasted with now, Twitter should have been worth a minimum of 3/4 less at its IPO than it was (probably more reasonably it should have been worth ~90% less at IPO, and worth a minimum of 50% less right now).
2015 | revenue $2.2b | op expenses $1.9b | op income -$450m
2018 | revenue $3b | op expenses $1.6b | op income $453m
The disaster that Dorsey inherited, he fixed. Flipping operating income by a positive $900 million in three years. A spectacular outcome for a business doing $3b in sales.
Twitter is still an independent business today solely because of the operational improvements that Dorsey made to push Twitter into sound profitability. If not for that, Twitter would have already been forced into selling itself (which was a common discussion prior to the dramatic improvement in operational results).
Boost sales $800m and drop operating expenses by $300m. That's as good as it is going to get for Twitter as a business conceptually. There is no scenario where it's going to be the next giant social network or a juggernaut like Facebook, there is no high growth scenario waiting to be discovered. The very nature of Twitter guarantees that can never happen, it can't attract enough participants to that style of social broadcast & consumption.
Twitter has actually already made changes that make it more useful for its core audience. Increased character counts etc., for example, has allowed Twitter to essentially replace microblogging--or even short-form blogging generally.
You compare Twitter with Facebook but Facebook has 9X or so employees. Presumably that means that while a feature like memorialisation gets worked on at Facebook, there isn’t enough manpower to work on it at Twitter. They’re too busy working on the core parts, keeping the lights on. But again, there could be even more constraints that I’m not aware of and you’re not aware of.
Please please please let’s not sit on our ergonomic chairs and ask “why don’t you just” without understanding their perspective. Let’s assume good intent and reasonable competence. Of course we look smarter and more competent by accusing someone of being the opposite, but we should resist the urge.
Notice you still haven’t said how Twitter is supposed to do everything Facebook does but with 1/9th the number of employees. You and everyone else have directly assumed that Twitter has decides not to work on memorialisation because they are malicious or incompetent ... when it’s possible that they just didn’t have enough people to work on it.
We could discuss if this feature should have been prioritised or not, but claiming that Twitter is this little understaffed company that cannot be expected to implement something like that is a bit disingenuous.
I can't help but see in this a new form of modernized, digitalized mortuary ritual, comparable to all the things we humans have been doing with our deads for millennia. Egyptian tombs sought to preserve the body; now with big-tech tombs we seek to preserve the mind, what's left of it, what has been revealed by the deceased. I bet this is just the beginning of that.
The work of historians is changing, fast, in this fledging computing era. Think that, from now on, we may be increasingly able to replay then-dead-but-real people in real situations as if it were just another virtual world.
Which leads to this suggestion: maybe all the data held by big tech companies should be released for public research (public datasets) upon one's death, after anonymization etc. of course (and maybe a 'wait' period of 10 years, or a full generation or more, whatever precautions are necessary). The point being to learn cumulatively from all our deceased brothers and sisters, make them count forever in the great study of humanity and the cosmos. Of course people should choose for themselves (including delays and anonymity), like some have donor cards, may prefer incineration, etc.
At our current trajectory, it looks much more like we are heading into a cyberpunk Esque dystopia in which people are not just only commoditized through their labor, but also their data value.
So instead of post-privacy for big data projects that could serve all of humanity, we end up with data oligopolies hoarding the "gold" in neatly segregated silos to control its scarcity and thus value.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/11/tim-berne...
Agreed, as we speak.
This is why I generally think we ought to take control back of our data, massively, as citizens. And devs and the tech community in general are front and center to lead the charge, obviously.
It's a long road. Years, decades probably. But eventually we must get there. We may have sacrificed the first generations in that regard because we honestly build as we go, we can't anticipate everything. But now that we're here, that we see that we know, it's time to stop deploring what is, and start building what should be.
IMHO... This isn't 'holier-than-thou' at all but very humbly calling for all of us to wake up and start creating tomorrow's solutions to these problems.
1. A first-come-first-serve system like Twitter. I'd list drawbacks but this comment section is full of them.
2. A lease system like domain names, whose drawbacks are best explained in this tweet by @devonzuegel:
> Domain names really hold you hostage. As soon as you've shared a link
> from that domain, you have two options when it comes up for renewal:
> (1) Pay the ransom for that domain registration, or
> (2) Break the internet, specifically the part linking to your own
> content
you can just allow people to choose whatever username they want, that's a system...that nobody seems to allow for whatever reason. people have the same names in real life and we've learned to deal with it. twitter already has a verified system to deal with imposters for high profile accounts where it would matter.
blizzard (battlenet) lets you choose any username but tags on a number for everyone. so there's bob#1234, bob#2342 etc. and then it hides the number for display purposes. that seems a decent compromise.
That way there is no overlap, and nobody is slighted when they find out that their name is taken.
ICQ uses a number, but yeah, how many people still use it?
Plus, now that the identifier carries no meaning, you can't type "@realdonaldtrump ..." and expect people to know who it refers to, you'd have to type "@aae0450, Donald Trump ...".
On Twitter or a forum like this for example, unique usernames are probably essential, because the alternatives are too confusing.
Yes, mostly by having systems that refer to people not by their names, but either by "universal" opaque IDs like social-security numbers, or by attaching to their name a system-specific hierarchical ID like a mailing address (because you're probably the only John Smith living at your address; if you weren't, it'd probably annoy you so much that you'd likely use a nickname.)
The "usernames" that this debate is about aren't "display names" (those can indeed be arbitrary), but rather basically "URL slugs"—things that allow you to target an email to that person, or to make a web request for the right person's content. Those have to be unique, in the same way that an SSN has to be unique. (They're primary/partitioning keys.)
Usernames, as URL slugs, are meant to be a "more readable, if possible" and "shorter, if possible" version of the opaque unique identifier, where you can maybe get something memorable and vaguely-resembling your own name, but where that can't be guaranteed, because a username—as a URL slug—can't sacrifice any of the properties of a unique identifier.
1. When a person registers a name they declare a price they are willing to sell the name for. They can update their price at any time.
2. They pay an annual tax (about 1% to 5%) for the right to keep the name.
3. If someone is willing to buy the name for the declared price they are forced to sell the name to them.
This system has the advantage that the person who values the name the most will get to keep it, and the person who lost the name will be fairly compensated.
[0] https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/upload_documents... (See the bottom of page 39 in particular)
economics concerns itself with the best allocation of productive resources. names don't really fall into that category (even if there is some marginal utility in the economic domain for edge cases like celebrities' names).
Could it be possible they have overflowed their primary / foreign key allocation necessary to support further user growth? Depending on their internal architecture, a migration to a wider key might not be feasible within the time horizon they have. Maybe it's easier to delete accounts?
If they have weird sharding and a lot of microservices, this might be their only way out without shutting off registrations - and they'd never do that.
Or maybe they have metrics that show new users skip signing up when their desired name is unavailable.
Can a Twitter engineer speak more to this?
head /dev/urandom | shasum
A second, somewhat related issue, is that these inactive accounts might also be used by all the russian state trolls. It's much harder to detect when old accounts start doing suspicious things than brand new ones, especially if you don't have a robust process in place for flagging inactive users.
If you forced me to guess though, I think the most straightforward, simplest one is that threatening account deletion is a good way to force older users to become active again, which will increase engagement on their platform and allow them to deliver more ads. In other words, the same reason that Facebook will start spamming your email if you stop logging in.
I can't imagine any manager at Twitter would be upset about the idea that a substantial portion of their dormant userbase would be effectively "forced" to log in every 4-5 months or so.
Also as someone said below, it forces users to accept any new changes to the ToS.
Are you sure that's what is actually going on? patio11 calls it lifecycle email marketing, and Nir Eyal thinks it is just a harmless way to keep your users "hooked". Why would you even say such things about such a brilliant technique which provides such great joy to the "growth hackers"?
Oh, I just got a "notification" from Facebook that someone I care about said something I probably don't care about, but there isn't any way to know for sure so I have to log back in to Facebook again. I will be back in 3 hours.
Well I know I did.
But why is this needed?
My guess: many people are sick of Twitter and since one president of one nation made it his personal propaganda vehicle it is becoming a mental wasteland - new ecosystems are growing and people inside these new communities are quite happy that all the zombies are contained in that trash dump, like facebook.
Actually we should all be happy that these first big "social" networks decontaminated the internet for us - these are now the Tschernobyls of social media where all the toxic waste is collected, hopefully for many years.
Interesting things now can happen somewhere else.
If a single bot account was created by a person for fun, they can easily log into it once to prove activity.
But if a person (or, say, a national intelligence service) has created 20,000 accounts programmatically, they’re going to have a much harder time manually logging into every one of them to preserve them.
that being said it would likely be trivial to add something like isActivelyViewed as a condition not to delete an account. if a lot of people view a page still it could be considered active. despite the account not being used anymore. If no one looks at it, delete it ...
Or we can just use archive sites to access old data. But they’re always slow and don’t let you search it properly.
> So too would accounts set up specifically as an archive, such as @POTUS44, a collection of all the tweets made by President Barack Obama while in office.
Recital 27
> This Regulation does not apply to the personal data of deceased persons.
> Member States may provide for rules regarding the processing of personal data of deceased persons.
Each country has its own rules. This is a summary https://www.twobirds.com/en/in-focus/general-data-protection...
However the tweets of a deceased person can contain personal data of an alive person. How do they handle that when the author can't agree to changes of policies anymore? But how can FB's memorialized accounts handle that?
With corporate personhood this should apply to inactive business accounts too.
Twitter is filled with controversy because most of the "news" people that fan the flames use Twitter has their primary message platform, This is why twitter is talked about more than Reddit, or Facebook or any others. The activists that pretend they are journalists are all on twitter, all talking to each other, and rage baiting the mobs
I’m sure there are many positive things happening. You don’t hear about them as loudly.