Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

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"To me it's great that Twitter is doing something similar to 4chan, which is making publication temporary."

I think it's catastrophic.

Just because some people don't value their own historical content doesn't mean that attitude should be inflicted on everyone else.

The amount of cultural, historic value in old tweets is absolutely immense. They tell stories that are both national or global in scale, as well as stories that are much more personal.

My own Twitter history stretches back over 16 years. It captures my career achievements, online relationships I've formed, things I've learned, stuff I've published. I have a backup, thankfully, because I clearly can't trust Twitter to treat it with the respect that I think it deserves.

If Twitter had been documented as ephemeral from day one this would be a very different conversation. The problem here is that millions of people have entrusted their content to it (over the past 17+ years) on the loose understanding that it wouldn't be thrown away with 30 days notice.

Cynically, as someone who isn’t on twitter, I have to ask whether that history is as important as you’re making it out to be?

You, yourself, the human being are the real legacy of your past. I feel like your history on twitter pales in comparison. And I know it might not feel that way if you’ve been on the platform for so long.

What actually matters?

There's a lot of information that was only ever posted to Twitter (whether you're a fan of that or not). Even if only 0.1% of it was valuable, that's still an incredible wealth of information lost. Think about how many pages across the internet cite tweets, how many links would be dead if everything was purged.

Those, too, will be lost in time, like tears in rain, eventually. Archive the tweet or otherwise duplicate the information if it's important.

Even if for nothing other than all accounts are banned, eventually.

This demonstrates a real issue: even information you "own" and feel like you can pull the plug on, really becomes part of a global discussion that can only be lessened by removing it.

A tweet you posted 10 years ago might be irrelevant noise to you, but someone else may have quoted it, assuming it's archived on a "too big to fail" platform, effectively eternal, and then from there it spreads into other conversations.

Who's responsible for deciding how and when to archive that?

Aside from that, there's huge historic value in the mundane in the aggregate. We have fine-grained knowledge of the rise and fall of cultural trends and figured-- the sort of stuff that will never make a "formal" historical record but will richly flesh out future understanding of early 21st century life. Much as many of today's historians will get more value out of a Tudor era garbage dump than a perfect statue of Henry VIII, social media will be an unimaginable treasure trove for 2500's historians.

Is there a way to archive the whole twitter history? I think there was a limitation on a number of tweets you can export using their api.

You can request an export and get emailed a link to a zip file full of JSON.

Do people ever go on Twitter to view tweets that are more than 2 days old? The only time I see posts that old is when someone is mocking another person with a “is that you?” post showing some sort of hypocrisy.

I don’t think anyone would really notice if posts older than 2 weeks auto deleted.

That's the sole way I use the service. I don't have time to be constantly checking it. I may get linked to something there from some other website though and read into things.

I don't find Twitter to be a good service for real-time communication so it's much better this way.

Yes. I frequently access tweets from years ago using Twitter search or following links from more recent tweets.

> Do people ever go on Twitter to view tweets that are more than 2 days old?

I do, fairly frequently.

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