Twitter/X has removed all media posted before 2014 | Hacker News Reader

Twitter/X has removed all media posted before 2014

twitter.com

137 pointsdavidbarker121 comments

Reading the thread, it seems like what they've actually done is broken old t.co links. https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1692928633004757144

If they were removing old media, then I doubt that said media would still be present on the CDN. https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1692926763481862438

I'm no Musk fan, but I still try to ensure that my criticism of him and/or Twitter (I refuse to call it X) is accurate.

ArchiveTeam backs up link shorteners. Might have saved some of this corpus.

Specifically, it looks like they've broken any http links to t.co, while the newer https ones still work.

The practical effect of this is actually worse than the thread stated -- all old media and links on Twitter are broken (at least, since 2010 when they started using t.co). But perhaps they can fix it by restoring the http version of t.co?

My guess as to what happened: they wanted to clean up t.co URLs so ran a query like "select all words in tweets starting with https://t.co/" and deleted all entries not present in that search, accidentally deleting all the plain http ones.

That sounds exactly as jank and half-assed as I would expect from twitter these days.

Bro doesn't even have a dry run button

Is it possible in an effort to reduced hosting costs they are intending to deleting the data?

Are they floating the big red balloon to gauge customer reaction?

> Twitter (I refuse to call it X)

Same energy as "I refuse to call it Meta"? I wonder why such thinking takes hold in the first place. It is fascinating someone would so invested in products like they'd be in sports, for example.

I am not the OP, but I just don't have the mental bandwidth or care to invest in these random swings and title changes at the whim of billionaires. I don't use either site, am not in tech, and my social circle will still refer to either as Facebook or Twitter. Maybe a relatable example: There are a couple major roads that have been renamed in the last ten years in my city and everyone still uses the old names in conversation.

I still call it the Tappen Zee bridge, not because I’m a big enthusiast for Dutch and Lenape. It’s not so much being invested as not wanting to give in to the rebranders.

For most, it's a community more than a product.

A lot of people see the rebranding similar to a billionaire buying their town and renaming it.

No. Facebook is still Facebook.

More like still referring Alphabet as Google.

I also find it fascinating how one person can buy the communication platform 450 million people use, only for him to change it for the worst. And somehow all users should go along with it.

> No. Facebook is still Facebook.

> More like still referring Alphabet as Google.

Facebook and Google are still the products. Meta and Alphabet are the parent company names. So it's not wrong. I don't know what X is supposed to be.

A publicity stunt?

Probably more of a narcissistic mistake.

Their point stands, as almost no one refers to Alphabet as such. Google is almost exclusively used when referring to the company.

People that work for Alphabet? Googlers, who will all tell you they work for Google

Killed by alphabet? Nope, https://killedbygoogle.com/

Waymo, formerly the Google Self-Driving Car Project.

Etc. Frankly, the only time I hear about Alphabet, is in relation to stock price news, nevermore.

To be fair google is a sub-company which does own (and subsequently kill) most of the products, not alphabet itself

>Frankly, the only time I hear about Alphabet, is in relation to stock price news,

You mean the stock GOOGL?

No one is forcing you to use it.

You can roll your own at your leisure. In fact, everyone probably should if for no other reason than to ensure such communication platforms remain as neutral as possible.

Software is cheap, but communities built on the platform are hard to replace. That’s precisely why Musk paid $44b for it instead of $44m.

X is incredibly awkward as a brand. Twitter is still located at twitter.com, the company isn't even dedicated to the namechange enough to redirect to a new domain. What's a tweet now? What's a retweet? Nobody cares. So twitter is now The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, Attempting to Rebrand to X. And on that platform at twitter.com, people continue to tweet and retweet.

Meta is different. Meta is an umbrella company, Facebook is one of its holdings. There's a legal distinction to be made, because Facebook isn't so foolish as to set fire to their most lucrative brand.

Xeet, rexeet.

Posts: Elon reposted from ...

Xitter, xeet, rexeet. As someone pointed out, the pinyin pronunciation of x as roughly "sh" is appropriate here.

A retweet can be a reex. Nice and short and appropriate. I'd shorten Xitter to Xit, and Xeet to Xed.

no, Twitter = xitter, when you used to tweet now you take a xit, and retweets are throwing xit.

Yeet, reYeet

To paraphrase Lil John, "Aww Xeet Xeet."

Should have gone with Y instead, making the verb "yeet", which is, coincidentally what I want to do to my computer every time Musk / Twitter news forces itself upon me.

> What's a retweet?

Seemed to be "repost" when I looked the other day. Not even branded.

IMO it's mostly incumbency. Everyone knows what Twitter and Facebook are, but I've seen it several times here, other forums, and experienced it in person, where people don't know what X/Meta are.

Both seem like scooby doo mask rebrand. Nothing substantial, just a costume over the bad guy. The rebranding is mostly to confuse masses and put some distance between them and what they did yesterday.

I remember calling the Citibank derivatives trading desk and they would answer the phone as "Salomon..." a full 15yrs after it had been purchased by and absorbed into Citi (post scandal, post acquisition)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_Brothers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_Brothers#Acquisition_b...

I think the culture, reputation, and infamy of the firm was so huge that people continued to subscribe to that history

Large parts of Goldman derivatives still uses J Aron name spaces and naming, particularly in the SecDB world. These sorts of things reflect a harkening to a time of ascendancy, often emulated, but slowly being strangled out by the hideous bureaucracy of the megacorp.

They renamed Sixth Avenue in NYC to "Avenue of the Americas" 80 years ago. Nobody calls it that. It's Sixth Avenue.

To be fair the signage, GPS directions, subway stations, mail etc all use 6th Ave. I think that’s more a vanity nickname than a legit attempt at a rename. I believe there are other similar secondary names to streets around industries that flourished there etc.

The signage used to say Avenue of the Americas but they started changing it back over the years. They did seriously intend for people to actually call it that but nobody did.

Interesting! I’ve been here 15 yrs and never knew that!

you might reflect on why companies do these sorts of rebrands to begin with. it's not usually to put a positive reputation behind them.

I don't quite get why people are so emotionally invested in brands like facebook/meta and twitter/x. at least from my perspective, it seems pretty easy to simply ignore them if you don't like what they're offering.

that said, I do have fairly strong feelings about comcast. I've lived in a few different places in my life, and in every one of them, comcast has been the only option for >5mbps down. their service and support sucked 15 years ago, and it still sucks today. I realize it has absolutely no measurable impact to their bottom line, but I'm still not going to help them get away from all the bad associations that go with the name "comcast".

In general, I don’t take any notice of wholesale company rebrandings; they very, very rarely take, and most will be abandoned within a year or so, or certainly within a decade.

In particular, when the UK Royal Mail renamed itself ‘Consignia’ (this actually happened; the early noughties were weird) everyone ignored that. This X business is similar, I think. Just so obviously stupid that most people will ignore it.

Personally I find X to be so generic that it seems meaningless and confusing.

I suggest calling it Xitter. (Pronounced with the Chinese pinyin “X”, so like “shitter”). It’s a good compromise.

Even the X = Z sounding in English makes it sound bad: Zitter.

God, he really did no market research at all, didn't even roll it around in his head for 3 minutes.

None of that matters to the users of the product, or so it seems.

And when Musk eventually gives up on Twitter and sells it to the Saudi PIF, we can all refer to him as an X-itter

Badum tsss, I'll see myself out.

I wonder if the guy posting even knows that those of us without Twitter/X accounts cannot read any followup comments to his post, and that when we go to his (or anyone else's) main profile we just see some random ass comments from a long time ago. And the search URL he included doesn't work at all.

Twitter is already a broken platform for sharing your thoughts with others. Congratulations on discovering a way it just became even more broken.

I was wondering wtf.

This was actually bad for me recently, cause I was unable to find tweets from a utility. Twitter would only show me tweets from random years ago, none of which were newer than 5 years old.

Later, I saw that they had tweeted about outages, and I just couldn’t see it cause I dont have an account.

This has not convinced me to get an account. I hope it convinces businesses to stop using twitter and Facebook as main platforms for pushing status notes.

idc about businesses using Twitter for comms but I have a huge problem with official govt agencies using it as their exclusive means of comms with citizens. I'm cool with Twitter being run into the ground if it helps us recognize the need/ develop a solution for a proper govt->citizen alerting system that doesn't involve proprietary and scummy businesses.

Wow I wonder how much record of the arab spring protests and uprising are now lost forever. Those protests were all around 2010 to 2012 or so and was in my mind what really pushed Twitter into the public consciousness. I hope the Library of Congress managed to archive all that stuff like they said they would years ago, it would be a big loss to historians for it to disappear overnight.

You think Arab Spring was good? For whom?

Of course it was good.

I didn't say anything either way. I think everyone can agree that losing a huge record of how it happened is a big loss.

The parent comment did not say anything about whether or not it was good or bad, simply that it was historic and that the record of it should be preserved

> that the record of it should be preserved

by whom?

qbasic_forever suggested the Library of Congress. You could read his comment you know.

It seemed to work out alright for Tunisia.

Don't they have massive youth unemployment and emigration?

https://www.ft.com/content/319c62a6-7698-4953-8c69-1109175f0...

How was their youth employment before the Arab spring? Hadn’t that been a problem in that region for decades?

for historians

History begins when billionaires and wiki say they do.

I'm not sure Twitter had media upload in 2010. We had to upload videos on other platforms, then post the links

Based on this level of business acumen I really wish Musk would buy TikTok.

At this point, I find it hard to believe he and his backers purchased it for any reason other than to destroy it.

I think it's simply his ego was larger than his capability.

That X logo is such terrible UI on devices that use an X icon to close windows.

Yes. That's the only problem with it....

I don’t know if I’m reading the tone of this reply wrong, but I didn’t suggest in any way that that’s the only problem with it.

It was a snarky tone. But I wasn't suggesting that you were suggesting that that's the only problem with it.

Though maybe it’s a hint?

I followed through.

That's an extreme reaction and a brave thing to share

(with apologies for me being desperately immature)

I think Musk is the youngest of us three.

Interesting. It was done as a public service. Hadn’t thought of that.

My question is, are we going to highlight every single substantive change to Twitter as it morphs into WeChat?

I think the fact that there’s no valid alternative means that we’re going to probably get stuck in the cycle where people are continuing to expect Twitter to revert or somehow go back to the old Twitter - and being frustrated and dissatisfied that it isn’t

But they are still using it!

I feel half of Norway collectively moved to bluesky two weeks ago. Mastodon people couldn't overcome the hurdle of selecting a server, and hence it didn't get much widespread traction or adoption. But bluesky most people found each other quickly and just continued there.

How did half of Norway get an invite? I don't see how it takes off like this. Their SEO keeps it off of some front pages as well. Very much a closed platform, sadly.

I got 4 invite codes a few days after joining. I guess it just exponentially exploded.

WeChat works because it is government-backed and I don't really see how Twitter can morph into WeChat without an authoritarian regime controlling it, promoting it, and stamping out the competition.

Having a simple tool for publicly posting snippets of text seems like a useful thing for a free society though and people are still using Twitter because it still mostly serves that goal. People are highlighting every substantial change because each change moves the needle to where it doesn't serve that purpose for some. Although it's not a hard line and even when it becomes unfit for purpose, it may be better than nothing and also it may be hard to stop using it (you may have a job that involves posting to Twitter, and you can't stop posting to Twitter until you find somewhere else to post.)

> Twitter can morph into WeChat without an authoritarian regime controlling it, promoting it, and stamping out the competition.

Did that with all of his other companies so I wouldn't count that out

Imagine if DeSantis or Trump win the next election. If Musk is running X still, then it's not that far fetched that a conservative executive branch would figure out how to sponsor it somehow

It really is easier to refer to it as ex-twitter.

I prefer "The App Formerly Known As Twitter" or TAFKAT.

I prefer Xitter, where the "X" is pronounced "sh" like in Xibalba.

One of my greatest misconceptions and disappointments was believing anything on the internet would be permanent.

Why do you think you thought that things you posted would be permanent?

Only things that you wish would go away are permanent.

The issue seems to be fixed https://twitter.com/EllenDeGeneres/status/440322224407314432

Who does actually care about this photo ?

Is it some kind of artistic heritage ?

I don't understand why it would be a problem to delete it or who would be harmed by it.

Not many people would care if this was deleted from Twitter. The photo has already been reproduced endlessly in other media anyway. I only posted this link because it was provided as an example of the terrible “loss” by the original poster on Twitter. I guess the people who consider pre-Musk Twitter a great thing would be sad that a big moment in the history of the site was lost (the tweet had some record for likes/impressions for some time from what I understand).

And I have removed my accounts. X was too much. No, thank you. One time Twitter was a nice place. That was a long time ago.

Consider yourself lucky that you were able to have usable accounts.

Whenever I tried to sign up, even years before the recent ownership change, the newly-created account would be automatically locked within minutes, and I'd be forced to give a phone number to unlock it. I wasn't going to do something stupid like that, of course.

That kind of a user experience, even a long time ago, wasn't so nice.

Friendly reminder that Twitter used to (and maybe still does) offer a “sign in with twitter” feature, and that users should review which serviced they signed up to with their twitter identity.

If there is any, either add an email address or find a way to move your data off that peofile.

We should all still blame Elon retroactively. It's not nice to point out that Twitter was a disaster before him.

He's the one who bought that disaster, not us.

I haven't been using twitter for a long time, already. It just felt stupid to even still hold an account.

As the old joke goes, whichever platform you're moving to, the average niceness of both X and that will stand to benefit.

Twitter was infested way before musk bought it.

And frankly, most social networks are today too.

Nothing is free forever especially if it is Ad funded.

Awesome. But what about the media posted after 2014? And when will they stop people posting new media, returning it to a text only site, forcing people to put at least some effort into trolling? It's easy to troll people into quote RTing you with images.

It will always stay "Twitter" simply because you cannot use a search engine with "X"

Build sand castles on the shores of corporations, expect them to be swept away at any moment. So people need to learn the lesson.

Even if title is misleading, this is a good reminder that you don't own or control anything you post to online platforms.

What should I do then?

I’d say get a domain and use a personal website to post content you care about.

And back it up regularly to local/personal storage.

Accept that the universe is not in your control, and go with the flow.

What do you think you should do? There's nothing here for you to do.

Post original links only, knowing they might rot as well.

Nothing is eternal (no matter what the marketing folks will tell you)

Either:

1) devolve into a quivering mass of nerves and anxiety, consumed by the inevitable slow descent into the depths of hell

2) carry on as usual

Partly true but a bit too much cynism. Post to a mastodon instance you trust and keep your own backups?

No one owns or controls anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com