{"id":39338,"date":"2023-05-10T15:18:25","date_gmt":"2023-05-10T19:18:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=39338"},"modified":"2023-05-24T10:42:16","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T14:42:16","slug":"deleting-inactive-twitter-accounts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/10\/deleting-inactive-twitter-accounts\/","title":{"rendered":"Deleting Inactive Twitter Accounts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elon Musk<\/a> (via John Scott-Railton<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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We’re purging accounts that have had no activity at all for several years, so you will probably see follower count drop.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

John Carmack<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I may be reading this incorrectly, but if you are actually deleting inactive accounts and all their historic tweets, I would STRONGLY urge you to reconsider.<\/p>\n

Letting people know how many “active” followers they have is good information, but deleting the output of inactive accounts would be terrible. I still see people liking ten year old tweets I made, but the threads are already often fragmented with deleted or unavailable tweets. Don’t make it worse!<\/p>\n

Some may scoff at any allusion between Twitter and ancient libraries, but while the burning of the library of Alexandria was a tragedy, scrolls and books that were tossed in the trash just because nobody wanted to keep them are kind of worse.<\/p>\n

Save it all!<\/p>\n

I did not appreciate how excited many people are about freeing up old usernames. That doesn’t change the point about preserving the old tweets — maybe rename the old account to include the year of creation.<\/p>\n

However, tossing old names back into the free pool just starts another land grab. People camping on hundreds of freely claimed usernames has always been one of the scummier aspects of the internet.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Matty<\/a>:<\/p>\n

There’s also the issue of people who have died and their accounts have been turned into a kind of memorial, not only would deleting them be devastating to their loved ones it would also allow people to impersonate the dead person…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

There was also a<\/a> story<\/a> about<\/a> this<\/a> in 2019, the Internet Archive<\/a> offered<\/a> to step in, and then Twitter<\/a> backtracked<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n