I understand why some people are upset about it (Eg due to accounts of deceased people), but I was really REALLY hoping to snap my first name which was registered by a European person 10 years ago, has 0 followers, and has never posted.
I definitely feel like they could compromise and at least delete those blatantly unused ones.
They haven't scrapped their plans for this. They said they'll put it on pause until they've come up with a tool for memorializing accounts. So presumably accounts that are legitimately not going used will still eventually free up.
Assuming of course that the account is truly idle and not being used to read without every interacting.
A simple fix would be to make an exception for accounts with >X statuses posted or >Y followers.
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.
I can understand not making a tool to memorialize users in first 3 years of creation but once twitter became a household name they really SHOULD have already updated their roadmap.
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
> … but I was really REALLY hoping to snap my first name which was registered by a European person 10 years ago, has 0 followers, and has never posted.
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.
1. Most Twitter users are not malicious in the way you suggest.
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.
That's literally the definition of name squatting. If you want to link to your Twitter account, maybe use it, before complaining someone else has made something useful out of it.
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.
You can't be the first to register on every platform out there. If you ever become successful enough, people are going to impersonate and false flag you anyway. You have to balance putting your beliefs out there, so people know an obvious fake; with not over sharing to the point you annoy people with differences from you, which I can tell you first-hand is hard to recover from.
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.
So you claim/reserve a private good, with no intention to use it. Just so others can't use it?
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.
Heh. Learned this lesson in college when a friend started registering all of our acquaintances names on AOL instant messenger, and impersonating a large number of people.
I think yours is an extremely idiosyncratic special case, and there are always going to be one-off special cases. You can't reasonably expect policy for the other 330 million users to grind to a halt to solve something that you could solve yourself by logging in once every six months.
> 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?
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.
I've noticed there is a "schedule tweet" option maybe you could schedule some tweets to keep your account active. A Happy New year here, a St. Patrick's Day there, maybe a few others. I know you don't want to tweet but at least this keeps you in the active category.
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.
I have a similar issue on Github and Gitlab.com - my handle there (same as here) overlaps with a certain annotation from Java's Hibernate, so I get a lot of @mentions from random repos.
(And all that because Github and Gitlab are both case-insensitive when matching @mentions.)
My college email forwarding is just my first name. (We got to choose our username and I got in early.) It doesn't really happen any longer but back in the day when a lot of people were not terribly familiar with the new-fangled email thing, I would get fairly regular emails--including some that were probably at least a bit sensitive--addressed to my first name by people who just assumed the email would somehow get to some other person with the same first name.
Ha, yeah. Imagine how I feel, sharing a name with a major VC firm! @sequoia was squatted for years, I asked for it back in 2011 or so along with verification that I am in fact Sequoia (github.com/sequoia etc.), they said they "don't release usernames."
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).
It never ceases to amaze me how Twitter is so unprepared for anything they do.
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?
It’s pretty disappointing. Their share price has been completely flat since IPO. I’m surprised shareholders have not revolted against Jack being a part time CEO. Clearly there needs to be some dedicated focus to clean up the app. So much potential to be so much better.
> It’s pretty disappointing. Their share price has been completely flat since IPO. I’m surprised shareholders have not revolted against Jack being a part time CEO.
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, Facebook, and similar might be of interest because of power and knowledge. If you are already super rich then making another billion or two may be less important than say analytics of how some popular uprising goes.
My pet theory is that Imgur is actually what the NSA needs all that diskspace in Utah for. :o)
People think that thinking through technical issues is hard, but thinking through issues dealing with people can make technical issues seem like child's play. This isn't just Twitter that botches thinking through the people aspect of changes. We see this happen to all sorts of companies across all industries.
This is uncharitable, IMO. It is not fair or reasonable to accuse a group of people of amateurism without knowing or understanding the constraints they’re working under.
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.
After 7 years in tech, i've learnt it's not like dealing with real humans. You're dealing with a business engine - never assume good intent or competence when trying to reason out why a product arrived at it's current level of success or failure
This makes me realize that from now on, most human beings will probably increasingly be "memorialized" online.
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.
That's very idealized, right now we still struggle with having big tech even acknowledge its actually our data [0] and not completely and only theirs the moment we give it to them willingly or often enough unwillingly.
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.
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.
As far as I can tell, there are two systems for meaningful names (as opposed to "arbitrary" ones like phone numbers or 4chan IDs):
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
Does anyone know of another way to do meaningful names?
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.
that's an economic solution (and a neat one at that) to a sociopolitical problem. societies use names to address, differentiate, and even affiliate each other.
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).
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.
> people have the same names in real life and we've learned to deal with it.
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.
I wonder what the real reason for account deletions is.
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.
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.
>>In other words, the same reason that Facebook will start spamming your email if you stop logging in.
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.
It is to cull high-volume bot programs, which are managed through the API. Note that every account will require a log-in to count as active, not just be posting.
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.
I would be pleasantly surprised if one of the big tech companies was deciding policy based on actual technical problems rather than politics/'business' reasons/whatever junk science is trending today. That would make a nice change.
No I highly doubt it. This is most likely as they say a GDPR issue. Per the GDPR they'll have to keep track of which users have agreed to which version of the ToS and Privacy Policy and make sure that they only process their data in accordance. This is a PITA, much easier to deem accounts inactive and delete their data. They've probably been contacted by the data commissioner of some EU country and asked nicely to comply with the GDPR.
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.
We're talking about users that last logged in more than 6 month ago here. It has obviously nothing to do with government sponsored shills or the GDPR. It's just that Twitter wants to eliminate users that are not "monetizable", they are also looking into users I quote "log in but don't do anything" on Twitter.
Actually, under the GDPR, as a general rule, you can't just keep personal data on your servers forever so GDPR might be involved but for personal data cleanup reasons/requirements.
I am not a Twitter engineer, but I guess that this is nothing else but a great marketing campaign - suddenly many people remember all their accounts and login and that will help to produce very nice reports about the "active user base".
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.
honestly i am a bit surprised why it would be an issue to delete content from a user who is no longer a user... it's kind of in the name of the thing. a user is generally 'able to use' the thing, hence `user`... if someones dead, they are not a user anymore. i think its a bit silly people are claiming disk space and resources for their deceased loved ones and heroes on some other people's service / servers. it seems even indecent to request such a thing... its a free service.
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 ...
Did Twitter already delete inactive accounts in the past? When I created my account in 2008 my preferred handle was taken by an empty account that seemingly never posted anything. With this recent news about account deletions I was curious if maybe I could get it, so I checked it again. I was surprised to see that it’s now a very active account with a “joined in” date in 2014. So it looks like the old inactive one was deleted at some point and then the handle was re-registered by someone else. Either that or the “joined in” date isn’t accurate.
My understanding is that twitter employees were able to manually delete an inactive account in the past to free up the handle for use. I know a couple people who got their preferred handles that way.
I'm sure they've at least proposed it before - some years ago I setup a recurring reminder to tweet on each of my Twitter accounts every six months "to prevent account deletion".
Readit News
I definitely feel like they could compromise and at least delete those blatantly unused ones.
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.
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
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.
Congratulations, you _are_ the very cybersquatter you feared so much.
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.
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.
That's kinda easy, you create a real account and verify it/link it in all your other profiles.
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.
It has been an issue for several decades.
Deleted Comment
That's just what you want us to think!
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.
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.)
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).
The user has no tweets, has followed nothing and done nothing since registering 2013.
I hope they end up doing it.
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
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?
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.
My pet theory is that Imgur is actually what the NSA needs all that diskspace in Utah for. :o)
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
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.
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:
Does anyone know of another way to do meaningful names?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).
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.
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.
On Twitter or a forum like this for example, unique usernames are probably essential, because the alternatives are too confusing.
That way there is no overlap, and nobody is slighted when they find out that their name is taken.
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?
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.
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.
Also as someone said below, it forces users to accept any new changes to the ToS.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...