I just deleted 36K tweets
ethankaplan.com
ethankaplan.com
I've wanted to do this, but in order to do it, you need to verify your email address with Twitter. Whenever I request the verification email nothing is sent or delivered. (Checked spam and everything). Twitter's support hasn't responded to my inquires, so I'm basically stuck. Anyone happen to have a solution for this?
- Created email #1 at https://www.guerrillamail.com
- Created test Twitter account using email #1, including receiving email confirmation request
- Created email #2 at https://temp-mail.org/en/
- Without confirming email #1, changed test Twitter account email to email #2
- Received email confirmation request at email #2
- And to be nice, deactivated test Twitter account :)
Good luck!
There's also tools for ripping Instagram and Tumblr photos :)
Twitter definitely jumped the shark a while ago. The hashtags got hijacked by brands and activists for hollow signaling and marketing. Retweeting and quoting got repurposed to shame and bully. Forced brevity got redirected into hot takes and memes. It was the core community who did it all first.
I suspect Twitter has been pushed aside by many for more private and granular services like Discord and Slack. Discovery there is a problem though, a million chat rooms of 10 people each make for a poor community. In some ways it's like the living rooms of Iran: most know public discourse is messed up and broken beyond repair, so they only speak openly behind closed doors.
If Twitter could admit that and shift gears, there might still be some hope and a future in it. As it stands, all they're doing is giving people better shovels to dig themselves deeper into the hole of their own making.
I still think a new twitter like service could still be relevant minus the baggage of what twitter has become. They could solve a lot of their issues by quarantining trolls including Trump into a different sub domain.
The biggest problem with most social networks is that once celebrities flock to your service they tend to dominate all discourse and you end up with a dichotomy of leaders and followers.
Facebook somehow manages to still keep trolls from dominating dialogue though it can be suffocating and reddit manages to counter the trolls with quality subreddits for people fed up with trolls.
By the time professionals' "I'm leaving Twitter" posts became unremarkable and trite, the mass exodus was well on its way: to Facebook for its more granual privacy/audience controls, Medium for its analytics, social features, and perceived professionalism, or to the social black hole, having been disenchanted with an overtly social, always public presence altogether.
It's always bittersweet (though mostly bitter) when communities falter and fall apart, but to me Twitter was never a good place to build a community anyway. Most of its advantages came from media and commentators fuming over having missed the boat on Facebook, so there was a concentrated effort to never make that mistake again: hashtags and Tweets were everywhere more so than AOL keywords ever were, which quickly made Twitter mandatory for people who wanted to feel like they could be "influencers", or hang out in their company. In this social and reputational gold rush, only a few came out ahead, which should not be a surprise to anyone, as much as it frustrates those who tried.
The important thing about Twitter is it's a really good real-time online CV/resume. I basically use it to tweet about things I care about professionally, and then link my Twitter account on my other personal pages. That way I can keep my personal pages relatively generic and point potential employers, employees, customers, or partners at my Twitter if they want to see a more current snapshot of my professional activities.
For the most part I don't get involved in the naval-gazing self-back-patting "Twitter Community" either, nor do I post about mundane personal shit, I keep it all professional-related. Most of my posts are intended for non-Twitter users (or at least people coming to my profile from origins other than Twitter) who are vetting me for some business opportunity.
i'm likely in the minority, but twitter for me is more personal than performative or social. i keep a backup of my tweets archive so that i will never lose any of my memories. and this is why i find tweet delete services so baffling.
It's configurable, so my tweets auto-delete after 30 days unless 5+ people favorite or re-tweet them. The Ruby script has been running for several years now on my desktop without any issues (I'm using anacron on Ubuntu, because the computer is off at night when cron would normally run)
There are third-party services available but I won't grant them access to my account and I prefer to do it myself.
Last time I did a Twitter pruning session to remove unwanted drivel, I did it manually and it took me a couple of hours. Thank God I'm only an occasional Twitterer, so I only had a couple of hundred to wade through.
What I'm really waiting for though, to make good on my desire to abandon Twitter completely, is for alternatives like GNUsocial[0] to offer the ability to import your existing Twitter archive. But, as is so often the case with open source projects, they prefer to fuck about with "me too" enhancements like adding 'transgender muslim emoji' support, rather than actually providing incentives for people to migrate easily from Twitter.
The real joy is the ability to filter and remove.
Unlike the other tools I used, this actually reduced the overall tweet count accurately. When I started fresh before, twitter was still reporting 11k tweets.
Thanks for mentioning this!
This year for spring cleaning. I deleted facebook, twitter, disqus, and thousands of comments I left on websites from over a decade ago. No archiving, just permanent deletion. It was the the most beautiful feeling. I felt free. Like a new person. Like there wasn't a part of me roaming around on the internet building up dust anymore.
I know space is cheap and startups love data but we should study what all that does to a person emotionally.
IF {Google Glass was suppose to keep us connected /BUT/ Google glass failed because we felt too connected /BECAUSE OF/ a human emotional desire to be left alone and let the mind relax.}
THEN {Permanently archiving all your content is suppose to be a feature /BUT/ people are deleting their content /BECAUSE OF/ a human emotional desire to start over, clean up, and not leave things strewn about}
That being said I really wish the Hacker News team would add a "DELETE ACCOUNT and all comments" feature. It's ironic that Y-Combinator's hacker news team stands up for so many positive internet movements yet feel that they can permanently keep all the content I generated. It is MY content after all. Do they own the copyright to MY words? The excuse has always been "it's a part of the public dialog". Everything is. Facebook, Twitter, & Disqus are also part of the public dialog. And they let me delete myself off of their services.
Am I understanding correctly that you asked (politely) by email to hn@ycombinator.com and they refused because "it's a part of the public dialog"? If so, I'm surprised and sympathetic. That response seems out of keeping with their generally accommodating approach.
There's a dread that a user feels when they realize they don't remember what they said or who they were 10 years ago, but the whole internet does.
> Little pieces of you are everywhere all over the internet
This is why it's important to choose random nyms not attached to your main identity in any way, and to strive for anonymity. On HN, create a throwaway account and run your posts through something like anonymouth[0] if you're concerned with correlation attacks, or having your stylometric patterns uncovered...
As for your copyright, the terms of service on websites deal with this, making certain that the content you provide is licensed to them (it has to be, or they wouldn't even be able to distribute it at all), and can spell out altered terms to avoid the problem of someone insisting their comments be deleted later. Further, even without extra clauses, I would argue for copyright purposes the "work" is the conversation, not your words, and so any lack of clear ownership should either argue for the entire conversation to be deleted due to one objector (which I think might be more likely by law, and what the terms of service are dealing with) or none of it to be able to be deleted until everyone agrees (which seems more clearly correct and what the terms should state if deletion is to be allowed); I can't come up with a scenario where it seems OK for you to delete just your part unilaterally.
You decided to go to a public forum and contribute to a public conversation. The fact that you said something meant that some people replied to you and others upvoted you instead of saying the same thing, making your comments load bearing and structural. You going back later and deleting what you said changes the context of what I said. For a great (related, though slightly different) example, seek out the account on reddit whose name was something like "edited_to_make_you_look_dumb", which would later edit what they said to make all people who responded to it look really dumb. The two hour window on Hacker News feels about perfect to me, giving time to fix typos, make minor structure and formatting fixes, and even delete things while other people still have time to react and adjust, but then locking the content in for the later record when the content becomes part of the archives.
When you go on a redact and purge, you are destroying something that not just that you created, but something that tons of other people took part in, and you are individually revising the historical record. One may as well argue "I also want everything I said in public comment at last week's City Council meeting redacted from the minutes and I want everything I said at last week's trial redacted from the transcript". This is how you should treat saying something in public as part of a public dialog: you said something in public, and now are part of the public record. Again: if you weren't prepared to say something in public, don't say it in public.
And honestly, I would much rather you not contribute to a conversation if you are going to come around later asking for your part to be deleted. It is as if we are going to paint a mural together, but for some reason every five years you go around finding all the murals you helped with and take back all your paint. If you hadn't have been there at all, someone else might have helped more, and it isn't at all clear our mural would be drastically worse off: but you removing your paint destroys the mural and invalidates all of the work of everyone else involved. It wasn't "your paint", it was "our mural", and you shouldn't get to unilaterally alter it :/.
if people can change both their username and email.
But the risk is that something said once can and will be used against a person in the future. The worst examples of that are currently being demonstrated by US border control Googling people and asking for social media login information.
If permanence needs to exist to retain context of discussions, then let only the content be permanent and not the identity of the person who said something.
"And honestly, I would much rather you not contribute to a conversation if you are going to come around later asking for your part to be deleted." That statement perfectly describes what's wrong with the silicon valley "dataphile" era. You're encouraging the shutting down of conversations, not the growth of more.
Even Y-Combinator said it in interviews that founders reveal more during more intimate interviews and talks than ones on camera. When you go around with a microphone and camera and record and set into stone what people say it doesn't encourage them to say more, but rather less. Because they're not sure if that information can be used against them in the future. When you fail to give users privacy and data retention rights they may just run away from your platform altogether.
There's a dread a user feels when they realize they don't remember what they said or who they were 10 years ago, but the whole internet does.
1) I don't mean this as an insult but what is your age? Because when I was younger my views matched yours, as I grew older the mental stress of my digital self being all over the place began to build up. It's something that happens with time and age. Sure there are outliers but for the most part we all slowly tun into privacy advocates as we get older.
2) "When you go on a redact and purge, you are destroying something that not just that you created, but something that tons of other people took part in"
It's better to create and delete rather than to never have created at all. Also, we're talking about Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News, and blog comments. This isn't a scientific journal, National Geographic, a Newspaper, or a text-book. We're talking about internet comments here. There's a time and place for data retention and I don't believe this is it. The burden of feeling like your life is cataloged on the internet with you having no control over it. The burden of feeling like your identity is split up in a million different little pieces is not a feeling you want your users to feel. No facebook or twitter or HN post is worth undermining basic user rights of privacy and deletion.
3) Your views on data retention seem extreme to me, the very conversations you're trying to permanently save will in a few months become outdated, no longer visited, not important, and useless. So what if someone deletes a comment and people reading 5 years in the future don't see it. What is the importance or significance of it that makes it worth destroying user rights. This is a sort of "Data Pack-Rat mentality", an obsession with archiving and compiling everything that everyone has ever said into a perfect neat little collection. And anyone that gets in the way of that perfect collection is a threat to it. You're more sympathetic and caring toward "the collection" than the users who create those collections.
I'll agree to disagree with you. I can't and don't want to change you but at least now you know why I am the way I am. Who you were 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago is not who you are now. What you care about changes, what you think changes, your identity changes, your dreams change, and unfortunately comments do not.
I believe User rights are more important than a perfect archive of some internet comments on a website.
1.) I don't think it has anything to do with age
2.) Even if you would be able to delete it, your comments would probably be cached by google, archive.org etc
3.) You contradict yourself here
> So what if someone deletes a comment and people reading 5 years in the future don't see it.
The reason you are able to delete a comment immediately after on HN but not later (as I see it) - let's say you're tired or drunk and reply with wrong information or being rude and realize it after you already pressed reply.
This has nothing to do with data hoarding, you realize that if enough people would be able to remove their comments the whole thread would be destroyed and no longer make any sense for new readers. Also it might misrepresent what other people were replying to, when taken out of context some innocent reply could be labeled racist, sexist or what have you. It could bring much bigger consequences than your worries that "your shit is out there".
I can understand the viewpoint against allowing deletions, and it's not necessarily a "ratpack mentality" of storing it all: it's losing the pearls in the chaff. Sure, most comments are worthless after a few days, let alone months or years, but a few are still valuable. I've been browsing the web for quite a while now, and I've never bookmarked much, let alone tried to "save it all", yet it still pains me a little that the few links I did save are mostly lost.
That said, I don't think that's enough to justify not allowing deleting comments. I'm just saying we shouldn't paint a caricature of people with different positions, even if we fully disagree with them.
All that aside, there's another point: HN can't actually delete your comments, they can only delete their copy. Dumps have and will be made, and a simple search can find comments by your nickname outside of news.ycombinator.com, and this is inevitable on an open site. Isn't there the danger of creating a false sense of privacy?
This is still possible? I've done this when the feature was new and tried it again a few weeks ago and there was nothing. Thought it is broken.
go to https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data and scroll alllllll the way down, there's a link to 'Twitter Archive'
Well, …
I used this Ruby application to do so, together with the archive CSV, customising it a bit.
https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/TwitterDelete
I think Twitter became less local or personal and became more serious.