The Sadness of Deleting Your Old Tweets

Deleting or not deleting, I dunno.

I started talking on the internet when I was 9. I've always had to live with the paranoia of my data following me around everywhere. Because it does, it could exist somewhere, even if I delete it. Who sees it? The people that matter (other technology folks, since that's where I've directed my career towards), or the rest of the world?

At the end of the day, my feelings are this. Everyone has issues. Everyone looks brilliant sometimes, and dumb other times. Everyone makes mistakes, some are better at hiding them than others, but that doesn't mean anyone is perfect.

It's easier to just not judge. Don't let others past drag behind them, don't use their past against them. Because, it's a mental prison you either force yourself in, or force others in. The way you treat the world either is the way you see the world, or it becomes the way you see the world.

Also, all those mistakes can add up to something great. Error seeking mentality can turn into error prone mentality. It's important to have tolerance for yourself, and others.

This is the direction everything went in. Collect as much data as possible. Inferences can be blinding. Of course it's going to affect people.

I often wonder why someone would run such a service for free. I assume they’re loosing money by running this service.

But what is the point of liking or retweeting tweets which you know the author will delete in a year/month?

I don't retweet much, but I want those retweets to stay on my feed, not disappear by author's wish. Similarly I like tweets to keep them as bookmarks, and I wouldn't be happy if those tweets would disappear too.

If deleting old tweets seems wise, then surely never tweeting in the first place must be wiser. Delete all you wish, but the number of entities independently archiving the Twitter firehose most be in the hundreds or thousands.

I suspect we're all lucky that for most of human history we didn't keep such meticulous records on every single human's most banal comments and observations. Surely from Aristotle to Abraham Lincoln, a scouring of their lifelong Twitter feed would have revealed every one of them to have produced a despicable melange of racism, spite, narcissism, chauvinism, and Lord knows what other vile comments.

It's rather silly that we're all encouraged to overshare and trumpet inanity into the social ether and at the same time we're going around firing people for regrettable jokes they made 8 years ago.

Ah well, I'll stick to making safe and largely valueless comments on HN...