I Will Not Delete My Twitter Account
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I was working on a different post today, but I got too deep into looking for a good example, realizing a bit too late that I won’t finish it today. So let me just improvise a quick post about a thing I have been thinking about for quite a while.
Here it is: I won’t delete my twitter account.
For a few years now, twitter is not a place you want to be at. Some people left it a long time ago. Some, for some reason, are fleeing it only now.
Many people talk about how they delete their accounts there. That’s ok! But that’s not what I will do.
I will not contribute to the link rot.
That’s one of the principles that I try to follow. We need to keep the Web interconnected. With over two decades on the Web, I saw many social networks die, their owners closing them up and removing all the content. I’m sick of it.
Twitter might as well die. In many senses, the links to it are already dead: a required sign-in, non-existent API. I removed all links to it from my site more than a year ago. I stopped linking to it, I stopped reading it. I stopped posting there.
If twitter goes away completely — so be it, but I won’t contribute to these links breaking.
The contribution of me deleting my account — whatever it could be — is not worth the harm that will be there from the broken links.
Yes, I have an archive of all content there, and I could host the content on my site (and, maybe, one day I’ll do so), but that won’t change a thing.
So, no, I won’t delete my account, but I am ok with it dying.
And if you’re planning to delete yours: I understand, but I recommend reading into how to do it properly before doing it haphazardly.
I don’t have any links about this (I will gladly add them if anyone shares them with me), but the general idea is that if you delete it, the username will become free, and anyone could take it up. The more followers you have, the higher the chance this will happen, with your username’s prominence being abused for spam, harassment, or even social-engineered attacks. There might be a good way to get rid of it but reserve the name — but, again, I don’t know the details. Send them to me!