Thread by @ryanqnorth

A TWITTER THREAD ON DELETING YOUR TWEETS, INCLUDING MOTIVATIONS FOR DOING SO AND BEST PRACTICES

by me

Ryan

A Guy Who Just Deleted Some But Not All Of His Tweets

So why would you want to do this? There's the practical reason (people dig up old tweets, sometimes taking them out of context, sometimes not, and use them to destroy your life) and the more societal one (do we really need dashed-off thoughts from more than a decade ago around?)

I was against the idea of deleting them for safety, because it felt like a concession, like saying "yes, it DOES make sense that people dig up old tweets to ruin you with them, and therefore we all must erase our history and present as perfect at all times!!"

It's bad for the individual because nobody IS perfect and it doesn't actually solve the problem (people will alter screen shots anyway if they really want to harm you) and it's bad for society because it's not sustainable. I don't wanna live in hypocritical puritan world, sorry!

BUT. I talked to people who had been targets of hate mobs, of Gamergate, etc, and what I heard was "it's not worth the risk" and "it's worse than you think it is". How our brains can't handle a constant stream of hate against us without concluding "I MUST be a HORRIBLE person".

Even if you know it's politically motivated. Even if you know it's a small group of vocal people (like the recent analysis that TERFs on Twitter are just 1000 people

https://mobile.twitter.com/HelenGradwell/status/1409070483673337856

) - it's hard to hold tight to that when it SEEMS like the whole world is hating you.

But I'm a straight cis white guy, and on Twitter that gives you privileges that excuse a lot. Surely I could use that to stand as a Non-Deleting Ally? Again, everyone who had been through it was like "I am saying this with all sincerity: it's not worth it, delete your tweets"

It's worth saying here that I don't think there's anything bad in my tweets: I've always treated Twitter as public and I don't believe I've logged on to spew hate, but still. Maybe there's something that without context looks bad! Who knows!

What finally convinced me was a friend saying "look, if you had a transcript of everything you've ever said since 2008, you probably wouldn't want that published. If you've grown AT ALL as a person over the past DECADE, then there's stuff you no longer agree with in there"

So that's what pushed me over onto Team Delete. But how to do it?

You've got a few options: you can READ all your old tweets and manually check them, I had 88k tweets, and estimating 140 characters a pop, that's 122 hours. If I read my old tweets as a full-time job it'd take more than 2 weeks. PASS

You can nuke ALL your old tweets, and there's plenty of services that'll do that. But I wanted to be selective! There's some jokes in there that I really like, and I'm years deep into retweeting this at Christmastime. It's a TRADITION

https://twitter.com/ryanqnorth/status/677282590076874752?lang=en

You may have noticed me retweeting some old tweets the past few days. That's because I was poking through my Twitter archive, which I was actually an impressively-well-designed little package. Twitter did a good job on this!
help.twitter.com/en/managing-yo…

They give you an html file which acts as a frontend the data: a personal mini-Twitter with instant search. Here's all the times I posted about pizza. As you can see, I have a problem with eating whole pizzas but let's ignore that for now!!!!!! Also forever!!

But it's not perfect. I decided I wanted to keep the funny jokes and delete the cruft, but there's no way to search for RT counts easily. I thought "oh gosh, I'm gonna have to write a script that goes through all this data and does that for me". But I didn't!

THANKS TO TWEETDELETE.NET. It's the site I would've written if it wasn't already done. You upload your Twitter archive to TweetDelete and it produces for you a CSV, which you can then download into a spreadsheet!

I decided that the formula "((likes/2) + (retweets))" would be my How Good A Tweet Was Approximator, and set a threshold of 15. Anything above could say, anything below would get erased. This turns 88k tweets into 10k tweets. Aka JUST THE GOOD STUFF.

Such a formula is imperfect: it favours new stuff, especially since the earliest tweets predate the concept of "non-manual retweets" but it's good enough for me! I already decided I don't want to spend too much time making this Perfect, just Good

(A quick check ensured that this would keep up the best tweets from the Hole Saga - imgur.com/gallery/bKoO8 - as well as my VERY credible claims that I am NOT handsome and successful air pirate D.B. Cooper, both of which are critical for future generations to know.)

Then all you have to do is copy the IDs of the tweets you no longer want from the spreadsheet, paste them into TweetDelete's webform, and it'll delete them all. No programming needed, just some basic (and optional!) spreadsheet skills. Tada!

You can also put in the ids of tweets to NOT delete on a different page, which is a good safety if there's a couple you want to ensure are always there for you. I added my very first tweets because I wanted SOME continuity

I didn't see a guide about targeted deletion like this, so I wanted to share. Of course you don't need to get this fancy: you can delete all your tweets, or, like many people do, delete tweets after a few months automatically. But this worked for me.

(TweetDelete costs $15 in a one-time lifetime subscription to do this fancy spreadsheet stuff, but has a free tier for simpler deleting. Well worth the money as it would've taken me several hours to program it myself, and I'm worth more than $15/hour!) ilu tweetdelete dot net)

I've got the twitter archive backed up, right beside my LJBook, which is a colossal PDF of everything I ever posted on LJ. Maybe one day I'll donate them to the Internet Archive (@textfiles tells me they DO accept Twitter archive donations!

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1418235775729164292

)

End result: I have a copy of all my tweets, just in case. Twitter has just the good stuff. And I'm no longer dragging 88 thousand old opinions around with me online, but the jokes I like can still remain. THE END

(I don't expect to have tweets auto-delete in the future, but given how easy and actually fun this was, I expect I'll go through once every while and do this again, deleting old stuff that no longer meets my Current Quality Thresholds TM)

After all this, how do I feel? Eh, fine. I wish Twitter would let you lock or hide old tweets without deleting them. I'm sad that a lot of what's now gone was conversations with people since those are by their nature less public! But overall: fine. It's fine.

It's fine, just another symptom of how the modern internet has evolved from a place of freedom into a space of compromise, liability, and pervasive surveillance. probably it's fine