twitter will start purging inactive accounts

[milo_r]

From TechCrunch:

Twitter is purging inactive accounts on its platform, which may free up a number of long-coveted usernames, according to recent tweets by owner Elon Musk. Though Twitter for years has promised to put more usernames back into rotation, it hadn’t yet made any large-scale effort to do so, despite having an inactive account policy in place that suggests Twitter’s users should log in at least every 30 days to keep accounts from being permanently removed.

According to Musk, Twitter’s purge is more conservative than that policy states. Instead, he says the company is purging accounts that have had “no activity at all for several years,” while also warning users that the result of the purge may mean users’ follower counts drop.
 

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

I'll be interested to hear just how many accounts go. Any user generated content site that has been around a few years is at least half inactive accounts (many of them barely used from the start). And that's not even counting all the bot accounts at sites like Twitter or Instagram which are used for everything from political manipulation and scams to simply paid boosts to people's follower numbers.

It's a lot of storage for sites, but I suspect that most don't undergo the time and cost it takes to weed them out for bigger reasons. It's not a good look when it turns out their sites are much more lightly used than assumed -- plus they can't sell as much "visibility" to advertisers.

[milo_r]

yeah, i suppose they mostly care about freeing high-value handles so that they can sell them, but i can imagine this being somewhat automated.

given the way people use the website though it's quite an oversight not to have a memorial option like FB does.