Discours.es

An interesting way of thinking about this:

Here is one conclusion: Time is a privacy setting. Even Facebook knows this! Users can, for example, keep new friends from seeing private posts from the past. On Twitter, there’s a lot less flexibility. You official options are going entirely private or deleting your account; your unofficial option is to delete your tweets.

I archived everything before deleting it all, and now my posts automatically disappear after a week, courtesy of one of the dozens of sites that offers such things. The result is that new posts aren’t saved anywhere anymore, privately or otherwise, unless they’re screencapped or embedded. This is fine but not ideal. I think a reasonable demand—or expecation, given how much of a grind the overall Twitter experience has become as the service has matured, and how evident it’s become that all that funlike work and worklike fun that was much easier to rationalize when both the service and your own experience was expanding in exciting ways was never really going to amount to much—is for the company to treat the age of a users’ posts as one more privacy parameter. I don’t suppose they’re really incentivized to do this. The new search product they’re selling to brands suggests that they’re incentivized not to. But at the very least we can understand this as a problem; as something a better service would offer, and that users of a better internet would take for granted.