# The Crazy Years

**URL:** https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/the-crazy-years/1451
**Category:** The Happening World
**Tags:** crazy-years, clown-show
**Created:** [30 May 2022 12:56 UTC](https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/the-crazy-years/1451 "2022-05-30T12:56:57Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 2047

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### Author: ![johnwalker](https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/user_avatar/scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/johnwalker/32/17415_2.png) [@johnwalker](https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/u/johnwalker)
#### Post date: [18 May 2023 13:14 UTC](https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/the-crazy-years/1451/2047 "2023-05-18T13:14:40Z")

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The sound you hear is decades of Internet history disappearing down the memory hole.

[![image](https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/uploads/default/original/2X/1/13a61030407ceaee5ae00aa19e0f06215ecaa1af.png)](https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/updating-our-inactive-account-policies/)

Google: “[Updating our inactive account policies](https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/updating-our-inactive-account-policies/)”.

> **[Twitter to remove idle accounts, archive them](https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-remove-inactive-accounts-2023-05-08/)**
>
> Social media platform Twitter Inc will remove accounts that have been inactive for several years, CEO Elon Musk announced in a tweet on Monday, saying that the action is "important to free up abandoned handles."

Twitter: “[Inactive account policy](https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/inactive-twitter-accounts)”.

This means that the intellectual capital created on these platforms by individuals who have subsequently died or [abandoned the Internet](https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/netslum/) will be lost forever. I understand the desire to free up inactive user names to keep the dead hand of the past from forever constraining the choices of new users, but why not preserve the content and change the account name to, say, @Archived\_RealGiodanoBruno when the account is declared inactive. Certainly, with the collapse in storage costs, the overhead of preserving the content has to be tiny compared to, for example, the hours of current event streaming on YouTube showing a “Live stream starting soon” card or such.

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