With the latest round of social media drama around API access and the move to paid only access by February 9th, I thought this might be my last chance to remove my posts without having to resort to shutting down my account. A few years back I had gone to the trouble of trying to setup t including signing up to the developer program which involved getting a grilling for two days as part of the application to ensure that I “was not planning on building a scraper/analyser”, before being granted access on to the program. So I picked up where I left off, not realising that though I had provisioned things on the developer portal, I’d revoked access on my actual account to the application I’d provisioned. That cost me a fair bit of time between getting everything updated on my computer and finding what the issue was. From then on I waited for the latest backup of my data to become available so that I could start deleting things, and after a day or so of waiting, it was time. In my terminal, the process went like: extract all the id_str entries in tweets.js, create a loop which iterates through the IDs and runs t delete status -f on each ID and then see. The first time I ran it, it started spitting out No status found with that ID messages so I quickly aborted thinking I had made a mistake, but I retried once more and left it running a little longer just to see, and surely enough, contents of tweets started showing up with message like @my-handle deleted the Tweet: something something. For the next day and a half I had a terminal window which was playing one last run of posts as it deleted them. I had thought that I would just be bombarded with a load of messages confirming the deletion, without seeing the contents, but instead the nostalgia train had arrived.
After almost sixteen years of posting on the site the majority of my posts were split between banality and specific to open source. I could vaguely recall when most things were posted. There were lots of reminders of things long forgotten too, including people’s handles, some which I wish I wasn’t reminded of again. The message "No status found with that ID." went past many times during the period, and occasionally "You may not delete another user's status." which made me smile.
Other highlights from the status’ returned by t included "User has been suspended" and "Sorry, you are not authorized to see this status.", but as everything was being replayed, I made a note of some of the things to share. Trolling DJ John Digweed over trying to sell t-shirts and merchandise was a phase I went through. There were the occasional outbursts due to frustration for one thing or another, sometimes ambiguous, like “To Wednesday, hopefully it wont be as bad as Tuesday”, and sometime extremely specific rage “it’s amazing, really, I always think “boy I’m glad they wrote this in Java” when using anything by Cisco or Dell, that’s after I’ve spoofed my browser ID to appear as IE & usually switch between FF & Safari depending on the task”. I would write about such rage later here. I had also been angry about the introduction of the recommender systems and pop culture “Gary Barlow, Peter Andre, Twitter’s who to follow feature is having a bubble!”, distinctly remember raging over being pushed Justin Bieber content. 😀
As I thought about people I’d communicated with there, I remembered the difficult periods that some folks experienced and shared, even long before the pandemic, but including then, and folks who are no longer around and sadly have passed away.
On the technology front, I once had fun gaming “trying to play Mari0 with a #dvorak layout keyboard is useless, W, A, S, D is no good”, shouting out to the past “burning a CD at 4x for old times sake”, discovered services are long gone (Heroku tier change?), and remembered the Oracle vs Google court case.
Sometimes I’d use Twitter to time things, “sweet, my SDF account has been verified, took 2 weeks for a dollar bill to make it from Brighton, UK to Seattle, USA”.
According to t whoami, I had just under 70000 tweets before I started, and it worked throught a majority of them, at a rate of 1 a sec, but at some point it stopped deleting anymore tweeting and just reported No status found with that ID. According to t whoami now there are supposedly 11656 tweets remaining, but on the website there is no indication, my profile is empty apart from 3 tweets which I wanted to keep. Either there’s some background process which needs to work through things to catch up, as I now have no notifications either, or I’m wondering if there’s any relationship with suspended and locked accounts. I didn’t log anything to see if numbers match up.
the first “big SGI” I ever used and had to admin.
Named it “elvis”, so I could ping it and get back “elvis is alive”
@mrbill on Origin 2k
(Bill Bradford – RIP)
