Giving up an identity, followers, and communication streams and starting from scratch is giving them a full victory, not a "little victory," that's their entire goal, the big deal. Sometimes the right thing to do, but it seems rude to give it as blanket advice.

This is a lesson I learned a long time ago -- don't define your identity or personal value on a public online service. It will always, always come back to bite you in the ass in one way or another.

A fun way to pass the time, yeah. A way to keep current with what's going on in the real time, sure. But the more personally invested you are in such a thing and the more you open up your private life and thoughts to strangers, the more devastated you will be when things go south.

I think we're talking about different things here. I mean to refer to an online identity, a way to talk to people about a certain topic. It can be professional, commercial, political, or personal. Many people have several online identities, to talk about different topics, and they're not attached to the personal side at all.

Of course, even if it's not a personal identity, that's not enough to stop certain people from attacking the Twitter user's personal life.

You seem to be arguing to not use Twitter, which is just fine, I don't think it's necessary at all in my life. But I think a lot of people find a lot of value in the platform, and when there's something of value, I can see why a lot of people would rather try to keep Twitter useful rather than just abandon it entirely.

I don't use twitter, but I've heard and seen that there is a way to turn your account private, so only people you follow can tweet you. That seems like a much more proportioned solution to getting spammed by tweets, than outright deleting your account.

This particular issue seems ripe for a technological fix from Twitter. It should be possible to tweak your privacy settings in such a way that you can turn down noise and only focus on the tweets you are interested in. Maybe it's just my naivete as a non-user, but it seems like adding a couple of settings would help you weather such a storm:

- allow tweets only from people you follow

- allow tweets only from people you've already tweeted at

- temp-block all non-followed accounts that tweeted you in the last X hours

I think asking Twitter to fix the much larger problem of "eliminating assholes from the Internet" is counterproductive. Twitter's inherent design is flawed as it is essentially a single loud public forum, but they can at least provide you tools to handle the worst cases of spam.

These are great comments that I fully agree with.