> People should know that they should cite you if they want something to be preserved in conversations or when linking.

If people are worried about that they shouldn't be relying on a third-party (twitter) for record keeping.

Link rot is something we can't avoid, but that's wholly different from actively going back and deleting things.

The bio space is too short. Meh, I can delete if I want to :)

Much as I hate linkrot I'm not sure we should be using Twitter as a archival source. But people do and you're not making future historians happy. ;-)

So - why are you using Twitter at all if you want to delete stuff so quickly?

You sound the kind of chap who would much prefer their own platform. Heard of these things called "blogs"?

Many years ago I used Posterous as my blog, in good HN fashion.

Aaaaand it went away.

Walled gardens are always going to be a massive vulnerability for link rot.

This time with Medium will be different! /s

Although I couldn't see a way to do it when I first looked at Medium, I'm told that there is now a way to use it with your own URLs.

I haven't bothered to examine how it works, but if you can do that and you have a disaster recovery plan that replicates your entire output to a different service (e.g. GitHub Pages) while retaining the link structure, then perhaps Medium is now superior to Posterous's original offering.

There used to be a way. The user had to fill a form and pay (less than 100usd, IIRC) and they would set up a custom domain for you.

The last time I googled it they had it discontinued this option.

Self-host - or at least use a platform that you can easily migrate away from without breaking urls.

Cool URIs don't change and all that... Thank heavens for the Internet Archive.

Twitter is not exactly a walled garden, though. AFAIK it's perfectly indexable.

Doesn't Twitter gate high volume access behind contracts for money?

In any case, if Twitter allows posy deletion, then it's standard. You may consider deleting bad form, but that's just another case of someone's perception of a platform not matching reality.

The internet makes it hard to definitively remove something, but a large percentage has already been lost to churn and bit rot due to lack of care.

If you think this will upset future historians, just wait until you find out that this is something that journalists like to do with their Twitter accounts too, and I would be entirely unsurprised if there's an overlap between the journalists who do this and the ones that start dubious but widely believed viral claims using their Twitter accounts.

Every so often I just delete all my tweets. It's not automated, because I do it when I feel like it. The first ever twitter app I made was a delete-all-tweets app just for myself to use.

I purge content from my law firm website all the time.

I completely trash and start over my personal website every few years, too, and I've never kept anything in a purge. I have personal archives of it, and the various archiving sites have been snapshotting my stuff since 1999, so, meh, if anyone wants to find my old work product, there's a way, without me having to archive it all for the whole world for all eternity.

Sometimes it's nice to start over.

I like to purge my real life too. De-cluttering is fun. My zen would be to have nothing left.

Regarding link rot, the walled garden comment above/below is spot on. When you're dealing with a bunch of walled gardens, link rot is so far unavoidable.

Don't worry about it, some people want everything for free, if they want to cite you they should plan that the internet is temporary and there is no guarantee that content will be there in the next 15 minutes let alone a few years. Keep deleting your stuff and don't worry about the people who think you should do this or do that with the way you handle your internets.

Downvoted for not contributing to the conversation. It's basically a personal attack on me and others sharing my opinion: saying we want everything for free, that we should not assume Twitter to be there in 15 minutes (when there is all the reason to assume the contrary), calling OP out to keep doing what I said I thought was not a good idea (without explaining yourself further) and not to worry about people like us. This isn't a logical argument and doesn't help the conversation, and that's besides the fact that you make it sound very personal.

It's interesting how this post gets more downvotes, as the front-page post "delete tweets older than X days" gets more upvotes. I wonder if this is due to priming.

That seems perfectly explainable by the fact that they're both correlated with time passing, given the possibility that the average HN voter agrees with the deletion of old tweets and disagrees your comment. This explanation has the added advantage of not being decapitated by Occam's Razor, the way your priming proposition is.