To Auto-Archive, Or Not To Auto-Archive
Should Tweets be ephemeral or quasi-ephemeral…
Note: this post was adapted and expanded upon from my newsletter published last week.Interesting discussion on Twitter a couple weeks ago around the notion of auto-expiring tweets — aka “ephemeral tweets”. Obviously, this is timely given that we seem to be in the midst of an epidemic of athletes getting caught with their 140-character (these tweets were from back in the day) feet in their collective mouths. And this has spread to Hollywood as well in a very high profile manner. Expiring tweets likely couldn’t have saved Elon Musk from himself last week, but it certainly couldn’t have hurt.
One twist on this that I think I like more is the idea of auto-archiving tweets. That is, these tweets still exist for you to see — but only for you to see — in an archive you control. Snap, Instagram, and a few other services currently have some version of this option (though with IG, for example, it’s not automatic). In an ideal state, I think you could set all of your tweets (or some tweets on a case-by-case basis) to automatically be archived after a certain amount of time, which you could also set — an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year, etc.
Again, the tweets would still exist in your archive, so they would still serve as a record of your thoughts and shares. But the public couldn’t see them anymore. If you wanted to surface them to the public again you could via the self-retweet! As I joked — but not really — this would serve the purpose of retweeting old tweets when you’re right about something and when you’re not, leaving those archived.
It would be sort of like a diary that is public at first (in the old days of the internet, we called this a “weblog”) and then goes into a private archive after that set amount of time. Because the things you wrote in your diary, even your public one, may make sense in the moment, but a few years down the line, many thoughts and expressions will undoubtedly be cringe-worthy (or worse). We all know this feeling. And now because of services like Twitter (and yes, even blogs), some people experience this embarrassment (or worse) in public.
Kayvon Beykpour, who runs product at Twitter (and co-created Periscope!) chimed in with another twist: “Does your pov on this change when thinking about replies vs non-replies?” It’s an interesting thought — yes, I think I would be okay with this just being for “main” tweets versus “reply” tweets… But I also think that opens a can of worms around visibility and transparency. If a tweet is archived but a reply is not…
Of course, that’s an issue right now with people who delete tweets. Maybe the solution is for the child tweet to follow the permissions of the parent tweet (if the parent tweet is archived or deleted, the children tweet could be auto-archived as well)? But as you can see, this starts to get pretty messy…
Still, it feels like having some optionality here with regard to the longevity of public tweets is the right call. I’m fine with leaving the default as “public forever” but maybe some tweets just make more sense for a moment in time… Or maybe some accounts would be happier letting tweets live for a certain amount of time by default. This isn’t an easy thing to think through, so I don’t envy Twitter on this topic…
Or perhaps I’m just old. And maybe everyone going forward just prefers the fully ephemeral option. Because old tweets aren’t always nostalgic, often times, they’re baggage.
