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Self-Destructing Tweets

Dennis O'Keeffe on October 05, 2020

I will be the first to admit it: I don't like social media. It's not that I do not enjoy the idea of staying connected with the ones that I love a...
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weedshaker profile image
weedshaker

Dude, I totally feel you!

For the same reason I wrote peerweb.site/, so that I can avoid posting on their servers and remove context from my account to/from the posted content.

I will also take your code as an inspiration, once I got to move everything to mastodon.social / minds.com/ or at least mirror it.

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csgeek profile image
csgeek

minds.com is new to me but it seems like every week there is a new 'own your data' insert bit-coin-of-some-kind implementation. mastodon is awesome though. I just wish i knew more people on it.

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okeeffed profile image
Dennis O'Keeffe

Yeah, nice! How good!

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csgeek profile image
csgeek

I wrote something similar in Java that basically adds a ttl to everything I post. My grand vision was to support all social media that just eats there breadcrumbs I leave behind.

I really wish self destructing messages were more common.

That's my favorite feature of keybase chat.

My week old conversation is irrelevant it has no reason to exist beyond that time frame.

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okeeffed profile image
Dennis O'Keeffe

Ahhh ttl is a great idea!

Agree on wishing for more self-destructing messages. I was looking at the Facebook Graph API as well and (unsurprisingly) it didn't look like they grant you much control over deletion.

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csgeek profile image
csgeek

My idea was to just have a service that ties to a web page where you can choose the media and give a TTL based on content. Then just have the service run every N time or be reactive depending on how you architect it but the general idea is:

tweet: delete every 7 days
DMS: keep?
FB photo: no TTL, or maybe 1 year.

Of course you can do this on a per message as well when you send it, but the more social services you add and supported content type the more complex it gets. Though if anyone wrote something like this, I would love to use it.

This needs a lot of love, but if anyone finds value in it, there's the code: github.com/SocialOxpecker/SocialOx...

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allands profile image
Lan

How do you think social media makes you tweet self destructive content? and why so?

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csgeek profile image
csgeek

Actually, my issue with a tweet is that it only has relevance for what.. a few hours? Maybe a day. After that it's only purpose for existing is a historical record of stupid things you probably should not have said.

So I'd love to have a self destruct ability that allows me to somewhat vent about something that's frustrating me and not have to worry about bitching about javascript being horrible (just an example) then applying to a nodejs gig and having to revisit that.

There's countless examples of people losing jobs and opportunities due to things said/done/take out of context and so on.

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allands profile image
Lan

thats why people usually have a non identified twitter. Professional profiles are usually on instagram. I get you though. It's weird how we simply get used to vent to the whole world, but at the same time it's not like we want an answer xd

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okeeffed profile image
Dennis O'Keeffe

In terms of the tweeting, it's (hopefully) not that I am tweeting content that needs to be removed but that I personally get addicted to checking it for interactions. It's not just social media - even work tools like Slack get to that point if I am constantly expecting notifications and checking it.

A lot of it for me is more along the lines of "if you don't want to eat chocolate, don't put it in the pantry". It is easier for me to remain self-disciplined that way!

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allands profile image
Lan

That line of thought works for me as well, but the way I try to implement it is by not using other social medias, except for twitter(as you said, theres some useful content there). The happy part is that it has already improved alot, since I don't really feel like using facebook or instagram anymore xd.

Really liked your article. Have a great day :)

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Jessica Garson

This is an interesting use case. Thanks for sharing.