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Twitter should automatically and quickly delete your tweet if it is bad.

3 points by amichail ↗ HN
The idea is to specify some criteria as to when twitter would automatically and quickly delete your tweet.

For example, if more than 2 people unsubscribe soon after your tweet is posted, then delete it automatically to avoid further reducing your audience.

You can even be more specific by only considering unsubscribers who pass some threshold in that count (e.g., those with at least 1000 followers).

Moreover, your criteria can take into account retweets and new subscribers.

CLARIFICATION: You -- not twitter -- would specify the criteria for automatic deletion of your tweets. If you don't like this feature, then don't use it.

19 comments

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csomar
Everyone is responsible for what he tweets; but the idea is good and can be a good Twitter App
fingolfin
So much for accountability, eh?
amichail
Not only would this limit your follower loss, but it would also give you feedback on the sorts of things you might want to avoid in the future when you tweet.
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duskwuff
Maybe it's just me, but I would be incredibly annoyed by a feature that would allow people to arbitrarily make my posts get deleted. Most Twitter users don't really care about this sort of thing, and those that do already have better ways of dealing with it.
amichail
You would specify the criteria for automatic deletion. If you don't like this feature, then don't activate it.
marcocampos
Welcome to real life. How about taking responsibility for what you write? Just think twice about what you're going to say. And if you say something people don't like, well too bad... just live with it. Everybody in the world does this everyday.

Being a douche is bad. Being a douche and try to hide it? Well, even worse. Now I really don't want to follow you.

amichail
I find this response rather strange.

Why not also argue against stop loss orders in the stock market?

noodle
stop loss orders cost money.
duskwuff
And stop-loss orders involve money. Twitter does (should?) not.
tdavis
Being a douche is bad

That's vague and subjective. Your definition of "douche" could be far removed from mine and even for douches I don't really paint things in terms of "good" or "bad". I could use this service and see it as a way to protect me from accidently offending people who take life far more seriously than I do. Hell, another HN poster has already taken it upon himself to vet my tweets for offensive things I shouldn't be saying in public.

Musashi
Take some personal responsibility instead of wanting Big Brother (Twitter) to do it for you. The more inappropriate things a person says, the fewer people will follow them... ... Anyway, WHO defines WHAT is a bad tweet? Just cos you don't like it and find it distasteful, doesn't mean that others will also. Many forms of satire would be deemed distasteful and yet others are simply deemed distasteful due to the reader having a poor sense of humour or lack of context.
amichail
You -- not twitter -- would specify the criteria for automatic deletion of your tweets. If you don't like this feature, then don't use it.
noodle
why should they implement this functionality? i don't really see any justification for why.

it makes twitter into a personal publicity tool out of the box, which i don't think is how it should be considered and a turn in the wrong direction.

Gibbon
"If you're not pissing off at least 50% of the people you meet each day, you're not having a good day."

Arbitrarily deleting messages based on you reader's behaviour is a recipe for mediocrity.

catone
I don't think this could ever actually work. If you've already lost 2 followers, then your tweet is already out there in the timelines of your followers. Those who are going to see it, probably already have. Those who aren't, probably weren't paying attention and never will anyway. There are already services that tell you what you said that made people unfollow you -- so you can delete tweet manually or modify your tweeting behavior (services like: http://www.tweeteffect.com/ and http://twitterless.com/ )

Twitter couldn't remove it from timelines until people refresh, and I'm not sure if third-party clients cache tweets, but if they do, then you'd never get your problem tweet deleted from those timelines either.

I guess this feature could somehow block people from retweeting your tweet? Maybe... I suppose. But, uh, most people don't retweet things that made them want to unfollow you. So that would be a silly feature.

What Twitter SHOULD do, instead, is fix their delete function, which leaves deleted tweets in Twitter search. Or provide a quick edit function (i.e., editing available for 90 seconds after tweeting) so people could fix typos.

deno
Why do you care so much about amount of people following you?