I'd downvote this if I could. It was submitted by the author to boost views. This article had pretty much no useful content. He deleted his tweets because he didn't like them changing their terms of service a few times. No deep analysis of why, though. And ... um, data mining? Like that's breaking news, that public tweets and likes could be data mined? Ok ... yeah, moving on, nothing to see here folks.

It's adorable how the author thinks he deleted his tweets.

It sure is easy to be condescending when you ignore chunks of the post. Like the link to http://twitter.dougbelshaw.com/

Do you think twitter deleted them from their database? Or just flagged them as not visible?

Id bet on the second one.

It doesn't matter. In both scenarios it's off the twitter site and backups still exist.

But can still be mined...

What stands out to me is the call-out against "Data miners". This is ironic to me in that twitter has been historically one of the LEAST friendly platforms for data ingestion. They have very strict limits on # of historical tweets fetched, firehose access (to summarize, "no you can't have it"), and utilization of data, to the point that in most discussions about the platform they're seen as very closed. (or at least too risky to rely on) The author even acknowledges this in his having to use a third party service to extract the tweets to a _more searchable_ subdomain?

I guess what this ramble is meaning to say: Where does the author's globbing-in of "Data miners" come from, why the distaste, and how does mastadon solve the issue?

He's advertising his own service. His criticism night be justified, but there's no new reason he mentioned why he would leave Twitter exactly now.

It's an ad.

I deleted all my favorites after Twitter renamed them to likes, and Twitter restored them a few months later, so I deleted my account entirely.

"this service that used to be on the side of liberty is becoming a tool for the oppressor, the data miner, the quick-buck-making venture capitalist."

Gee, what a surprise.

I doubt there are a lot of companies that don't try to monetize their userbase and "free" product in some way eventually.

there's an irony to bashing the shallow corporatization of twitter while actively trying to manufacture outrage alongside a link to your competing service.

gross.

His? Did I miss something here? And the point of Mastodon is not having any company in charge.

From the article:

> In particular, I’ve been hanging out at social.coop, which I co-own with the other users of the instance.

Now, whether that's "own" like "founder" or "own" like "credit union member" is perhaps up for debate, but the opening paragraph leads with an endorsement for a competing service over which he has partial ownership, in his words.

Since he's just advocating for people to join credit unions in general, I don't think it's a problem either way. But it looks like the latter from what I can see.