I can understand not making a tool to memorialize users in first 3 years of creation but once twitter became a household name they really SHOULD have already updated their roadmap.
In the era of cloud computing, how expensive would it be to make an account readonly and store the paltry data it created in a cached location somewhere?
All of their tech decisions feel really reactive nowadays
With roadmap decisions like these, the compute or storage cost for the data is an insignificant part of the product decision making.
The real cost of doing something like this is doing user research to figure out the set of human behaviors around the memorialization process, deciding where in the product to make the functionality available, training material for how it escalates up to human support teams, and what other things are on the team's plate at the same time.
Why does it have to be specifically the tech holding them back from doing it?
Personally the permanence of internet content is terrifying and by far the worst aspect of it. Potentially there are people like me who would be at the table whenever "what to do with accounts of dead people" is discussed, strongly advocating for deletion. Lacking clear consensus they just left the decision until it had to be made.
In the era of cloud computing, how expensive would it be to make an account readonly and store the paltry data it created in a cached location somewhere?
All of their tech decisions feel really reactive nowadays