Because bits aren't stone markings on graveyards. If you want they can last as long as the service does, which is a fine cut-off. Otherwise you get the same trouble with every other kind of method of authentication: after your ID is recycled whoever picks it up again even after it has been carefully scrubbed will inherit all the inbound links and so on. That doesn't really happen with gravestones.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I'm looking for something more than "it's possible to do this."
Or rather, I don't think there's a need to go to such an extent to preserve old usernames and histories. I think it'd be sufficient to let archivists at whatever data they wanted, and return the names to the churn.
They're not names, they're identifiers. There is absolutely no shortage of those and Twitter threads in their original form have all kinds of uses. Court cases, keeping the web in one piece, reference material, claims of prior art and so on. The archives can not be searched and that makes them much harder to use for that purpose.
Our company is pretty handy in digging up stuff but you'd be surprised how much of the web is rotting away while you're staring at it and every time that happens there is a fair chance we lose something, forever. It need not be that way.
Imagine we'd have a day-to-day account of the lives of the people from 500 years ago, and that you could home in on whatever individual from that time stuck on the web. I personally think that unless the author removes it these content farms owe it to the creators that gave them the content in the first place to at least support and store that content until copyright on the content runs out.
Thank you for elaborating. I'm actually more sympathetic to preserving identifiers now!
I do think Twitter could handle this better. One problem with your distinction between names and identifiers is that, for Twitter, they're largely the same. And, Twitter lets any user change their name AND identifier at will. The history on Twitter is already badly muddled; this doesn't change much, except for a handful of high-profile accounts that people want to keep as memorials.
Twitter, I think, is not the right venue for that. They should make these accounts available for archival, or spin them off into a separate namespace, but I don't believe it makes sense for Twitter to keep inactive accounts preserved as they are indefinitely, just because the whole twitter namespace is already in such a flux (and it's not a good venue for memorializing the deceased).
Still, thanks for clarifying and changing my mind somewhat.
I'd be ok with it if they preserved the history, timestamped the change of ownership and made sure that from the page of the current registrant you could backtrack to the history of the account over time. That would be an acceptable middle-ground, maybe even show (#2) or so behind the name linking to the account history to indicate the nth re-incarnation of that particular account. That way all the old content would remain linked and you'd be able to find out if someone has re-purposed an account right up front.
