A couple of months ago, I documented how some Googlers have been removing some of their old posts (tweets) from X (Twitter). John Mueller from Google didn't really comment on why back then (I asked) but yesterday he finally explained why he keeps removing his old Tweets (Posts) from the platform.
John Mueller explained on X that he is "not a fan of how the platform has evolved." He added, "Despite what some bloggers think, Twitter is not documentation, so I clean up my account periodically." Instead, he uses the opportunity to update the official Google documentation on the Google website. He wrote, "If something's unclear, we'll see if it's appropriate to update the documentation."
Mueller added:
Not every tweet is worthy of persistent documentation; things depend a lot on context, and that gets lost & distorted so quickly even within Twitter. Many things are easy to extrapolate or evaluate with some experience & the documentation.
Since that December story, John Mueller has continued to delete posts from the platform. If you read through some of the archives here, you will see that many of the embeds I have from the platform are missing and broken. But since the JavaScript embed included the text of the reply, it still contains how John responded. The issue is, I often included the embeds because it contained the context of who he replied to, with the exact question. That context, in many cases, are now completely gone.
Here are those posts (get them before they are removed - kidding...):
Just personally not a fan of how the platform has evolved, and despite what some bloggers think, Twitter is not documentation, so I clean up my account periodically. If something's unclear, we'll see if it's appropriate to update the documentation.
— John (@JohnMu) February 4, 2024
Not every tweet is worthy of persistent documentation; things depend a lot on context, and that gets lost & distorted so quickly even within Twitter. Many things are easy to extrapolate or evaluate with some experience & the documentation.
— John (@JohnMu) February 4, 2024
On the one hand, maybe. On the other hand, documenting things which make no difference is kinda futile, it just brings people to wonder if maybe it does make a difference and Google's just trying to hoard the 301's for itself (spoiler: no).
— John (@JohnMu) February 5, 2024
Back in December, Danny Sullivan, another Googler who has removed a lot of posts from his personal X account, told us, "On my personal account, I have (well had, the service died) auto-delete that's been in place for over a year. It kept things with some notable engagement that seemed, well, worth keeping. I can pull work tweets up from my archive if needed."
I love documenting how things change, how context changes the answer that a Googler may give and how sometimes Google's view on policies may also change over time. It is a hobby and I do the same not just with posts from Googlers on social media but also by monitoring a lot of the official Google documentation and seeing what changes from time to time with those documents.
But I do get how X is a different place than it was and how it may not be as exciting to post on there as much.
Update: John did save all his old tweets somewhere:
I have all my old Twitter dumps, so at least I'll be able to do it, look at it a bit (and then burn the model down, lol).
— John (@JohnMu) February 5, 2024
Forum discussion at X.
