Quit Twitter—But Don't Delete Your Account

pcmag.com:

Elon Musk's tenure at Twitter continues to be a fascinating social experiment. In just the last few weeks, we've seen a fight with NPR, allegedly private messages showing up where they shouldn't, the announcement of a dubiously secure messaging system, and a threat that underused accounts will be seized in a kind of digital eminent domain. These are excellent reasons to quit Twitter for good, but if you do, don't delete your account.

As cathartic as deleting your Twitter account can be, a long-standing online presence associated with a real person is a valuable commodity, even if the platform is not. Holding on to it gives you a better chance to maintain control of your online identity, while deleting it can cause problems.

If a scammer were to come along and pretend to be you—perhaps reaching out to your Twitter followers and asking for money or personal information, or just using your likeness to peddle spam links—you'd want to set the record straight. If you've deleted your account, you don't have that option. You can create a new account, but that might not look any more convincing than the scammer.

Worse yet, someone may eventually take over your old username. Now, this would be a bad user experience, but Twitter is reportedly planning its seizure of underused accounts specifically to release those usernames for others to take on. Should this happen it's all but guaranteed to cause confusion, and it might enable scams as bad guys pounce on previously unavailable accounts. Musk has said that old accounts would be "archived," but also reiterated(Opens in a new window) that "it is important to free up abandoned handles." His recent threats to give NPR's username to a different user(Opens in a new window) out of spite