I wonder what the real reason for account deletions is.
Could it be possible they have overflowed their primary / foreign key allocation necessary to support further user growth? Depending on their internal architecture, a migration to a wider key might not be feasible within the time horizon they have. Maybe it's easier to delete accounts?
If they have weird sharding and a lot of microservices, this might be their only way out without shutting off registrations - and they'd never do that.
Or maybe they have metrics that show new users skip signing up when their desired name is unavailable.
Could it be possible they have overflowed their primary / foreign key allocation necessary to support further user growth? Depending on their internal architecture, a migration to a wider key might not be feasible within the time horizon they have. Maybe it's easier to delete accounts?
If they have weird sharding and a lot of microservices, this might be their only way out without shutting off registrations - and they'd never do that.
Or maybe they have metrics that show new users skip signing up when their desired name is unavailable.
Can a Twitter engineer speak more to this?