Hacker News Reader

Tools like this are why I stopped using Reddit ( aside from talking about programming). And I assume anything I post here may eventually be traced back to me.

Even if you do change your username regularly, your patterns of speech may stay rather similar. And no matter what you say, the context around it may change in 30 years or so.

This new generation loves to screenshot personal conversations and then post them to Reddit for brownie points. Meaning if you get involved with someone who's slightly malicious, they can easily ruin your life too.

At this point I'm very careful to only meet folks in person. It's not unheard of for people to share compromising details about themselves, only to become extortion victims.

> Even if you do change your username regularly, your patterns of speech may stay rather similar.

This is so true. There was some guy on a career advice subreddit complaining that he wasn't getting any job offers. As more and more details came out, the guy became combative and refused to take any ownership of his own flaws.

He eventually made a new account, but he couldn't help himself and began making the same complaints and in much the same manner.

I run a script called "shreddit" I found on GitHub that edits and then deletes your comments. It's configured via a YAML file and you can whitelist or filter stuff that you want deleted. I do this every few months. It's probably paranoid and maybe not even useful, but I grew up with imageboards that were fully anonymous and auto delete - for me it should all be ephemeral.

There are few sites which keep track of your delete history as well as edit history so you are not immune to being archived and watched by someone else.

I grew up with imageboards that were fully anonymous and auto delete

You would be horrified at how easy it to recover supposedly-deleted content from most imageboards.

I'm aware of 4chan archives - I use them all the time, but at least stuff under "anonymous".

Oh, I meant that most imageboard software is so ropey I can recover deleted stuff without any external archive or prior monitoring. Finding people's identity is of course a different and harder problem.

Do they have this for Facebook? If like to obfuscate my data before deleting my profile

Everything you’re saying is true, and from a privacy standpoint it is quite scary.

However, there’s a really easy way to not worry about this: don’t be mean/rude to other people publicly, and think about what you say before writing it down.

It’s also hard to be “compromised” if you really own who you are. Embarrassing things about yourself are only embarrassing if you’re embarrassed about them.

Obviously, people have interests and fetishes they’d rather not be made public. Maybe they’d like to interact with those communities online and remain anonymous. I don’t have an easy answer for that - an alt account might not be enough.

Still, for many social media sites it really is in some ways the same standard as written letters. Don’t write things that you’re worried about being read and attributed to you in the future.

Security by obscurity many apply: if in 2050 everyone everyone has 30-40 years of social media data under their belt, it strikes my as unlikely that anybody’s going to care about the one thing you said 30 years ago, a needle in quite an enormous haystack.

After all, you aren’t a historical figure.

> there’s a really easy way to not worry about this: don’t be mean/rude to other people publicly, and think about what you say before writing it down.

I wouldn't usually do this, but since you're arguing it's okay...

Here's you belittling someone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25349593

Here's you discovering that text doesn't always convey the tone you wanted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24518501

Here's you being rude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055238

If you don't think these comments reflect badly on you, wait until the online mob has had a few hours to get angry and then try explaining. Remember that anyone going after you can take comments out of context, add commentary to twist the perspective, and pull comments from arbitrarily far into the past (extra useful if you've ever changed your mind).

I disagree on the assessment of your picks of the GP's comments, and I'd urge everyone to read through them as well.

None of them is "mean/rude". Perhaps not watered-down to the modern PC norms, but they are perfectly fine and would've not been out of place in an in-person conversation.

You appear to be mistaking expressing an opinion for showing a disrespect or trying to offend someone. That's a slippery slope.

>don’t be mean/rude to other people publicly, and think about what you say before writing it down.

This is obviously good advice, but the rest of your comment basically amounts to rephrasing "there is nothing to be afraid of if you have nothing to hide". The problem is that often times people don't have a choice about what they are forced to hide.

For example, one's sexuality is often something that needs to be hidden. It isn't just that some fetishes are embarrassing. Some orientations in some jurisdictions are illegal or not legally protected. It was just a few months ago that the US Supreme Court ruled that you can't fire people for being gay for example. And that is just the legal repercussions. There are all sorts of social, religious, and familial circles that will react negatively to a person's true self that might force that person to hide a part of their life.

Ideally we get to a place in the future when this isn't true. However it is true today and failing to recognize it is either of sign of naivety, privilege, or a lack of empathy.

> Some orientations in some jurisdictions are illegal or not legally protected. It was just a few months ago that the US Supreme Court ruled that you can't fire people for being gay for example.

Here are several maps[1] of the US that show the states and counties where it is legal to discriminate against LGBT people in housing, education, healthcare, public accommodations and whether or not hate crimes against them are recognized by the governments as hate crimes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Stat...

> Ideally we get to a place in the future when this isn't true.

You know the Gibson quote "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed"? The corollary is that the present isn't evenly distributed either. The past often lingers well past it's sell-by date.

So even if/when we get to such a place, I don't think the problem will actually go away for a long time, if ever.

Consider that the US is more than two generations past the 1964 civil rights act, and that while, as a country, the US recently elected and even reelected a Black president, there has subsequently been a significant reactionary backlash, to put it mildly, that is still ongoing.

> It was just a few months ago that the US Supreme Court ruled that you can't fire people for being gay for example.

This is to say nothing of the (however unfathomable) possibility of the country taking a 180 and walking this back.

To each their own, you can only control what you say, not how it's interpreted.

Plus I really think people should be able to mature, just because you said something really mean when you were 19, doesn't mean at 39 you're a horrible person. In fact just because you said something really mean at 19, doesn't mean you're a horrible person at 19. But instead of it being a one-off comment at a party, it's now a part of you. I really think this is why so many young adults get so stressed out over social media, you constantly need to create this artificial image of some superhuman who's living a fantastic amazing life. Any misstep you'll lose fans,followers, etc. This makes so many people so miserable.

I know I became much happier after I got rid of my social media, but again to each their own.

As we get more comfortable with the idea that people have decades long fully public histories of inconsequential things, we will also get more comfortable with the idea that a person at 19 is different from the same person at 39.

Rereading my blog entries from 15 years ago, I wouldn't write the same things today, but if someone points at a 2006 blog entry to say something about 2021 me I also expect people won't take them especially seriously.

I think you may be overestimating how much people will care about the time difference. Simply put, it's extra additional context that will almost assuredly have to be put forward as a defense by you, after they have already formed their impression of you.

I suspect such claims will come off as very hollow to most people who have become upset with you. You would probably be questioned about why you had not proactively removed and apologized for your old writings on your own, as soon as you "changed your mind" about the topic. This of course ignores that changes are often slow, and rather unlikely to prompt you to recall every single trace you may have left of your previous thoughts. But that's all squishy context that the internet has thoroughly shown it does not care for, nor even recognize most of the time.

I've been writing publicly on the Internet for >15y, under my real name (www.jefftk.com), and no one has given me a hard time for old posts. Quite the contrary: people have often written to say they found my old posts useful or otherwise interesting.

I do think it might be different if my entire online presence consisted of a handful of posts written a long time ago, but anyone trying to get a sense of me from my writing can tell very quickly that I have a lot of views about a lot of different things.

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu (supposedly)

Your view seems quite naive to me. Not only do times change, with previously acceptable things becoming unspeakable (eg. "retarded", "transsexual", "transvestite"), but with taking out of context and selective quoting you can distort the meaning of almost anything.

Rewatching one of my favorite shows (Arrested Development) was rough. They made "Retard" and "Tranny" jokes left and right.

And the jokes about the Japanese characters as well.

They really leaned on the idea that you can get away with insensitive humor as long as it’s delivered by the crass idiot of the show (generally Gob)

Forget trans jokes - just typical gay jokes were common until the early 2010s.

They're still pretty common, at least on Family Guy reruns.

I would really caution against thinking this way. Parent discusses changing contexts which is exactly right. Things said in polite society 30 years ago are no longer acceptable, there is no reason to think that what we say today in polite society will be acceptable in 30 years time. The thing is even though everyone will have skeletons in their closet that doesn't act as some sort of defense, it will only take the right kind of persistence by someone strongly motivated to blow up your life, it doesn't matter that much that they have skeletons.

It also seems to be very asymmetric, in that the ones most likely to attack are the ones with the least history. It's an asymmetric tool younger folks can use against older folks, and that asymmetry will always exist.

Cancel culture really isn’t about what you think of yourself. It’s about what others think of you.

>After all, you aren’t a historical figure.

easy for you to say

Give it time

This old argument for victim blaming made sense when the UX for publishing content brought to mind submitting a thesis

When the UX is deliberately designed to make is seem more like a free flowing discussion in a bar, the responsibility is no longer sorely with the user.

"Retroactive prosecution" are words that I tell my daughters all the time. Do NOT put your opinions online...period. You have no idea what will be illegal in 30 years and if you were for or against it.

For Americans, if it were legal for you to post something today, your actions are legally protected thanks to Article 1, Section 9, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which prevents “ex post facto” laws, or laws which retroactively change the legal consequences of past actions.

Most countries have some version of this protection, so your legal advice to your daughters is probably incorrect.

Not if your families beliefs are outdated or otherwise bigoted. My older family members are racist. I harbored racist beliefs, and told plenty of racist jokes as a boy. My "opinions", I posted on twitter, as a teenager, would be more than enough to get me expelled from society today. Be it culturally cancelled in the US, or imprisoned in the UK.

Not everyone is raised by good people. Thankfully I had a seismic event (Perma banned from a favorite game after sinking 1000s of hours for being offensive) correct my behavior. I thank my lucky stars it was merely me being banned from a video game that caused me to reconsider how I act, and not something much more serious.

> I harbored racist beliefs, and told plenty of racist jokes as a boy. My "opinions", I posted on twitter, as a teenager, would be more than enough to get me expelled from society today. Be it culturally cancelled in the US, or imprisoned in the UK

that's not a problem with you, but with cancel culture in general.

Fascinating story! Interesting counter-narrative to tropes about video games being harmful to ethics or personal growth. Have you written about your experiences at any length?

It is basically impossible to get imprisoned in the UK for mere verbal racism, and highly racist opinions are posted in the newspapers all the time. Even the "gas the jews" Nazi dog guy was only fined £800 and it didn't stop him standing for election.

"only fined £800" for a joke. Might not be prison, but it's still extremely worrying.

Nah, he put a lot of effort into getting a particularly blatant piece of anti-Semitism heavily publicised.

The use of highly selective and unsubstantiated accusations of anti-Semitism is becoming a problem, but not in this case.

He says he never expected it to get farther than a few friends. It went viral without any promotion on his part. Is there any actual evidence it was all some carefully planned sinister plot to spread a few Hitlery catch phrases for some reason and not something done to annoy his girlfriend and amuse his friends or are you making a judgement based on something other than evidence?

> It went viral without any promotion on his part

How many youtube subscribers did he have at the point he posted it?

He subsequently turned it into an "edgy" comedy career, career in politics, and ~1m youtube subscribers across his various channels. Pretty good return on investment.

> spread a few Hitlery catch phrases for some reason

This not an argument in his favor.

> How many youtube subscribers did he have at the point he posted it?

I looked it up. He had all of 400 subscribers when the video was uploaded. He clearly wasn't trying to leverage his massive youtube fanbase at the time. His girlfriend testified in court that her boyfriend wasn't racist. They were both caught off guard by the video's popularity and the response it got from authorities.

She said "I know what kind of person he is. It is just not a very nice thing to say obviously. I didn't think about it being anything other than him annoying me, I didn't think it would have the effect that it did."

> He subsequently turned it into an "edgy" comedy career, career in politics, and ~1m youtube subscribers across his various channels. Pretty good return on investment.

I mean, on one hand he's got more youtube subscribers than ever, but on the other he lost his job and will struggle to get hired for the rest of his life because people will assume he's a racist because of a joke... I'm not sure I'd call that a win exactly, but I can't blame him from trying to make the best of the situation any way that he can. He seems genuinely interested in fighting against what happened to him so that it doesn't happen to others.

> This not an argument in his favor.

That was your theory, although I still can't imagine what you thought the end goal there was. He goes through all that trouble to manufacture and promote a viral video with a couple seconds of hitler in it but for what exactly? If he were a secret nazi and this was all some kind of master plan what is the pay off here?

If you're really without any evidence that the video wasn't just a joke that people took too seriously, why have you accused him of being a racist with a nefarious plan? What kind of evidence do you think a person should have before they make a claim like that about another person?

I think you're not quite getting bikeshaving's point. Certainly in the US, you can't be jailed for past behavior even if it's outlawed now. It seems like Great Britain isn't quite as absolute, but the European Convention on Human Rights bans it explicitly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R...

I also think "expelled from society" is a touch dramatic. As best I can tell, not a single famous racist has starved to death, or even been forced back to subsistence agriculture. I think the most extreme penalty I've seen is having to change jobs/industries, or perhaps losing some friends.

So your standard for whether something is serious is whether someone literally dies as a direct result of it?

For most of us, losing your career and all or almost all your friends is kind of a big deal.

People have committed suicide over this.

Try applying your standards to things you believe in some time. "He says he was a victim of racist discrimination? Well, he still seems to be alive and fed, and has stable employment at Walmart. So that's a touch dramatic."

That is not my standard for "serious". But my standard for "expelled from society" is actually that they be expelled from society.

I agree that the social penalties for racism can be serious. Although I look forward to you naming 3 people who because of teenage postings lost their "career and all or almost all [their] friends", because again I think you're being hyperbolic in a way that undermines your point.

However, I also think that racism is serious. Perhaps this seems crazy to you, but I'm much more concerned with the many lives destroyed by racism (very much including actual murder) than I am with the social consequences racists (very rarely) experience.

You're focusing on a turn of phrase used by an earlier poster in order to ignore the larger discussion. There is no value in litigating the exact phrase "expelled from society". Whatever you want to call it, the point is that lives get ruined and people commit suicide over things that don't reflect who they are.

Demanding evidence of ruined lives for 'teenage postings' is again, an arbitary limitation that doesn't make sense given that we are talking about things that will be happening in the future, not things that happened in the past. We need to wait for social mores to change enough since teenage postings even started existing around 10-15 years ago.

However despite you deliberately trying to set a standard that makes no sense given the topic, I Googled for 5 minutes and satisfied it anyway:

Teenage girl killed herself amid fears she would be branded racist over joke photo she sent friends, inquest hears

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/28/teenage-girl-kil...

White teen who posted racist video of black HS classmate eating chicken could face criminal charges

[1] https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/white-teen-made-ra...

Teen commits suicide after cyberbullies share explicit messages outing him as bisexual

[2] https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/10/01/teen-commits-sui...

Two of these kids actually died, which I think is even more than losing their "career and all or almost all [their] friends".

Nobody is arguing for racism. What you're wrong about is the poo-poohing the threat that the combination of shifting social mores, eternally-recorded online remarks, and vindicitive power create.

Implicitly you seem to be suggesting that it's okay if some 'racists' have their lives ruined, since the cause is so just and important. Looking at the stories of these kids above dying - do those stories make you think anything different?

Are they acceptable losses, or did they deserve it? Or is there a problem here to fix?

You probably think of yourself as an empathetic person. So try expanding your empathy to more people.

Perhaps you've had the privilege of always believing only things that align 100% with the views of the powerful. You seem to be a wealthy San Francisco leftist, so I can see how you would live under the basic belief that "if power is suppressing it, it must be bad".

Perhaps you think there is a clean simple line between Good People and Those Evil Nazis Who Deserve What They Get. There is not. Humans are complex.

However, try to conceive that someone could be both dissident and not-evil at the same time. If you need to, you can imagine living in another society where the power actually disagrees with you. What then?

And please recognize that your orthodoxy may change. Maybe you'll change your views, or society will. Then you'll be the "racist", or "Nazi", or "communist", or "kaffir", or "heretic", or "reactionary", or whatever label they're using in 30 years.

I am not the one who set the "expelled from society" standard. My point was that it was dramatic. If you are truly interested in a healthy "larger discussion" you'll hopefully agree that turning down the rhetorical temperature makes it easy to have a good discussion that gets at the truth.

Of course, given that you've decided to spend multiple paragraphs in a personal fantasy building a very poor straw man of me and my views, I think that a good discussion is not really your goal here.

>I am not the one who set the "expelled from society" standard.

Yes you are. I said "serious" and you yourself specifically pulled it back to the literal interpretation of "expelled from society". Another poster used those words casually; you're the one who decided that their literal intepretation was the "standard".

On the rest, this just feels like you're pointing at my tone as an excuse to avoid acknowledging or engaging any of the questions I brought up.

I said "Perhaps you believe X". This isn't building a strawman, it's trying to get to the heart of the beliefs underlying the issue. If you believe something totally different than X it'd be great if you would explain it.

A good discussion is my goal. Is it yours? You smugly tried to shut me down with a demand for news stories that you thought couldn't be satisfied. And now you're refusing to talk - with the excuse that you don't think I want to talk.

In any case, I'd welcome a meaningful response that actually addresses my points and the larger discussion.

Bottom line: You seem to think that it's only very rarely that a few terrible racists get socially punished this way, implying you think the situation is okay. I showed you that it's not, it's kids and normal people, and people are dying. What's your reponse to this new information?

One thing I'd really like HN readers to understand is that UK newspapers, even supposedly respectable ones like the Telegraph, are FUCKING GARBAGE.

Please stop posting links to them because they're often inaccurate, sometimes deliberately so.

Phoebe Connop, the girl who died, was British so I think it's kind of reasonable to post British papers about it. But here are some non-British ones if you really want.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/uk-teenager-phoebe-connop-hanged-h...

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/school...

While this is technically correct from legal standpoint, the kernel of truth is in there. (Il)legality doesn't matter much compared to consequences. Consequences matter a lot, and in that case his advice is perfectly sound.

That one "joke" you made when you were sixteen might render you unemployable by 2040. People evolve, and their earlier marks on earth vanish. Before social media even the worst could re-make themselves into something better, now even the best have their worst moments permanently recorded.

The hope would be that, as more and more people are caught up in this sort of thing, we'd become more accepting of personal growth, as a society. This hasn't happened yet. Hopefully this is just a growing pain. But I can definitely see why people wouldn't want to take a chance, given the stakes!

Just because you're protected from the government doesn't mean that the mob won't get you. Take for example, the founder of Mozilla. Apparently a number of years ago he donated a thousand dollars to a political organization that lobbied for some anti-LGBT laws. The public outrage forced him to resign.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...

I think gp may be going for "persecution" rather than "prosecution", i.e. jury of public opinion rather than jury in a courtroom.

Legally yes, but call it retroactive cancelation then... Something that is legal today but might be shameful or even ilegal in 30 years.

An example: a young person paints his face in black before going to a party. Decades later, black face is a thing and people find out about that party and it's now a shit show for the guy that is a prime minister of a country. There's no legal prosecution, but cancelation is even harder to deal with.

you can never predict how old laws would work with modern systems - for example, in Russia you also have this rule, but after the mass persecution and censorship started the judges ruled that a post on social media, even one made before the new laws were written, is still perfect ground for conviction because it is still accessible at the time of arrest. So, how many tweets do people have? Are you going to closely follow new laws and comb through all of your post history on the entire internet every time a new law is passed?

Different perspective. It's not legal advice. It's read history advice...when governments change people generally go to prison or worse for things that were legal under the previous government. Since data is mobile and global there is good chance that if a government goes away the data won't.

I'm thinking McCarthyism as an example makes it good advice either way.

Also for Americans, parallel investigation is a thing.

> Also for Americans, parallel investigation is a thing.

Usually called parallel construction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

there is no guarantee that the constitution will be the same in 30 years.

“anonymous” accounts aren’t even that anonymous...

Post a few times and just with your text (no IP address or anything), I can pretty accurately determine who you are:

https://twitter.com/austingwalters/status/104189476543920128...

Depends on population size, but HN (for instance) is small enough.

Ha, I did something similar to Quora [1] back in 2014/15-ish while the population size was still small as well.

Currently working on using similar tech to match would-be authors with the publishers that most commonly sign book deals in their style, plus a few other projects. Fun tech, but also lots of interesting potential!

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-vulnerable-are-Quora-answers-to-au...

I don't think it's all that bad.

Forgettability certainly isn't something we have in day to day interactions with those around us, our friends, coworkers, nor our neighbors. We tend to pay dearly in our local social circles for the sort of behavior that we tempt ourselves with online. People just stop spending time with us when we can't get along. You have skin in the game.

If there's something different about the internet, it's that it compels so many of us to say regretful things that we want to delete.

> It's incredible how our online activities became permanent, no matter how much we try to erase the parts we don't like

I'm having the opposite realization lately. This tech trope of permanence isn't actually happening.

For instance, I used to be able to search some of my unique internet/gaming aliases 15 years ago and get thousands of results as I was a big forum poster back then and those hits showed up. Now I get three hits across the whole internet. Things die and nobody saves it. Why would they?

Then you look at Archive.org, the main presence I can think of that's aiming for long term records, and they have breadth, like website homepages going back weekly for a decade, but they rarely have evidence of that controversial deleted tweet from a week ago. Quickly, all people have are screenshots and then it fizzles out.

Finally, to my eyes, the only issue with permanence of things we've said in the past, if it exists, isn't with the permanence itself but because modern culture gives very few of us a way back from something unsavory (by someone's standard) that we once uttered.

Just hours ago, I had posts shadow removed from r/nba, ya sports. All well within rules, but not acceptable for whatever reason, and that's their right(maybe should only be for staff not sub mods though to shadow,) but it sucks. Makes a platform even if it's the only game in town pretty unusable. When I commented in said thread that they were shadow banning many comments, I got the 2 day ban :) I've commented before here, that shadow banning is very underhanded even if effective and especially infuriating when your content is fine which are most of my experiences. So then at some point you have to wonder about what even gets out vs what all is mined, and used however. Just populate the platforms fully with bots and marketeers I guess and let them talk amongst themselves. Maybe we can give those bots and marketers the right to vote as an extension of corporate personhood. The interesting thing is how you have zero recourse, not to say you should or have any right, but you were likely in the middle a discussion with another person/people and you are now to look the fool with removed content and no ability to respond. Shady business, but luckily sports in this case.

update nobody wants: I took other's advice and contacted the mods and reported like the private message suggests. Somehow that was "evading the ban" which got me a permanent site-wide ban. I never logged in to any other account or posted on the banned one in the sub banned from. It makes no sense. Did they just take a sub mods false word on this? I would have thought that's something determined in code pretty easily. I'll respect this though and not use their service, and talk truthfully about them to anyone who will listen. I understand they are a ycombinator company, so please don't ban me here too for sports wrongthink and being critical of a once really good platform.

And then there's the various anonymous imageboards where no registration is required and names are not only optional but actively discouraged. While discussion is not always constructive, it certainly represents a wider spectrum of thoughts and is therefore inherently more interesting.

Traditionally, threads and posts are ephemeral: old ones get deleted as new ones are created. There are automatic archiving services out there though.

This is one reason that I create new account on each service every few months or until my cookies expire. I never remember or save passwords.

This isn't a new problem. "The internet is forever" is a adage I grew up with several decades ago. Everyone knows that if you post it on the internet, it can be copied and used against you.

What is new are the giant companies that profit greatly from encouraging users to deanonymize themselves and post compromising details on the internet, so those details can be mined and used for targeted advertising. I look at the adults who, just two decades ago, warned each other about what they put on the internet, and they're now on Facebook leaking nearly every detail about themselves and their private lives to the internet.

And yet, whenever I want to refer back to a Reddit comment I made in the past, I can never find it even with these tools.

The trick is to make every account a throwaway and not link anything together.

kkjkg

jk