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Comment by offtop5 | 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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

"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.

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

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

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)

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

easy for you to say

Give it time

>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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

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.

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