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Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

This opinion always reads to me as: "I want to be able to speak in public without fear of consequence." That's never been the case and I don't know why anybody thinks it ever has. Digital technology created infallible memory, to be sure, but memory isn't a new thing.

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The bigger issue is most of us said/did dumb shit 20+ years ago, but luckily there was no widespread put everything on the internet movement so we get judged by how we are now, not how we was as kids. While I agree people should be held responsible for things they say/do, I also think that at this exact moment in history, people give little to no thought to the idea that people change/grow as they age. Just look at Jenna Marbles on YouTube, she's in self exile because she wore too much fake tan in a video from 10 years ago.

Agreed! I don’t even know stuff is wrong or insensitive sometimes. Someone recently told me not to say the word “Jew.” I wasn’t saying it in a bad way - we were discussing a friend who is Jewish, but I didn’t know just saying the word “Jew” could possibly be taken badly.

When I was younger, I said something about a “Jap.” I honestly was just trying to take a shortcut by saying Jap instead of the full “Japanese” like saying burger instead of hamburger. I got a shock when I was told that was bad.

> The bigger issue is most of us said/did dumb shit 20+ years ago, but luckily there was no widespread put everything on the internet movement

Well, I found some of my conversations on BBSs or Fidonet from over 25 years ago are now on the Web...

So what you say was right as long as it was indeed just 'said', but as soon as something was written and/or recorded somewhere, it may resurface on the Internet one-day, even though it was never intended to appear on the Internet.

This is an incredibly toxic way to think about conversation.

Thinking before I speak and having consideration for how my words might be interpreted in the future is "toxic"? Words you say to others have consequences. It makes sense to take that into consideration.

That seems pragmatic and polite to me.

The ability to broadcast some random thought you have to everyone on the planet, publicly archived and attached to your name, for all of eternity, is a new ability. We've never had it before, and we're discovering the consequences of that. I think it's reasonable to have some disagreement about how that ability should be handled without reducing that disagreement to whether or not words have consequences (obviously they do).

I don't think there is any useful conversation to be had re: "forgetting" that public data. It's a matter of fact. Once data is public it's public. There no magical "forgettable" bits for special classes of digital data.

Deleting copies pof data from public and quasi-public forums isn't practically possible, short of taking away everybody's general purpose computer. I don't think that's going to happen (and I certainly wouldn't want it to).

I think it's just a world we have to live with. I don't particularly like it, but I don't have a choice in the matter.

The trouble with that is that the old tweets from an immature brain are amplified beyond their original context, intentionally, so that they hurt a lot of people, and then a punishment is applied as if the author had just deliberately blasted the world with their remark yesterday. People are using the private conversation analogy because so many teens just meant to write to a few friends or use it as a sort of diary. To make them responsible not only for their youthful immaturity their whole life, but for any mental health struggles, and for not having a perfect understanding of the nature of the service, is cruel and non-productive social behavior from the adults.

You’re having trouble understanding because you are only imagining yourself making these decisions, and you are a fully grown adult who handles life’s pressures well and you understand Twitter from a product perspective. You will need to consider how others use the service to understand why expecting perfect behavior across every person’s entire life is unwise collective behavior.

Yours and so many other posts here seem like an argument for now allowing children to use these kinds of services.

It also sounds like parenting needs to take into account this new reality. To the extent that it applies in my household I know my wife and I are.

I’m neutral on a legal intervention but I certainly agree parents should heavily educate and be restrictive until enough has sunk in. We do similarly with our family.

My main concern here is to explain why a young person’s use should not be treated like the use of a sophisticated social media user who is older and more mature.

In this context, we're specifically talking about young people, who are _literally not yet wired_ to properly evaluate consequences. It doesn't mean they get a pass for anything, but surely at some point in your life you've said/done something that wouldn't pass with modern standards, particularly if it can be cherry picked to the word.

The "words have consequences" line of thinking doesn't provide a rationale for the consequences. It is simply a way of avoiding critical thinking about harsh reactions to unpopular statements. You might as well say, "all fallout is good fallout."

Quoting Mohandas Gandhi: "Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err and even to sin. If God Almighty has given the humblest of His creatures the freedom to err, it passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human Beings of that precious right."

Most of those words that have "consequences" nowadays aren't unlawful or even particularly malicious, and some are in fact just jokes and statements of opinion that go against the grain of the zeitgeist. Often, the reaction is more damaging than the words themselves.

It makes me sad just to think about a world where every pub conversation and class discussion I've ever had was archived for posterity. That sounds like misery to me.

On one hand, that's true. On the other hand, 10 years down the road, all you have is 140 characters, and you lose the whole context in which something was written. You know, "Qu'on me donne 6 lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre" and all that.

Everyone is triggered by different things. Your bureaucratic style "words have consequences" sends shivers down the spines of many people who grew up in the Eastern block.

We know the language that precedes cancellations by now.

Why? If what's being held against you later is so awful that it can't be explained away with "I was immature"/"I was angry in the heat of the moment"/"I have since learned that that's not correct," then it must have been a pretty toxic thing to say in public.

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