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Comment by offtop5 | Hacker News Reader

Well said, I stopped using Reddit and Twitter because I realized a few things.

First arguing with other angry people all day has never accomplished anything.

Second no matter what you say, in 10 or 20 years it might be absurdly offensive and that can destroy your entire life. The dumbest thing you ever said at 19 is a part of your identity even when you're 42. But that only applies to the internet. If I said something really horrible to you at a bar, the worst that will happen is I'll probably just get kicked out.

I say that on Twitter, you can destroy my career for the rest of my life

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It does seem like people ought to just think more about the permanence of what we put online and act accordingly. There is no way to guarantee ephemerality for anything you send to another person online. They can always record or whatever in some way. We have to act like this stuff is entered into the permanent record and be OK with that. There is nothing we can do to 100% prevent stuff being recorded somewhere.

I agree we’d all be better off not judged on our younger attempts at “edginess” and stuff we said while figuring out who we are in our teens. But at a certain point we have to accept that posting anything online anywhere is _publishing_ and if you _published_ a racist letter to the editor at 19, instead of said something offensive at a party, there is a different judgement there & it’s justified.

I do think in time the answer “I’ve grown a lot since that time and regret those tweets” is going to become more acceptable & people will be judged more on recent stuff they say and do.

I wonder if we aren't at a bit of a unique moment in that:

1. Norms around speech have changed quite a bit in a fairly short amount of time.

2. For the first time, we have a group of adults who were largely on the internet as young people.

I think kids today are being raised to be much more cognizant of what they post online, (and what they say in general) so we just had this window from like 96-2015 or so where people where encouraged to post just about anything casually to the internet, and yet south-park style offensive comments were still ok for many kids.

Obviously there's always going to be some edgy-kids saying stupid stuff, and I daresay _most_ young people will say something regrettable if you record them for long enough, but this might be a really large cohort.

None of my social media accounts can be used to identify me. Even when young and stupid I never used my real name on any account. If you're not educated and smart enough to realize what internet is and to protect yourself well then you really shouldn't be on internet. I can't fathom why people connect their social media accounts to their real identity. Is it some kind of ego/narcissism thing? I've never felt the need to make sure my real identity gets credit for doing good things like helping people going through stuff to being a developer member on open source projects.

It would be interesting if someone researched that need. Would be a good addition to OPSEC education.

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