I was a user of K5 and I don't think anyone there viewed it as "ephemeral communication". If they thought so, it seems as though the joke's sort of on them, gi

I was a user of K5 and I don't think anyone there viewed it as "ephemeral communication". If they thought so, it seems as though the joke's sort of on them, given that the site stayed operational for almost 17 years. I can forgive that sort of attitude among the early users of Usenet, because there was a long period during which it was just technically infeasible to have a permanent archive of everything (and it's still kinda true, if you count binaries groups; most Usenet providers don't keep everything forever). But that was definitely not the case by the time K5 came around. The site's culture, at least IMO, was that if you really embarrassed yourself your way out was by ditching your pseudonym and starting over (or by saying the dumb thing under a throwaway account to begin with, which was perhaps too easy on K5). There's perhaps some argument to be made that forums that require real-name registration ought to allow comments to either be deleted (bad) or anonymized (probably better) on request, to allow people to move away from past statements. But I don't know if that's ever really been a reasonable expectation on a pseudonymous forum, at least of the non-toy/non-amateur variety.