6 ms·

Oh boy, thank God people my age don't have to worry about the incredibly embarrassing things we did, or embarrassing fanfiction we wrote, preserved publicly for

Oh boy, thank God people my age don't have to worry about the incredibly embarrassing things we did, or embarrassing fanfiction we wrote, preserved publicly forever. Gen Z, woooooo. Woo. I'm doomed.

Polylactic_acid 6y ago
I'm Gen Z too and for my whole life the advice has been "Don't put your real info on the internet". The only thing that comes up when you search my name is my gitlab profile and a technical blog. All of my cringy forum posts still exist but they are all under random usernames and would be very difficult to link back to me.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    Yes I'm quite aware that if governments were after me they could probably dig up this stuff but thats not my concern. I'm focused on random internet users being able to dig up 10 year old posts which would be insanely difficult given how much crap there is on the internet and how much I have changed since then.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      I remember reading corporations crawling the so called "deep web" and even the "dark nets", advertising their capabilities as superior for gathering new insights/intelligence a few years ago. Was just a short blip on my radar, because I haven't seen it mentioned afterwards. Anyways, what can be done probabably will be done, for whichever reason because it's getting cheaper and cheaper. And then the next leak happens. And somewhere on some site like Have I been owned?, or in a torrent there is a comma separated list with many, or even all of your former pseudonyms connected with your current address, social security, drivers license, younameit. Gotcha!
      - Godel_unicode 6y ago
        Who does this kind of wild speculation help?
        nitrogen 6y ago
        It's not speculation, it's basically an open source intelligence tool. I can't recall the name of the company I somehow stumbled upon, but they exist. Palantir, as an example, might be someone who you'd expect to develop commercial tools for intelligence gathering. High frequency traders or other investors also.
        Godel_unicode 6y ago
        It is speculation. They do not exist. You're thinking of Maltego, and it's very far from what is being described. Palantir makes software, not a panopticon for their own use. High frequency trading is entirely unrelated to scrounging the deep dark web for crumbs to stitch together forum accounts. This is a fantasy spurred on by too many dark mirror episodes, nobody does stuff like that for the hell of it. Storing the amount of data we're talking about is expensive. Collecting it is expensive. Processing it is expensive. There's little money to be made with it, but it sounds really good if you don't think too hard about it. It's illuminati conspiracy mumbo jumbo for nerds.
        LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        Chill...
      - nl 6y ago
        This really isn't how this works. Stylometry is a thing, sure. But it's rarely accurate enough to use on bulk archives in an automated way, especially when archives come from different domains (eg, technical vs social writing). It's useful for identifying possible alternate authors plays attributed to Shakespeare[1], but a lot less useful for trying to tie a reddit identity to a github profile. Anyways, what can be done probabably will be done, for whichever reason because it's getting cheaper and cheaper. Crawling and storing is cheap, but analysis is harder. Automated spell checking ("probabably" above not withstanding!) and auto-complete means stylometry is even less useful now. Source: myself - I work in natural language processing, and have talked to people applying these techniques. [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00289/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0028...
  - dumpsterdiver 6y ago
    For any who are interested in witnessing a fictionalized example of applied Stylometry, I highly suggest the Star Wars Thrawn series by Timothy Zahn. Thrawn's specialty is making tactical inferences based on the physical art pieces created by a culture. It's a really interesting read, but don't take my word for it!
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
kibwen 6y ago
My internet coming-of-age was between 2000 and 2008, and I was happy to learn that all the forums I used to frequent are now kaput, with no public archives. It's always a bit of a shame to lose historical documents, but who knows what embarrassing comments I'm now free of forever. (And don't worry, my mortifying preteen Super Mario RPG fanfiction yet survives in personal backups.)
- spydum 6y ago
  Never fear, most of those phpBB and ubb forums got breached and no doubt a database dump survives somewhere on a torrent ;)
- _Qeomash_ 6y ago
  That is very oddly specific. Hello, fellow old school SMRPG fan.
mjayhn 6y ago
Well there's a decent chance you're going to be working for millennial and gen-X'ers nowadays. We're the ones who were hiding all our online lives (still) from our parents. I'm glad my Myspace was deleted to my teenage angst. Point being a lot of us I think are really respective of privacy and the fact that people (even teachers and nurses!) have lives that don't revolve around work.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  Nice to see Gen X mentioned. In the several years, the media has mentioned only Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z. It’s like Gen X is the lost generation.
  - boulos 6y ago
    The Lost Generation were the people who came of age during WW1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Generation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Generation
  - Izkata 6y ago
    Apparently before the name "Generation X" stuck, one of the proposed names was "New Lost Generation".
    - ddingus 6y ago
      Gen X here. Apt
  - Jaruzel 6y ago
    This is something that I've been aware of for a while now. Us (Gen-Xrs) have had a rough time of it; The boomers rode the financial booms and mostly did well, and the millennials are pandered to everywhere you look, whereas we had to suffer more than one financial crash, and the media and retail pretend like we don't exist, so nothing is aligned to our values or desires. Even worse, there's a large chunk of millenials who don't even believe that Gen-X exists, and think that the generation above them are all boomers.
smoe 6y ago
I’m glad not being a teenager these days where everything is constantly photographed and filmed then shared everywhere without consent. At least with my old embarrassing forum posts and such it was me actively sharing it :)
baby 6y ago
I mean if everybody has something to be embarrassed about then nobody really is. But yeah if youtube existed when I was young I would probably be internet famous in a bad way.

Oh boy, thank God people my age don't have to worry about the incredibly embarrassing things we did, or embarrassing fanfiction we wrote, preserved publicly forever. Gen Z, woooooo. Woo. I'm doomed.

Polylactic_acid 6y ago

I'm Gen Z too and for my whole life the advice has been "Don't put your real info on the internet". The only thing that comes up when you search my name is my gitlab profile and a technical blog. All of my cringy forum posts still exist but they are all under random usernames and would be very difficult to link back to me.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  Yes I'm quite aware that if governments were after me they could probably dig up this stuff but thats not my concern. I'm focused on random internet users being able to dig up 10 year old posts which would be insanely difficult given how much crap there is on the internet and how much I have changed since then.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    I remember reading corporations crawling the so called "deep web" and even the "dark nets", advertising their capabilities as superior for gathering new insights/intelligence a few years ago. Was just a short blip on my radar, because I haven't seen it mentioned afterwards. Anyways, what can be done probabably will be done, for whichever reason because it's getting cheaper and cheaper. And then the next leak happens. And somewhere on some site like Have I been owned?, or in a torrent there is a comma separated list with many, or even all of your former pseudonyms connected with your current address, social security, drivers license, younameit. Gotcha!
    - Godel_unicode 6y ago
      Who does this kind of wild speculation help?
      - nitrogen 6y ago
        It's not speculation, it's basically an open source intelligence tool. I can't recall the name of the company I somehow stumbled upon, but they exist. Palantir, as an example, might be someone who you'd expect to develop commercial tools for intelligence gathering. High frequency traders or other investors also.
        Godel_unicode 6y ago
        It is speculation. They do not exist. You're thinking of Maltego, and it's very far from what is being described. Palantir makes software, not a panopticon for their own use. High frequency trading is entirely unrelated to scrounging the deep dark web for crumbs to stitch together forum accounts. This is a fantasy spurred on by too many dark mirror episodes, nobody does stuff like that for the hell of it. Storing the amount of data we're talking about is expensive. Collecting it is expensive. Processing it is expensive. There's little money to be made with it, but it sounds really good if you don't think too hard about it. It's illuminati conspiracy mumbo jumbo for nerds.
        LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        Chill...
    - nl 6y ago
      This really isn't how this works. Stylometry is a thing, sure. But it's rarely accurate enough to use on bulk archives in an automated way, especially when archives come from different domains (eg, technical vs social writing). It's useful for identifying possible alternate authors plays attributed to Shakespeare[1], but a lot less useful for trying to tie a reddit identity to a github profile. Anyways, what can be done probabably will be done, for whichever reason because it's getting cheaper and cheaper. Crawling and storing is cheap, but analysis is harder. Automated spell checking ("probabably" above not withstanding!) and auto-complete means stylometry is even less useful now. Source: myself - I work in natural language processing, and have talked to people applying these techniques. [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00289/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0028...
- dumpsterdiver 6y ago
  For any who are interested in witnessing a fictionalized example of applied Stylometry, I highly suggest the Star Wars Thrawn series by Timothy Zahn. Thrawn's specialty is making tactical inferences based on the physical art pieces created by a culture. It's a really interesting read, but don't take my word for it!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

kibwen 6y ago

My internet coming-of-age was between 2000 and 2008, and I was happy to learn that all the forums I used to frequent are now kaput, with no public archives. It's always a bit of a shame to lose historical documents, but who knows what embarrassing comments I'm now free of forever. (And don't worry, my mortifying preteen Super Mario RPG fanfiction yet survives in personal backups.)

spydum 6y ago
Never fear, most of those phpBB and ubb forums got breached and no doubt a database dump survives somewhere on a torrent ;)
_Qeomash_ 6y ago
That is very oddly specific. Hello, fellow old school SMRPG fan.

mjayhn 6y ago

Well there's a decent chance you're going to be working for millennial and gen-X'ers nowadays. We're the ones who were hiding all our online lives (still) from our parents. I'm glad my Myspace was deleted to my teenage angst. Point being a lot of us I think are really respective of privacy and the fact that people (even teachers and nurses!) have lives that don't revolve around work.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
Nice to see Gen X mentioned. In the several years, the media has mentioned only Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z. It’s like Gen X is the lost generation.
- boulos 6y ago
  The Lost Generation were the people who came of age during WW1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Generation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Generation
- Izkata 6y ago
  Apparently before the name "Generation X" stuck, one of the proposed names was "New Lost Generation".
  - ddingus 6y ago
    Gen X here. Apt
- Jaruzel 6y ago
  This is something that I've been aware of for a while now. Us (Gen-Xrs) have had a rough time of it; The boomers rode the financial booms and mostly did well, and the millennials are pandered to everywhere you look, whereas we had to suffer more than one financial crash, and the media and retail pretend like we don't exist, so nothing is aligned to our values or desires. Even worse, there's a large chunk of millenials who don't even believe that Gen-X exists, and think that the generation above them are all boomers.

smoe 6y ago

I’m glad not being a teenager these days where everything is constantly photographed and filmed then shared everywhere without consent. At least with my old embarrassing forum posts and such it was me actively sharing it :)

baby 6y ago

I mean if everybody has something to be embarrassed about then nobody really is. But yeah if youtube existed when I was young I would probably be internet famous in a bad way.