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Stuff like this makes our online presence very creepy. More than I personally used to think anyway. Even on platforms where people usually think of their accoun

Stuff like this makes our online presence very creepy. More than I personally used to think anyway. Even on platforms where people usually think of their accounts as "throwaway" or "anonymous". Take Reddit. Besides the well-known archive sites that keep removed/deleted content (removeddit, ceddit, etc), there is this cool service (pushshift) that offers all that and more. One interesting and relevant feature of this tool is the ability to look up all content by a specific author/username. You just put the name there, and lo and behold, everything this person ever posted is right there; even if it's deleted, or removed. If you do a quick test using this tool, you'll soon see the amount of people who thought their deleted content couldn't be tied back to them, continuing to use their usernames like nothing happened. The deleted content can sometimes be incredibly sensitive information that the person posted by mistake (or when looking for advice, having a rant about something, etc). It sometimes includes very specific details that may uniquely identify a person. And most users aren't aware of any of this. And it's available even if you delete your account. Someone just has to know that you used this username once upon a time. The tool eventually removed this option from the UI (but it's still available through their API). The thread where this removal was announced is interesting and reveals how useful this tool was to some users on Reddit for combating spam/harassment (or even to find their own content), but nevertheless this dark side of it is there. As you might expect, someone slapped a new UI on that very tool, and that feature is readily available today, few google searches away. When I saw this tool, it really reminded me of that. It's incredible how our online activities became permanent, no matter how much we try to erase the parts we don't like (or don't want to be public).

offtop5 6y ago
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.
- dangus 6y ago
  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.
  - offtop5 6y ago
    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.
    - jefftk 6y ago
      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.
beauzero 6y ago
"Retroactive prosecution" are words that I tell my daughters all the time. Do NOT put your opinions online...period. You have no idea what will be illegal in 30 years and if you were for or against it.
- bikeshaving 6y ago
  For Americans, if it were legal for you to post something today, your actions are legally protected thanks to Article 1, Section 9, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which prevents “ex post facto” laws, or laws which retroactively change the legal consequences of past actions. Most countries have some version of this protection, so your legal advice to your daughters is probably incorrect.
  - interviewer0000 6y ago
    Not if your families beliefs are outdated or otherwise bigoted. My older family members are racist. I harbored racist beliefs, and told plenty of racist jokes as a boy. My "opinions", I posted on twitter, as a teenager, would be more than enough to get me expelled from society today. Be it culturally cancelled in the US, or imprisoned in the UK. Not everyone is raised by good people. Thankfully I had a seismic event (Perma banned from a favorite game after sinking 1000s of hours for being offensive) correct my behavior. I thank my lucky stars it was merely me being banned from a video game that caused me to reconsider how I act, and not something much more serious.
    - chrisweekly 6y ago
      Fascinating story! Interesting counter-narrative to tropes about video games being harmful to ethics or personal growth. Have you written about your experiences at any length?
    - wpietri 6y ago
      I think you're not quite getting bikeshaving's point. Certainly in the US, you can't be jailed for past behavior even if it's outlawed now. It seems like Great Britain isn't quite as absolute, but the European Convention on Human Rights bans it explicitly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_Rights#Article_7_%E2%80%93_retroactivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R... I also think "expelled from society" is a touch dramatic. As best I can tell, not a single famous racist has starved to death, or even been forced back to subsistence agriculture. I think the most extreme penalty I've seen is having to change jobs/industries, or perhaps losing some friends.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
simplestman 6y ago
This is one reason that I create new account on each service every few months or until my cookies expire. I never remember or save passwords.
lettergram 6y ago
“anonymous” accounts aren’t even that anonymous... Post a few times and just with your text (no IP address or anything), I can pretty accurately determine who you are: https://twitter.com/austingwalters/status/1041894765439201281?s=21 https://twitter.com/austingwalters/status/104189476543920128... Depends on population size, but HN (for instance) is small enough.
- drusepth 6y ago
  Ha, I did something similar to Quora [1] back in 2014/15-ish while the population size was still small as well. Currently working on using similar tech to match would-be authors with the publishers that most commonly sign book deals in their style, plus a few other projects. Fun tech, but also lots of interesting potential! [1] https://www.quora.com/How-vulnerable-are-Quora-answers-to-automated-writing-style-analysis https://www.quora.com/How-vulnerable-are-Quora-answers-to-au...
hombre_fatal 6y ago
kkjkg jk
matheusmoreira 6y ago
And then there's the various anonymous imageboards where no registration is required and names are not only optional but actively discouraged. While discussion is not always constructive, it certainly represents a wider spectrum of thoughts and is therefore inherently more interesting. Traditionally, threads and posts are ephemeral: old ones get deleted as new ones are created. There are automatic archiving services out there though.
anothernewdude 6y ago
The trick is to make every account a throwaway and not link anything together.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
I don't think it's all that bad. Forgettability certainly isn't something we have in day to day interactions with those around us, our friends, coworkers, nor our neighbors. We tend to pay dearly in our local social circles for the sort of behavior that we tempt ourselves with online. People just stop spending time with us when we can't get along. You have skin in the game. If there's something different about the internet, it's that it compels so many of us to say regretful things that we want to delete. > It's incredible how our online activities became permanent, no matter how much we try to erase the parts we don't like I'm having the opposite realization lately. This tech trope of permanence isn't actually happening. For instance, I used to be able to search some of my unique internet/gaming aliases 15 years ago and get thousands of results as I was a big forum poster back then and those hits showed up. Now I get three hits across the whole internet. Things die and nobody saves it. Why would they? Then you look at Archive.org, the main presence I can think of that's aiming for long term records, and they have breadth, like website homepages going back weekly for a decade, but they rarely have evidence of that controversial deleted tweet from a week ago. Quickly, all people have are screenshots and then it fizzles out. Finally, to my eyes, the only issue with permanence of things we've said in the past, if it exists, isn't with the permanence itself but because modern culture gives very few of us a way back from something unsavory (by someone's standard) that we once uttered.
tim44 6y ago
Just hours ago, I had posts shadow removed from r/nba, ya sports. All well within rules, but not acceptable for whatever reason, and that's their right(maybe should only be for staff not sub mods though to shadow,) but it sucks. Makes a platform even if it's the only game in town pretty unusable. When I commented in said thread that they were shadow banning many comments, I got the 2 day ban :) I've commented before here, that shadow banning is very underhanded even if effective and especially infuriating when your content is fine which are most of my experiences. So then at some point you have to wonder about what even gets out vs what all is mined, and used however. Just populate the platforms fully with bots and marketeers I guess and let them talk amongst themselves. Maybe we can give those bots and marketers the right to vote as an extension of corporate personhood. The interesting thing is how you have zero recourse, not to say you should or have any right, but you were likely in the middle a discussion with another person/people and you are now to look the fool with removed content and no ability to respond. Shady business, but luckily sports in this case.
- tim44 6y ago
  update nobody wants: I took other's advice and contacted the mods and reported like the private message suggests. Somehow that was "evading the ban" which got me a permanent site-wide ban. I never logged in to any other account or posted on the banned one in the sub banned from. It makes no sense. Did they just take a sub mods false word on this? I would have thought that's something determined in code pretty easily. I'll respect this though and not use their service, and talk truthfully about them to anyone who will listen. I understand they are a ycombinator company, so please don't ban me here too for sports wrongthink and being critical of a once really good platform.
OscarCunningham 6y ago
And yet, whenever I want to refer back to a Reddit comment I made in the past, I can never find it even with these tools.
heavyset_go 6y ago
This isn't a new problem. "The internet is forever" is a adage I grew up with several decades ago. Everyone knows that if you post it on the internet, it can be copied and used against you. What is new are the giant companies that profit greatly from encouraging users to deanonymize themselves and post compromising details on the internet, so those details can be mined and used for targeted advertising. I look at the adults who, just two decades ago, warned each other about what they put on the internet, and they're now on Facebook leaking nearly every detail about themselves and their private lives to the internet.

offtop5 6y ago

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.

dangus 6y ago
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.
- offtop5 6y ago
  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.
  - jefftk 6y ago
    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.

beauzero 6y ago

"Retroactive prosecution" are words that I tell my daughters all the time. Do NOT put your opinions online...period. You have no idea what will be illegal in 30 years and if you were for or against it.

bikeshaving 6y ago
For Americans, if it were legal for you to post something today, your actions are legally protected thanks to Article 1, Section 9, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which prevents “ex post facto” laws, or laws which retroactively change the legal consequences of past actions. Most countries have some version of this protection, so your legal advice to your daughters is probably incorrect.
- interviewer0000 6y ago
  Not if your families beliefs are outdated or otherwise bigoted. My older family members are racist. I harbored racist beliefs, and told plenty of racist jokes as a boy. My "opinions", I posted on twitter, as a teenager, would be more than enough to get me expelled from society today. Be it culturally cancelled in the US, or imprisoned in the UK. Not everyone is raised by good people. Thankfully I had a seismic event (Perma banned from a favorite game after sinking 1000s of hours for being offensive) correct my behavior. I thank my lucky stars it was merely me being banned from a video game that caused me to reconsider how I act, and not something much more serious.
  - chrisweekly 6y ago
    Fascinating story! Interesting counter-narrative to tropes about video games being harmful to ethics or personal growth. Have you written about your experiences at any length?
  - wpietri 6y ago
    I think you're not quite getting bikeshaving's point. Certainly in the US, you can't be jailed for past behavior even if it's outlawed now. It seems like Great Britain isn't quite as absolute, but the European Convention on Human Rights bans it explicitly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_Rights#Article_7_%E2%80%93_retroactivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R... I also think "expelled from society" is a touch dramatic. As best I can tell, not a single famous racist has starved to death, or even been forced back to subsistence agriculture. I think the most extreme penalty I've seen is having to change jobs/industries, or perhaps losing some friends.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

simplestman 6y ago

This is one reason that I create new account on each service every few months or until my cookies expire. I never remember or save passwords.

lettergram 6y ago

“anonymous” accounts aren’t even that anonymous... Post a few times and just with your text (no IP address or anything), I can pretty accurately determine who you are: https://twitter.com/austingwalters/status/1041894765439201281?s=21 https://twitter.com/austingwalters/status/104189476543920128... Depends on population size, but HN (for instance) is small enough.

drusepth 6y ago
Ha, I did something similar to Quora [1] back in 2014/15-ish while the population size was still small as well. Currently working on using similar tech to match would-be authors with the publishers that most commonly sign book deals in their style, plus a few other projects. Fun tech, but also lots of interesting potential! [1] https://www.quora.com/How-vulnerable-are-Quora-answers-to-automated-writing-style-analysis https://www.quora.com/How-vulnerable-are-Quora-answers-to-au...

hombre_fatal 6y ago

kkjkg jk

matheusmoreira 6y ago

And then there's the various anonymous imageboards where no registration is required and names are not only optional but actively discouraged. While discussion is not always constructive, it certainly represents a wider spectrum of thoughts and is therefore inherently more interesting. Traditionally, threads and posts are ephemeral: old ones get deleted as new ones are created. There are automatic archiving services out there though.

anothernewdude 6y ago

The trick is to make every account a throwaway and not link anything together.

hombre_fatal 6y ago

I don't think it's all that bad. Forgettability certainly isn't something we have in day to day interactions with those around us, our friends, coworkers, nor our neighbors. We tend to pay dearly in our local social circles for the sort of behavior that we tempt ourselves with online. People just stop spending time with us when we can't get along. You have skin in the game. If there's something different about the internet, it's that it compels so many of us to say regretful things that we want to delete. > It's incredible how our online activities became permanent, no matter how much we try to erase the parts we don't like I'm having the opposite realization lately. This tech trope of permanence isn't actually happening. For instance, I used to be able to search some of my unique internet/gaming aliases 15 years ago and get thousands of results as I was a big forum poster back then and those hits showed up. Now I get three hits across the whole internet. Things die and nobody saves it. Why would they? Then you look at Archive.org, the main presence I can think of that's aiming for long term records, and they have breadth, like website homepages going back weekly for a decade, but they rarely have evidence of that controversial deleted tweet from a week ago. Quickly, all people have are screenshots and then it fizzles out. Finally, to my eyes, the only issue with permanence of things we've said in the past, if it exists, isn't with the permanence itself but because modern culture gives very few of us a way back from something unsavory (by someone's standard) that we once uttered.

tim44 6y ago

Just hours ago, I had posts shadow removed from r/nba, ya sports. All well within rules, but not acceptable for whatever reason, and that's their right(maybe should only be for staff not sub mods though to shadow,) but it sucks. Makes a platform even if it's the only game in town pretty unusable. When I commented in said thread that they were shadow banning many comments, I got the 2 day ban :) I've commented before here, that shadow banning is very underhanded even if effective and especially infuriating when your content is fine which are most of my experiences. So then at some point you have to wonder about what even gets out vs what all is mined, and used however. Just populate the platforms fully with bots and marketeers I guess and let them talk amongst themselves. Maybe we can give those bots and marketers the right to vote as an extension of corporate personhood. The interesting thing is how you have zero recourse, not to say you should or have any right, but you were likely in the middle a discussion with another person/people and you are now to look the fool with removed content and no ability to respond. Shady business, but luckily sports in this case.

tim44 6y ago
update nobody wants: I took other's advice and contacted the mods and reported like the private message suggests. Somehow that was "evading the ban" which got me a permanent site-wide ban. I never logged in to any other account or posted on the banned one in the sub banned from. It makes no sense. Did they just take a sub mods false word on this? I would have thought that's something determined in code pretty easily. I'll respect this though and not use their service, and talk truthfully about them to anyone who will listen. I understand they are a ycombinator company, so please don't ban me here too for sports wrongthink and being critical of a once really good platform.

OscarCunningham 6y ago

And yet, whenever I want to refer back to a Reddit comment I made in the past, I can never find it even with these tools.

heavyset_go 6y ago

This isn't a new problem. "The internet is forever" is a adage I grew up with several decades ago. Everyone knows that if you post it on the internet, it can be copied and used against you. What is new are the giant companies that profit greatly from encouraging users to deanonymize themselves and post compromising details on the internet, so those details can be mined and used for targeted advertising. I look at the adults who, just two decades ago, warned each other about what they put on the internet, and they're now on Facebook leaking nearly every detail about themselves and their private lives to the internet.