> They don't want their daily utterances to be a matter of record.
Experience being stalked and harassed online for years and you'll hate it as well. Imagine in your 30s having your job threatened because you made a dumb post when you were a teenager, and no one will ever let it go or accept that people change.
Many people are uninteresting, and never have this experience. Celebrities have large support networks and agents. For anyone caught between the two extremes, this can really break people who have no one to turn to and no support when they end up targeted.
> Ephemerality mitigates that, providing the expression and connection of social media without the stakes.
It's also a lie and setting people up for disaster. Nothing will stop stalkers from crawling stories with archive.is or even just taking screenshots. Nothing you put online is ephemeral, unless it's too uninteresting to be worth saving. Stalkers will write bots to scrape your Twitter stories, your Discord deleted messages and on and on, and then peruse the results at their leisure for juicy content to twist and distort.
Google currently OCRs text in screenshots posted to stalking websites to tie back to you in search results. And those websites rank like you wouldn't believe. Once Google gets their hands on it, forget it. You'll never outlive it.
> Nothing will stop stalkers from crawling stories with archive.is or even just taking screenshots.
That assumes many things, the first being that someone thinks you're important enough to archive, and that you were important enough to archive long ago. This is exceedingly rare for that middle ground you're discussing.
You're right in that anything CAN be saved if its online and someone is motivated enough, but the added resistance ephemerality adds protects most people. You're talking a very narrow use case, and in that case it should be obvious your internet world is public realm. All of these points you're making rely on extreme stalking already happening. Not only stalking, but archiving of that stalking.
For the vast majority of people and the vast majority of their posts, ephemeral content actually does disappear. Especially on mobile platforms that aren't really archived like the web is. Ephemerality doesn't save you from crossing lines (plenty of teens have gotten in trouble over Snapchat messages in various forms), but the generally mundane harmless stuff goes away and can never be later used to misconstrue or define who you are.
> That assumes many things, the first being that someone thinks you're important enough to archive, and that you were important enough to archive long ago. This is exceedingly rare for that middle ground you're discussing.
What is to stop someone from writing a crawler that goes around and captures Twitter stories for every user into a permanent archive that they make available online in a few years or sell to stalkers? That would be an extremely valuable pool of content.
Just think of how much money you could make if you had 2020 dirt on a major political candidate in 2040. Maybe you know their secret fetish, their racist tirade, their thoughts on a controverisal subject, something the media would devour.
> All of these points you're making rely on extreme stalking already happening. Not only stalking, but archiving of that stalking.
It's a lot more common than you think, and nowadays they have Cloudflare to protect them so they're incredibly resilient. I was blinded to it as well.
The problem with this line of thinking is that you're only an uninteresting target until suddenly you're not. It just takes one crazy person coming across you to radically change your life. That new app or service you developed may take off overnight before you know it. Or it may happen so slowly that you don't realize that the rules have changed for you and you need to start being much more discreet.
The way these sites work is they build up dossiers before they go public with them. You'll think you are not being targeted for months, and then all of a sudden you get it all dumped on the web at once.
These kinds of ephemerality promises are dangerous, even if you are lucky enough to never be targeted.
To my mind, if you're posting something publicly (or even semi-publicly but you can't vouch personally for everyone who has access), stop and think. Would you mind if the content you're posting, with your real name attached, were posted on every wall in your city, and on the front page of every newspaper?
If you'd feel uncomfortable, don't post it publicly.
> Nothing will stop stalkers from crawling stories with archive.is or even just taking screenshots.
What stops this is not being interesting at the time you post. So if you're some random high school kid in 2020 who posts something stupid, nobody is going to obsessively catalog what you say in case you become an NFL quarterback or a congressperson in 2030.
That was true of the old internet, and might possibly be true still, but not for long.
Nowadays we have archive.org and people who wish to datamine and hoard things. I can absolutely see someone coming out with a search interface to browse through peoples' Twitter stories that they've secretly been archiving for years with a small bot scraper. The guy running archive.is has been spending thousands of dollars a month to run it for ostensibly no reason whatsoever.
The rules have changed and the stakes have escalated. I think the world will wise up and we'll start seeing greater opsec efforts around personal anonymity. People will start acting online like they do in real life in any situation that they even remotely care about (even under their pseudonyms), and anonymous communities will continue to grow and thrive as the outlet for all of the hatred that people harbor.
Not even really true of the old internet, depending how far back you want to go. Remember there are entire archives of Geocities, and everyone was frantically archiving the entire Yahoo Groups. There was the Dejanews archive of Usenet, and so on.
The idea that "I'm not important enough" needs to disappear. It doesn't matter if you're important or not to automated bots.
Experience being stalked and harassed online for years and you'll hate it as well. Imagine in your 30s having your job threatened because you made a dumb post when you were a teenager, and no one will ever let it go or accept that people change.
Many people are uninteresting, and never have this experience. Celebrities have large support networks and agents. For anyone caught between the two extremes, this can really break people who have no one to turn to and no support when they end up targeted.
> Ephemerality mitigates that, providing the expression and connection of social media without the stakes.
It's also a lie and setting people up for disaster. Nothing will stop stalkers from crawling stories with archive.is or even just taking screenshots. Nothing you put online is ephemeral, unless it's too uninteresting to be worth saving. Stalkers will write bots to scrape your Twitter stories, your Discord deleted messages and on and on, and then peruse the results at their leisure for juicy content to twist and distort.
Google currently OCRs text in screenshots posted to stalking websites to tie back to you in search results. And those websites rank like you wouldn't believe. Once Google gets their hands on it, forget it. You'll never outlive it.