I don't understand how people who are into their late 20s and 30s have time for all of this online drama

If you have to work, manage relationships, and have to cook and clean up after yourself, where is the extra time for it?

Not only that, but with what little free time that's left, people would choose to spend it on engaging in online drama instead of doing something actually pleasant

It's one of those things that I thought was funny and entertaining when I was younger, but it just seems kind of dumb to me now. Similar to the digital nomad thing. Maybe I've just gotten boring, idk

It's easy to say that forgetting is an ethical act if you're the perpetrator of things you want people to forget. Reading this article, it seems she once got her jollies making the world a worse place for her political enemies.

She seems to sincerely think that Twitter is bad, but it's not bad because of what she did with it, it's bad because well, you don't always win fights on it and when you attack someone you can get in trouble too and that's really messy and she doesn't want to deal with that. If she didn't want to deal with it, she didn't have to participate; the kind of political activism described in this article is not how most people use Twitter.

I can understand wanting people to forget if you said one or two things years ago and people took them out of context. Or even if you did one misdeed, but it was years ago. This is not, according to her article, why she wants people to forget.

One of the issues with removing traces of yourself online, when identity in the postmodern digital era is almost totally determined by those artifacts or representations of ourselves we publish, is that you are effectively performing an act of digital suicide. With no representations of yourself on the net, you may as well not exist, and people are free to project anything whatsoever unto the tabula rasa of your nonexistent persona.

While this is an excellent Rorshach for exposing the internal biases of others and demonstrating that even the staunchest progressives are also readily capable of misidentifying others or failing to recognize their "self-identification", the issue of not being seen for who one is and constantly "misidentified" also presents its own challenges.

I have never seen so very very many words written to say what sums up to “in hindsight, I wish I hadn’t posted that”.

This book burning vibe is pretty extreme. I wish there were a reliable way for everyone to write pseudonymously. (I don't as a reminder that legal action against an employer could baselessly unprotect the whole team.)

I did some cursory research on how important 'forgetting' is to neural networks. I didn't have conclusive results because I just played with a few ideas, never really making it serious, but the idea has stuck with me as important for a long time now. In a finite space the pigeon hole principle says you eventually must take something out to put something new in so finding algorithms that efficiently forget are likely key to learning. I think this applies to neural networks and, I think, to society as well. You can't preserve every building for history. You can't remember every grievance or act of heroism. Eventually you have to forget to move forward. At least that is the thought.

I don’t care that much that all my past follows me. But the latest trend appears to be to visit my sins upon my children. Given that’s the case, it’s better to appear squeaky clean later on. I’ll CCPA HN and ask them to clean up.

I don't know what's more shocking: tweeting 40,000 times, or going through the deletion process and ending up still thinking you need to keep 6,000 of those tweets.

Conceptually related The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...

I'm happy I got to read this. Sometimes, I feel guilty about spending too much time watching children's shows over the weekend.

Forgetting can be a necessary and empowering act of self-preservation

When I had Twitter many years ago, a friend would retweet lots of bloodsport tweets of the sort this post describes.

I had wondered about how much being involved in this bloodsport impacted the participants.

Interesting read.

> Eventually, trolling right wingers just became who I was. I was good at it—I still laugh at how I got Zuby banned for saying “ok dude” to me and then him writing his most popular song about it

Somehow this person (hope this doesn't get me banned as well) felt that that was ok to put down into words. Twitter brain-rot at its finest, Musk did these people a lot of good when acquiring said company because it has allowed some of them to try and get some sort of normal life back.

HN should allow for post deletion.

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