I find it off-putting making my first non-video related piece in a long time be about this topic. I've been contemplating this subject for a while now. This is similar to a person leaving all of their social media.
After Xanga's demise, I thought about leaving blogging altogether. I created my WordPress account as an alternative placed by Xanga admins to importing archived posts to WordPress. It worked in a way, but posts with images are still linked to Xanga servers, which they were taking down to begin with.
Five years later, I've been more active on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. I have Twitter, snapchat, and trusty old Blogger. I mainly use WordPress and Blogger for cross-posting and sharing my creations on YouTube. Lots of platforms to be creative out there... until you don't feel it anymore.
I don't have a big following. Feedback is appreciated, but that's not what's driving me to create. For every video I make on YouTube or piece I write here, I'm improving and honing my skills. Lately, I just don't have it in me to do these things anymore. It starts to feel like a chore. To put something out there for the principle (this post is an exception cause I really wanted to write this down).
So what would the death of my online presence be like? I know of two ways.
People have done this for privacy reasons, identity theft. Sometimes bullying. Or maybe you're just fed up and realized how you respond and talk to people has completely changed, taking everything as a personal attack, enforcing your authority, etc.
A social media soft reset would be deactivating your Facebook accounts or privatizing all posts and shared media from friends, subscribers, with no updates. You can always go back to a deactivated Facebook account as if you never left. All your private posts are only viewable to you. You simply stop posting and end up being a lurker. With an active account, you still have access to your social media, but you don't comment, leave a like, subscribe, retweet, etc. There are third-party versions of social media apps that completely masks your presence: read receipts, "Seen by" for Instagram stories, etc.
It's not as drastic as a purge, but it's the same idea of minimizing your online presence. Not entirely a death.
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It's really hard to do a complete purge, especially if your online presence is tied to you in real life. There are services online that lets you delete your accounts online. It will find all sites you have access to with all the emails you provide and ask if you want to delete them.
For Twitter or Instagram, if your account is not set to private (or was set to public at some point), chances are your tweets and photos have been crawled through by countless bots, aggregated by third-party sites, hashtags, metadata, and everything else replicated.
As an experiment, try googling your full name or social media username. Scroll past familiar search result and check all search results in subsequent pages. With my username, I found that several of my photos on Flickr have been used in online articles in different states or countries.
Some people have devious-feeling reasons for purging or minimizing their online presence. Which leads us to number three.
This veers more towards conspiracy theory levels, but there are many legitimate reasons for remaining off-the-grid online. Top of all reasons being your privacy. With social engineering, it only takes a few keywords to find out where you live, your phone number, an email address, and your name. The more personal information you have out there linked to various sites (social media, banking, email, websites, etc.) the bigger your online footprint is.
On a grander scale, you could hire a lawyer and use a service to help remove your online presence as much as possible. There will always be remnants of aggregated data obtained by companies (mostly spam) that shared your info, but search results on your name/username moving forward will be minimal and whatever you or a company has on you that you put out online.
For social media, it's using a completely different username with no ties to your older account. You can be fancy and roleplay a different set of likes/dislikes, hobbies, interests, etc. But that's reserved for catfishers. Or simply start a new random account that doesn't stand out. You can blend in with the crowd.
10-15 years ago, I can probably do a complete purge in heartbeat. Didn't sign up to as many sites as I have now. Now, I have more real connections online. Some tend to be more annoying than most, but it's like everybody else's situation. They're good people. This is our reality now. Our aging infrastructures just needs to keep up.
I'm done.
After Xanga's demise, I thought about leaving blogging altogether. I created my WordPress account as an alternative placed by Xanga admins to importing archived posts to WordPress. It worked in a way, but posts with images are still linked to Xanga servers, which they were taking down to begin with.
Five years later, I've been more active on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. I have Twitter, snapchat, and trusty old Blogger. I mainly use WordPress and Blogger for cross-posting and sharing my creations on YouTube. Lots of platforms to be creative out there... until you don't feel it anymore.
I don't have a big following. Feedback is appreciated, but that's not what's driving me to create. For every video I make on YouTube or piece I write here, I'm improving and honing my skills. Lately, I just don't have it in me to do these things anymore. It starts to feel like a chore. To put something out there for the principle (this post is an exception cause I really wanted to write this down).
So what would the death of my online presence be like? I know of two ways.
1. The Purge
The hoarder in me is the only thing preventing me from going about this route. It's the most extreme example I can think of: Permanently deleting all social media accounts. All videos uploaded to YouTube? Gone. Instagram photos? Gone. Tweets? Gone. Everything is gone with or without saving backups. Online connections you don't have a contact with offline? Gone and severed.People have done this for privacy reasons, identity theft. Sometimes bullying. Or maybe you're just fed up and realized how you respond and talk to people has completely changed, taking everything as a personal attack, enforcing your authority, etc.
2. Soft Reset
A soft reset is another term for a restart on a device (typically a smartphone), that closes all applications, clears RAM, and any unsaved data. Data stored on the harddrive is not affected.A social media soft reset would be deactivating your Facebook accounts or privatizing all posts and shared media from friends, subscribers, with no updates. You can always go back to a deactivated Facebook account as if you never left. All your private posts are only viewable to you. You simply stop posting and end up being a lurker. With an active account, you still have access to your social media, but you don't comment, leave a like, subscribe, retweet, etc. There are third-party versions of social media apps that completely masks your presence: read receipts, "Seen by" for Instagram stories, etc.
It's not as drastic as a purge, but it's the same idea of minimizing your online presence. Not entirely a death.
----------------
It's really hard to do a complete purge, especially if your online presence is tied to you in real life. There are services online that lets you delete your accounts online. It will find all sites you have access to with all the emails you provide and ask if you want to delete them.
For Twitter or Instagram, if your account is not set to private (or was set to public at some point), chances are your tweets and photos have been crawled through by countless bots, aggregated by third-party sites, hashtags, metadata, and everything else replicated.
As an experiment, try googling your full name or social media username. Scroll past familiar search result and check all search results in subsequent pages. With my username, I found that several of my photos on Flickr have been used in online articles in different states or countries.
Some people have devious-feeling reasons for purging or minimizing their online presence. Which leads us to number three.
3. Rebirth
They want a fresh start. Free from their previous account(s) online presence or online presence in general. I wish I knew then, as a fellow pioneer of this new frontier called the World Wide Web, how precious and golden being completely anonymous is online.This veers more towards conspiracy theory levels, but there are many legitimate reasons for remaining off-the-grid online. Top of all reasons being your privacy. With social engineering, it only takes a few keywords to find out where you live, your phone number, an email address, and your name. The more personal information you have out there linked to various sites (social media, banking, email, websites, etc.) the bigger your online footprint is.
On a grander scale, you could hire a lawyer and use a service to help remove your online presence as much as possible. There will always be remnants of aggregated data obtained by companies (mostly spam) that shared your info, but search results on your name/username moving forward will be minimal and whatever you or a company has on you that you put out online.
For social media, it's using a completely different username with no ties to your older account. You can be fancy and roleplay a different set of likes/dislikes, hobbies, interests, etc. But that's reserved for catfishers. Or simply start a new random account that doesn't stand out. You can blend in with the crowd.
10-15 years ago, I can probably do a complete purge in heartbeat. Didn't sign up to as many sites as I have now. Now, I have more real connections online. Some tend to be more annoying than most, but it's like everybody else's situation. They're good people. This is our reality now. Our aging infrastructures just needs to keep up.
I'm done.
