No Stupid Questions

I think it's less that it DOES exist forever and more that it CAN exist forever

You can't guarantee that every copy was deleted, even if you can't find it with a Google search.

Say you were able to check every accessible location on the internet, and you made sure it was deleted, you can't guarantee that someone didn't save it locally only to upload it again at a future date.

Anything that you want disappear will exist forever. Anything you want preserved will disappear tomorrow.

It depends, I think. If it's a scurrilous, untrue rumour about your sexual habits, then it will be preserved indefinitely. If it's some critical information, that is only published in one place, and you need to cite it for a paper, then it's either gone or modified beyond recognition.

The things on the Internet are forever... except for that one thing you saw years ago that you can't find anymore. Everyone has their Internet white whales (or Holy Grails).

I think it still holds as a metaphor.

Pencil strokes can be erased easily, but pen strokes can't. They will still fade over time, or the library can catch fire, but it's not under your direct control.

It is surely less accurate than it was presented to be a decade ago. I have searched for info I knew it was online 10 years ago, and most of it is either lost entirely, or Google is useless nowadays and can't find it anymore

Just always bear in mind that Beyonce had this photo deleted from the internet:

I go with "Always assume that nothing is anonymous and everything is permanent".

Once it's been posted online, you have no control or indication that someone else has saved that to their own storage.

You can remove your post, but you have absolutely no way to ensure its truly gone, even if you can't find another copy anywhere.

Unless you have the control on the webpage hosting a content, it's pretty hard to remove something out of the internet. Even if you do, people may-have back-up or screenshots, then there is place like internet archives where you'd find tons of old websites.

That said, tons of stuff end-up disappearing over-time. Look how many forum have closed down, is myspace still alive ? Recently, the French "Skyrock blog"platform closed down, but all of it's archive have been given to the French national library so in a few decades, sociologist will have tons of data about the youth of the millenials

Some good practice of digital hygiene include :

• Do not use your real name, and change pseudonyms

• Beware of photos, at a point mass face recognition will be the norm, so assume you're not anonymous, Posting a photo after proudly finishing a Marathon or earning a Karate black belt is fine. But if a photo isn't fine out of context, don't publish it.

I would say it's written in disappearing ink. It can't be erased easily but can fade with time (assuming nobody comes along and adds more ink to repair the fading)

The problem is you don't know what is in ink and what is in pencil till years after the fact.

A forum I visited way back when, Kuro5hin, no longer exists but there is some snapshots on archive.org but I doubt that anything I wrote there is accessible (or traceable back to me either here of in real life.)

A blog I wrote for a couple of years back around '07 is definitely still online. But again, there is no way to connect it to current me.

TLDR: Be really sure before you put your real life name or identifying info to anything online.

Is some decade(s) old post of mine from some old forum really still floating around somewhere out there on some random old server chugging along?

Search for your old user name(s) and see for yourself. It's funny how much old stuff I find with the names I used back then. Some of it long forgotten, most of it pretty cringeworthy.

Web sites and pages come and go, but the search engine indices are forever. The Internet Archive, for example, uses data from a search engine crawler to populate their archive of the internet (until Alexa was shut down by Amazon, they do their own crawling now). Google likely has a lot of old internet data in archives as well.

We have far more capacity to archive than we have to recall, and this holds true even as an individual.

Which is to say that everything posted is indelible ("written in ink"), but the vast majority of it is rendered transient ("written in pencil") by way of a huge amount of obscurity.

Or, in simpler terms, it's both :)

Is some decade(s) old post of mine from some old forum really still floating around somewhere out there on some random old server chugging along?

I searched for an older (embarrassing) username I first had 20+ years ago and luckily found nothing except someone who had since taken it on as their moniker.

sure, but its still written on paper. fire still does its thing

Is some decade(s) old post of mine from some old forum really still floating around somewhere out there on some random old server chugging along?

The No Such Agency probably has a copy in its data centre in Utah. Other nation state actors probably have one as well if it's the singular and not the plural (decade).

It’s not written in either. It’s digital code stored on various electronic media.