[RubenSandwich]

Agreed.

We need to find a balance of forgetting things online:

"I don't know if they did this in Germany, but in our elementary schools in America, if we did something particularly heinous, they had a special way of threatening you. They would say: "This is going on your permanent record".

It was pretty scary. I had never seen a permanent record, but I knew exactly what it must look like. It was bright red, thick, tied with twine. Full of official stamps.

The permanent record would follow you through life, and whenever you changed schools, or looked for a job or moved to a new house, people would see the shameful things you had done in fifth grade.

How wonderful it felt when I first realized the permanent record didn't exist. They were bluffing! Nothing I did was going to matter! We were free!

And then when I grew up, I helped build it for real."[0]

[0] http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm

Edit: Removed code quotes for quote.

[davemp]

Please don’t quote with code snippets, it’s unreadable on mobile.

[theoh]

Here is the above text:

I don't know if they did this in Germany, but in our elementary schools in America, if we did something particularly heinous, they had a special way of threatening you. They would say: "This is going on your permanent record".

It was pretty scary. I had never seen a permanent record, but I knew exactly what it must look like. It was bright red, thick, tied with twine. Full of official stamps.

The permanent record would follow you through life, and whenever you changed schools, or looked for a job or moved to a new house, people would see the shameful things you had done in fifth grade.

How wonderful it felt when I first realized the permanent record didn't exist. They were bluffing! Nothing I did was going to matter! We were free!

And then when I grew up, I helped build it for real.[0]

[RubenSandwich]

Sorry about that, it's fixed now.

[hutzlibu]

Your last sentence was funny, but I disagree with:

"We need to find a balance of forgetting things online"

I rather think we need to find a balance of dealing with each other's misstakes and abandon Facebooks etc. styled and polished world of perfectness.

We are not perfect. We made misstakes. Lot's of them.

But in most cases that's OK, if we learned from it.

[RubenSandwich]

I think it actually has to be erased, otherwise, some future employer, acquaintance etc, might judge you for something you've moved on from. People do learn and move on from their mistakes, but not when they are continually berated for them because that causes them to be self-defensive and it's my experience that as soon as the defenses go up the ability for self-reflection is lost.

What I mean by balance is that political scandals should definitely not be forgotten, but thoughtless things written by a minor should. I just don't know where the line should be and personally, I think it varies widely by the circumstances.

There is a movement across the globe currently to try to make the internet forget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten.

[hutzlibu]

I know there is this movement.

But I believe in truth. And despise hypocrisy ...

But I believe hypocrisy is a follow up, when you set the standard, that there might be no dark past.

So the person from human HR interviewing you than, can look down at you, because your incident made it into local news - but he got lucky and his incident gots forgotten and ereased. And he believes now in his righteous act, even though he did the same things (drugs, racism, whatever).

I rather believe there should be a right to move one. Yeah you did those things, but you learned from it. (or still stand by them) This I would like much more, than pretending everything is and was shiny, which it often was not. But you can't really solve the problems if you can't even talk about them.

[baddox]

Heck, even the threat that your grades from middle school would effect your ability to get into certain classes in high school turned out to be nonsense.