[md224]

As someone who was just thinking about this concept a week or two ago, I can tell you how I viewed the use case. (And kudos to the developer who actually followed through with building it, unlike me!)

To me, it's about subverting the chilling effect that occurs when you're about to say something online and you think "could someone potentially use these words against me?" Not only governments or enemies with grudges, but even future employers with hair-trigger sensitivity doing some kind of background review. Many of us (if not all of us) have opinions or perspectives that may make others uncomfortable, and it seems unfortunate when we censor ourselves for the sake of maintaining a pristine public image.

One solution is to simply say whatever you want and then, if you reach a point where you sense that your persona may come under scrutiny (perhaps you're applying for jobs), go back and remove any material that you feel might be used against you.

The other solution is this concept of self-deleting messages. Instead of having to go back and find all the things you said that could be liabilities, simply give these comments a maximum lifetime when you make them. It's an efficiency thing. You save yourself the worry of "ah god what if I forget I said this and someone finds it down the road" and you avoid neurosis keeping you silent when you should be able to speak your mind. It seems like a win-win to me.

Sure, if somebody REALLY wanted to preserve your statements on the internet, they could do that. And this tool would basically be useless for celebrities or anyone with a significant following. But most of us aren't those people. Our public faces rarely come under scrutiny, but it would be helpful to have a tool that makes it easier to manage when they do.

[adyus]

I think your comment is assuming that something actually gets deleted permanently from social networks. That has been proven to not be the case.

Once something is published, the cat's out of the bag. Sure, for a person with few followers trying to guard their future, the risk is smaller than the celebrity in your example.

But the risk of a bot snapping a shot of the statement before it gets deleted outweighs the reward of posting ephemerally, at least for me.

[md224]

> But the risk of a bot snapping a shot of the statement before it gets deleted outweighs the reward of posting ephemerally, at least for me.

Sure, that's valid. I guess I just don't see that risk as worth worrying about; I can't envision a scenario in which a future auditor (other than the government, perhaps) would resort to that kind of digital archeology to defeat my attempts at removing controversial statements.

It's possible that I'm just really underestimating how much the average person has their social media statements cached and replicated across the Internet in a public fashion, accessible by a simple search for their name. In my opinion, if you say something and then have a program "delete" it after 48 hours, future employers or adversaries aren't going to see it unless:

a) they happen to work for the social network in question and see no problem in digging through their own databases/backups

b) they're a government agency with access to troves of archived communications

Considering I find both scenarios to be fairly unethical, I don't think I'd want to seek employment from company A or government agency B to begin with.

Of course, when we're talking about governments as adversaries, the rules go out the window. I'm talking more about barely controversial statements made by average citizens who might be a little concerned with how future employers view their public persona. I think that's a valid use case.

[zeroc]

Yeah, absolutely my thoughts. Many times I want to post something related to politics and as you know we all have some weird opinions, then a couple of days after that the post becomes obsolete.