It's interesting how that changed within one generation in many cases. Millennials started using the Internet when conventional wisdom was to not use your real name online. Don't reveal your age or location. Don't post your photo. Use an anonymous name.

We went from that to the complete opposite.

The internet from 10 years ago was also less likely to remember everything you do forever. Messaging between friends happened using services that didn't save conversation history server side, public chat rooms including IRC were rarely logged, blog posts had a minimal reach, and were largely pseudonymous anyway, making the connection with a real person more difficult. Perhaps this kind of lack of consequences drove people into complacency.

In fact, young me didn't think that websites, mostly forums and early microblogging sites, would ever go away. I wish I could see those posts today.

It may be a fabricated memory, but I remember always being aware of the lack of privacy in those services. And never using your last name or sharing your location.

True. I meant to say that websites, while seeming permanent, didn't enforce a connection to more private parts of one's identity.

are all your gmail and facebook messages from 10 years ago not still available? I think youd have to go back more than 15 years to get to services where communications are now faded.

Not everything was conducted over gmail or facebook messages.

(This is still true, in fact.)

>Messaging between friends happened using services that didn't save conversation history server side

A lot of messages did.

Yes. The last generation was taught from a very young age that what you put online is available for all, and learned from the mistakes of their older siblings / parents. I see way more "controversial" content on facebook / instagram from my older friends than from the younger ones.

Lets not speak to soon until we see this gen at adult age. The self censor in the past was that college admissions will dig for your social media pages. I remember in high school people changed their names on Facebook until they were accepted to their colleges. One kid at another local school got an offer rescinded over a tweet even back then. Once these kids got their first jobs after college, then my feed was a deluge of psuedoscience, political bait, and multi level marketing, all of which these same people would have avoided posting during highschool out of fear of consequence, and now that they are employed adults there are seemingly no repercussions, to them at least.

> There's something to be said for having an album of photos that you pull out a couple of times a year to show a select group of others. It makes the experience much more valuable than blasting out content for everyone to see.

While I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment, and mostly agree with the idea, a part of me sees that only as a change in scale. As someone that doesn't really partake in social media sharing (I use FB for event notification) or take many pictures, I see parallels between sharing the album and posting online. I've had plenty of embarrassing childhood photos shown. Generally the only difference is time from the event.

I mean, it's not like a couple hundred years ago we even had the option to do this (other than the obscenely rich getting portraits painted).

I note all this because I find often when it appears it's just scale that makes a difference, that's just hiding the real things that are causing concern (or perhaps we should also be concerned to some degree about the small scale as well). So in this case, is sharing an album really all that much better? If so, is it because of temporal distance to the events, reduced group size per sharing instance (the overall size might be the same, over time), or sharing with people that aren't in some tighter group (or some combination thereof)?

Scale has a multiplicative (maybe even compounding in a viral network) effect. Therefore usability * scale means scale itself is part of the problem, if not the underlying one.

>There's something to be said for having an album of photos that you pull out a couple of times a year to show a select group of others.

My perhaps unreasonable hope for a Facebook killer is just a paid personal archive of your own photos, writings, etc. with the assumption of privacy by default.

Have you tried iCloud / iPhone? That's what I switched over to once I quit Facebook and Android. The iPhone is great, it's private by default, I can share photos / albums only with the people that I want, and I create different groups based off of different interests, trips, etc. All together with iMessage and Notes I get pretty much everything I had with a newsfeed / blog, all without the implications of Facebook and giving up all of my privacy.

Same here. At first it seems a little clunky, but then I realized that was actually a feature.

The old school version is my aged mother finding birth announcements from the late 50s and early 60s handwritten by my aunt for each of her four children. My aunt passed away five years ago. She sent the originals to each of my cousins by snail mail. They were thrilled to receive such a thing written by their mother.

How permanent would such a thing be in the long run, though? I ask this as someone who will soon have to download their G+ data before the service is shut off in a couple of weeks. Not to mention the recent MySpace debacle where a lot of data was lost due to a system migration.

Also, the assumption of privacy is nice, but how private is it actually? For example, you'd have to break into my house and steal my photo album to see pictures of me as a baby.

Not trying to be contrary, I guess I just don't resonate with social media that much. A private personal archive of my data would be one that I control on my own devices. I treat posting to the cloud, in whatever form, as making it public despite whatever assurances they have about privacy, unless it's something like my taxes or banking information where there are strict laws involved.

The thing about G+ is that it wasn't their core business. There are a lot of replies to my comment talking about existing solutions... which are also peripheral to the companies offering them. I hope that at some point someone makes what I described their core business, with the ability to get your data out painlessly as a hedge against the finite lifetime of the service.

If you have an Amazon Prime subscription you get unlimited photo storage and a certain amount of space for videos/documents for free.

You can also create groups and post photos/videos to that for sharing with family.

Only issue I've run into is the Amazon Photos app on Android doesn't always back up photos as timely as I'd like, and deleting photos on my phone (wanting them to stay in the cloud) results in some odd behavior with images not loading, even though pulling up a computer they're still there.

I also have a quite large video that it keeps getting stuck on with the upload, which might be part of the issue.

https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Photos/b?ie=UTF8&node=13234696...

google photos stores all your images and videos for free (well it downscales them to 14m if they are over) - but for most people this is essentially free and forever. You can choose to share images and folders/albums - or even share everything. You can also ask it to pull from folders on your phone or computer - so every time I take a new photo it is saved.

It then does nice 'reminders' of your images and videos from years back.

This plus google docs if you want to save private writings has you pretty much covered.

I am very happy to be off social media now - my vague replacement is sharing things to Whatsapp with selected friends and family.

The one problem (as far as owner privacy/access control) with these Google services is that the read-only sharing method is essentially irrevocable (without moving the item in a way which causes Google to host it at a different URL) and infinitely resharable by anyone who gets access independent of the owner.

As I discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19444392

> My perhaps unreasonable hope for a Facebook killer is just a paid personal archive of your own photos, writings, etc. with the assumption of privacy by default.

Really, the only reason Google’s collection of online services (Google One, basically,though the individual services mostly are older than that bundling) falls down here is that several of them use unguessable URLs and URL sharing as the private sharing mechanism (at least for read only sharing), instead of revocable access delegation.

Its more practical to teach the younger generation to assume that everything is public by default and equip them with necessary skill to deal with this. At least thats what I will teach my kid.

I call that Gsuite and/or iCloud, both of which I pay for.

The reason infants have ever survives is that their parents get dopamine fixes. I wouldn't knock it too hard.