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Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally my kids have their social media profiles set to "private" and don't have any motivation to make them public. In fact, most of their friends with a few exceptions have the same setup. They also regularly "wash" their profiles because they're kids and are constantly redefining themselves to their peers. Good luck finding any of that in a public archive.

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Gen Z/Gen Alpha grew up in a world with social media being already established and so they are aware of the pitfalls.

Millenials are screwed because they starting using social media before fully understanding the ramifications(because most people did not know how this was going to play out in the early days).

Myspace and similar sites from that era disappeared pretty nicely, though.

yes, there's a curve here. My early online days were in the time of GeoCities, and later CollegeClub (anyone remember that?); I had pretty significant online presences then, but they're all gone. The Archive doesn't have them, and that was before everything was scraped. I'm fairly certain this is all gone. Then comes the intermediate period when everything was starting to be scraped, but nobody realized or cared; that's where today's younger millenials find themselves. And then the present, where we all know what's happening, and some people just don't care, and others go to great lengths to obscure...

I missed the CollegeClub days but I think I still have an old Neopets profile, although I don't think there's anything too dangerous on there I could be blackmailed with...

I've left the "I could be blackmailed"-days behind me. There was a time when I was worried about what of me people could find online. Nowadays, it's "yes, that was me. Have fun with it."

I think the old pages are still around although at some point mySpace locked down all the profiles by default so that they are not public anymore and you have to be logged in and friends with the person to view them.

Private, but likely with many friends and acquaintances. Everyone they allow has access to all they've shared. This is a good step, but this isn’t the level of protection some believe it is.

Yep, anecdodltally i ran an experiment on this. Trick is that ppl are in "networks". Find somebody you think is in your target network who got low followers to following ratio and send a request, do this 5ish times. Then go based on recommendations and ppl will see "oh that account follow these other ppl i know lemme accept a follow request".

Until they follow/friend an account to enter a contest, follow harrystylesfans, some influencer who's account is managed by an agency, or "sign in with <social>" somewhere and give too much access.

It's a pretty large attack surface that can be subject to a lot of very cheap automation.

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