I cut my teeth on Usenet, mailing lists, and IRC - on all of which the idea of unsaying something you said was a self-evident absurdity.
So no, I don't have a problem with it here either.
If I feel badly enough about something I've said in the past, I can always follow up that I've changed my mind / disagree with my past argument and the reasons why.
I just don't understand people fixation with deleting public stuff they willingly upload to public networks.
These kind of discussions remind me of a quote I read somewhere back in the 90's: When someone gets in a computer, their IQ drops 50%: That's the only explanation why the same person that falls for a stupid "nigerian prince" scam, would tell a person knocking at their door asking them to give them money to get more money to fuck off.
Same with sharing stuff... people go on the internet sharing photos, videos and text that they would not share on a normal interaction in "real life" (you can see a high rated post here, being quite aggressive about some old email interaction while being impersonal, but when dang replied the user changed their tone... WHY?). Just behave like the real you when you are on the internet, it is a public place by definition.
I've got plenty of old comments in Usenet, slashdot, old forums and plenty of other websites from more than 25 years ago. Sure, some of them are stupid because I was younger, or they are charged, flamebaits, trolls, or just plain stupid (specially ones in comp.os.linux.advocacy ).
But yeah, that was me, and if someone finds those posts and confronts me to them, I have to own them, and as you say, I would be able to follow up on why I wrote "hahaha you use window$z you suck donkey ballz" 25 years ago when I was 13 years old...
> I've said in the past, I can always follow up that I've changed my mind / disagree with my past argument and the reasons why.
Yes, that's the rational way. However, with today's SJW and Twitter mobs, you don't know what someone might dig up in order to make your life hard going forward.
Mega Nazis, if they should come to exist, are going to seek to hunt people down whether or not anti-Nazis have done so first.
If you are concerned about Mega Nazis, hoping you can convince them to be tolerant Mega Nazis by the example of tolerant anti-Nazis is...not likely to be an effective approach.
This. These who lived the past "hacker" culture should have self-anonymizing habits burned into mind, be it using nicknames and masking details about private or work life.
So no, I don't have a problem with it here either.
If I feel badly enough about something I've said in the past, I can always follow up that I've changed my mind / disagree with my past argument and the reasons why.