I was always, though, more on the side of “You were an asshole on Wikipedia for six months. Does it hurt, now? Oh well. Shouldn’t have said those things.” But it generally got voted down.

On Google Groups postings from before Google – I’m a relative newbie, having only been on Netnews since 1981, before it became Usenet, before DejaNews acquired significantly large archives of the contents, before Google acquired DejaNews and Googleized it. (I was probably on mailing lists a bit earlier, but had spent a couple of years mostly in mainframeland, and never had an Author account on Plato.) So on the average, for anything I might regret saying today, I’ve probably said things far more regrettable over the years, and you’re only not seeing them because my email address has changed…

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2008/10/mail-goggles-a-breathlyzer-test-for-your-gmail.ars

I was hoping they’d fade away like old VHS tapes. Not so much for my sake, but to spare future generations the noise and static of this one.

Hey, maybe the future owners of Google, Wayback, MySpace, Facebook, et. al. will just “tape over them”, so to speak with new chatter? A bit like ruthlessly clearing a house full of dated, unwanted furniture bequeathed by a dead relative. Yeah, it meant a lot to the dead relative, but nobody has house-room for it now.

Yes, sort of…. I still think the better response in such exceptional situations (which override general principles) would not be to delete the comment entirely but to edit/overwrite the text somesuch:

[something entirely nasty and defamatory was posted here, @78. [Author'sName] has since admitted no grounds and sincerely apologized, @113.]

That also attacks the issue of propagation—rather than disappearing the comment and thus making it live on in rumor, any link or reference to it becomes attached to the retraction.

Incidentally, in this post Scalzi doesn’t address this issue at all, I don’t think, but I just checked the comment policy linked, and he says he will edit personal attacks, etc.

I saw enough of this to do with spats in online romance fandom that I ended up writing a “Welcome to the Panopticon” rant after one particularly awe-inspiring outbreak of morning-after-the-night-before attempted censorship. Personally, I think there are legitimate reasons to ask for comments to be deleted or modified. But as so many people in this comment thread have already said, it’s usually not physically possible to remove the evidence, simply because there are so many caching services outside the control of the site where the comments were originally posted.

I use this pseud not, as I suspect several people that hang here already know, because I’m so afraid of being outed or because I’m afraid to own my words, but because I like to keep my professional me and my personal me google-separate. By and large it works, and it’s pretty important. If folks really want to find me, I’m under no delusions that they could do so, and fairly easily. But I like most of my google hits to bring up my professional persona, so that clients, potential clients, curious opposing counsel, etc., can find me easily and don’t have to wade through a bunch of irrelevant stuff to get to what they need to know.

ANYWAY, reading this just now prompted me to one of my semi-frequent “google checks” to see how much of me is overlapping. I didn’t find much overlap. What I did find, however, is that my name comes up in my state’s “unclaimed property” database. TWICE.

Woo! Thanks, John.

And D’offended, don’t sell yourself short. You can certainly aspire to one “epithet” John used, that being ‘mad craziness’.