rrraksamam ========== omnes spes demortae sunt Yesterday I stumbled across a university pubnix that served user websites in the early 2000's. The webpages were so simple, yet full of details. Many of them provided links to other personal websites that are now gone. Most of the people were in their 20's and 30's at the time. So by now they'd be in their 40's and 50's. And I wondered where they were right now, whether they were still alive, and if they remembered that they'd created some personal homepages on some random pubnix server two decades ago, that are still online today. It's interesting to see how things have changed since then. Back then, everyone used their real names online, and posted their personal information - where they went to school, names of universities, degrees, where they lived, phone numbers, names of their spouses and family members, etc. Now, people are more reserved about sharing their personal information online. Not everyone - of course, there's millions of people who've shared everything online, perhaps a little too much, when you come to think of it. But there's also people who are kind of semi-anonymous or completely anonymous online; the obvious reason being - privacy. I think the drawback of privacy and anonymity is that it completely obscures and devalues a chunk of people's personality, character, and sense of self-worth. Nobody's going to take some scrambled username made up of alphanumeric and special characters seriously. Is it a real person? Yes. But would you take user7359oqwr, or Mary Hopkins seriously? If a person's profile has nothing personal on it, no personal information, no pictures, nothing that could specially relate to them, nothing that sets them apart from the others; no uniqueness at all, how many people would approach them for a conversation? How many people would want to get to know them, be friends with them? How many people would care, miss them if they died? So user6104zdhv stopped coming online; big deal. Nobody knew who they were. Nobody had ever seen them. Nobody knew anything about them. It's hard to miss someone you didn't know.