Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've thought a lot about this recently. A large portion of people hate social artifacts. They don't want to have their picture taken. They don't want to be recorded on audio or video. They don't want their daily utterances to be a matter of record. They want comfort and low stakes. A performance can be evaluated in the moment. An artifact (a recording of that performance) can be scrutinized forever, even by people wh…
> They don't want their daily utterances to be a matter of record. Experience being stalked and harassed online for years and you'll hate it as well. Imagine in your 30s having your job threatened because you made a dumb post when you were a teenager, and no one will ever let it go or accept that people change. Many people are uninteresting, and never have this experience. Celebrities have large support networks and…
That assumes many things, the first being that someone thinks you're important enough to archive, and that you were important enough to archive long ago. This is exceedingly rare for that middle ground you're discussing.
You're right in that anything CAN be saved if its online and someone is motivated enough, but the added resistance ephemerality adds protects most people. You're talking a very narrow use case, and in that case it should be obvious your internet world is public realm. All of these points you're making rely on extreme stalking already happening. Not only stalking, but archiving of that stalking.
For the vast majority of people and the vast majority of their posts, ephemeral content actually does disappear. Especially on mobile platforms that aren't really archived like the web is. Ephemerality doesn't save you from crossing lines (plenty of teens have gotten in trouble over Snapchat messages in various forms), but the generally mundane harmless stuff goes away and can never be later used to misconstrue or define who you are.