It's clearly a bad thing if one wasn't intending to be a ghost online.
I've run into this same issue as more and more internet interactions moved onto walled garden platforms, and an unfortunately-named programming language from the fruit company destroyed my previous decade of SEO...
I get that, but the context from the article is that of an interviewee looking up the interviewer and commenting that the interviewer was a "ghost" online. To me, that's somewhat bizarre. What bearing does your interviewer's hobbies have on your perception of whether the company and the role would be a good fit for you?
Where I live, it's expected from candidates to show they looked up the company and have prepared a question regarding a project the company is working on or something else about the company itself. So, you actually end up googling the thing.
It makes one an easy target for negative campaigning. If you have no "real" web pages showing your real self, the first hit will be someone else talking trash about you. Or worse, pretending to be you.
A vast and positive online presence is an insurance.
I kept myself out of the internet for most of my life. Once I reached my 40s, I decided that I was wise enough to share my experiences in a way that can enrich myself and others. And, I think that it was a good call of judgement. I have never hold extreme opinions (ok, I like Windows) but I didn't have enough knowledge to know how companies will value my writing.
Now that I have a career and a long life experience, I feel confident to publish online. I value young people writings, so being young should not be a stopper to have an online presence. But, you need to evaluate how you feel about it and how much you really know what are you doing.
So, maybe to be a complete ghost online can be a good sign that people are thoughtful or that they have a less extrovert character and none of them is a bad thing.
Except for all the reasons you shouldn't. The biggest reasons is that if putting up a website doesn't feel like a good use of time, it's probably better to just not have one.
An alternative way to think about it is this... is it a good business decision to de-prioritize talking to people who don't have a website? I'd be real surprised if the answer was yes.
One of the benefits not mentioned in the article: it serves as a good personal record of accomplishments or thoughts (similar to a diary). How often does the new year come around and you think to yourself, "where did the year go?"
However, the same would apply to community work, etc.
A good personal website isn't only about presenting yourself, but also about respecting the viewer/reader, aligning interests, sharing and the promis to do so in a consistent way, and caring about things in general. If this goes with some brilliant content, this should be making a difference.
> is it a good business decision to de-prioritize talking to people who don't have a website? I'd be real surprised if the answer was yes.
I agree absolutely, as the party seeking individuals this would be foolhardy. But even if all hiring managers acknowledge this, it can still pay for individuals to put up a website, because this allows one to frame and refine ones own ideas, and thus catch the fancy of a potential hiring manager or collaborator preemptively, without requiring that person to be in a room with them and ask the right questions at the right time. Think of it as a way to increase serendipity.
Completely agree with the article. I think it's very unfortunate that so many think a LinkedIn or StackOverflow profile is a viable replacement for a custom-made website that can portray you in any light you so choose.
I've been told several times that I was Googled prior to interviews/meetings and have heard great things about my website, my online presence, my books (I have an "author" card when people Google me), etc. Whatever you do to make you stand out is a boon.
> I think it's very unfortunate that so many think a LinkedIn or StackOverflow profile is a viable replacement for a custom-made website that can portray you in any light you so choose.
A logical consequence is that you compete with other vain people online who might choose to stretch the truth a bit more than you do. At which point does telling convincing lies about yourself become a useful skill to have?
Some of the most interesting things online are people writing about things they are passionate about, for the sake of writing about them. At least in my opinion, so it’s fair to say that I agree with the author.
I think it’s an equally delightful experience to journal about things though. I do it from time to time, when some subject just needs to get written down, almost as though the journaling is me thinking out loud on something. I could certainly do this in an old fashioned journal, or keep things to myself, but in my experience, I’ve learned a lot about something by having to write about it in a way that anyone could read. Which includes explaining things that are obvious to me, but not to you.
I know it’s not for everyone, and I respect that, but if you do think out loud, then do us all a favour and share the things that are most important to you. I think it’ll help keep the internet much more interesting in the age of social media.
If we can find it anyway, with google down-prioritising personal blogs.
I had an idea for a Vietnamese Italian fusion joint called Pho gettaboutit. Rice noodles, rare beef, and tripe with Bolognese sauce and garlic bread? Mmmmmm.
The best one we've come up with is a Russian-American fusion truck named "Collusion", serving (alcohol-free) cocktails named after all the major players / plot points in the "Russia investigation".
It's an endless source of entertaining ideas. "Moscow Mueller", "Manafort on the Rocks", "Cohen Kvass". Or you can go for drinks that are flavored after their namesakes: dry, sweet, bitter, sour.
Park it in front of Trump Tower on central park, and Instagram fame would be instantaneous! Feel free to steal my idea.
I have a similar concept: collections of fake band names, domain names, stand-up comedy pieces, and rap-suitable lyrics. The trick is extracting coherent routines that tell a story well.
Ages ago, in the age of Usenet, I had a huge collection of such bits (plus quotes of others) for use in .signature files.
Another variation on this is the opening titles to "Bob's Burgers".
A series of disasters hits the restaurant before its ultimately opening (fire, pests, etc) and the respondents (exterminator,etc.) has a new, funny name each time. Also, the neighboring stores' names vary in funny ways.
This has been stuck in my mind for a while. The past months, whenever I searched for something I would get covered in pages upon pages of SEO-friendly copywriter bullshit without real content; it's driving me mad.
How possible would it be, to build something like this?
You could start a search engine with data from commoncrawl, maybe you can even get other projects like archive.is to ship you some hard drives. Then you just need to build an index and serve search queries; plenty of open source search engines have been attempted, giving good Templates or even directly usable implementations.
The hard thing is distinguishing personal blogs from blogspam and other worthless content. Performance is a huge issue since you want to spend at most double digit milliseconds per page, but maybe it's getting viable with ML becoming commoditized. But getting this perfect would make or break the project.
I am also thinking about this problem constantly. SEO destroyed internet for me. I keep searching on HN using https://hn.algolia.com but obviously you can use it only for specific topics. I think there is a market in this problem
If you're passionate about a subject, you're going to have strong opinions about said subject. If you voice/publish those opinions, some people are going to hate you. Perhaps a potential employer was set to hire you until they read your blog post in which you were eloquently critical about offshoring, for example.
Or worse, you expressed an off-hand opinion about some social issue back in 2006 in an otherwise technical blog post that the wrong person stumbled upon and now the world is going to cave in on you.
I would love to write more, but censoring myself for the sake of future employers, psychos, etc. tends to make anything I do produce come off as bland and uninteresting.
I don't point potential employers to my personal website (which I also don't associate with my real name). It's just none of their business. When I want to share work that I've done, I put it into a standalone presentation that I provide on a memory stick.
> I would love to write more, but censoring myself for the sake of future employers, psychos, etc. tends to make anything I do produce come off as bland and uninteresting.
Just write about your favorite hobby. When I started my personal blog a decade ago (yikes...), I chose a topic and made a rule that I would stick to it. No politics, no tech, no personal drama. I still enjoy writing about it, and have almost always stuck to the rule, so I don't think an employer could take offense at any of the several hundred thousand words I wrote.
I understand your concern, but I think you can avoid a lot of the negative sides by only writing about things you like. It’s really hard to piss people off if you’re sharing experiences about things you love, especially if you stick to just your experiences and never try to tell people what the “right” way to do things is.
Political views have never been much of a problem for me. I’m strongly opinionated, but I also work in the public sector, which means I leave my personal political views completely out of my professional life. That is certainly a form of self-censorship, but even though it it’s forced upon public servants, I can’t think of a single time I regret keeping my political opinions to myself. There are certainly political movements I wouldn’t work for, but over all it rarely seem like a good idea to get into politics unless you actually want to make a career out of it.
Some people like to be ghosts online but I really do like to post and write about my experiences whenever I can and it is nice to look back and see what I was doing a couple of months or years ago.
Personally, a website I can just do whatever on is great and I don't have to be worried about a platform's limitations, requirements, or nuances.
Most people prefer simplicity of networks like Twitter, facebook, etc but I really like having my own blog where one blog post is 50 words and another is 1500 words and many other things at the same time. And my individual pages can be anything from experiments to documentation.
I don't think it's fair to judge a candidate based on their online presence. Some people are very private, or for whatever reasons prefer not to have an online presence.
Furthermore, if you judge every candidate by the number of linkedin posts and stackoverflow answers or whatever superficial metric than you will miss out on a lot of talented people.
I'm not the type who has an urge to express my opinion or feelings on anything. I've been on Youtube for years and never posted even one comment. Although I always like videos, if I liked them of course.
Oh I see, that's a fair point. Perhaps in your case it makes sense to have some presence when you know that people may you look you up. Although, I would still argue that should not be reason enough - unless that it is, you actually want to have a personal website and enjoy writing.
In my case, I often feel like my opinions are so asinine and generally not worth sharing that I just don't feel the urge to set them in stone, so to speak.
I would consider being an online ghost as a great compliment with how everything has been lately. There is way too much public information being pumped out for no reason at all.
This was my sentiment while reading the article. Two years ago I went through a process of completely stripping away my online presence. I'm now unsearchable by name, name and company, name and home town.
The author's reasons for having an online presence don't appeal to me personally. I can practise skills that I will find useful and I can learn, all without publishing evidence of it online.
> I can practise skills that I will find useful and I can learn, all without publishing evidence of it online.
So can and do I. This nickname belongs to a "fake identity" I use online for services where I don't want to be connected with my real name. I got an fitting email address and thought about a first (Martin, obviously) and a family name, too, so I can pass most registrations. Took me about half an hour to set it all up, you should try that too.
How did you achieve that and what about sites like archive.org?
Also, have you considered going a "middle path" where you are searchable but no info comes up besides your name and face? With how things seem to be evolving I lean torwards a "grey man" strategy because some day you will be suspicious by not being searchable online. At least that's what I kinda fear.
I'm lucky that I share a first and last name with someone who is a successful Social Media influencer, also with a professional photographer, a journalist and and an amateur model (Haha, I wonder if that is enough for an Internet detective to work out my name!). This helps because they all have very searchable content online.
I've tried to strike a balance between anonymity and retaining 'placeholder' accounts with my name. I can't rule out a change of heart in the future.
I removed all data from facebook manually by using Social Book Posts Manager. Clunky but it works. It took about a week of different sessions to allow it to work through all of my facebook content. My FB account still exists but is effectively private, all the settings are as locked down as I can make them.
I deleted all my tweets manually and set my account to private where possible.
I stripped my LinkedIn profile back to basics manually because I didn't really use it anyway. I don't need it, I have a job I'm happy with that pays the mortgage, I don't feel the need to network myself.
I removed the content from my website (<firstname><lastname>.co.uk). I left it displaying my domain registrar's holding page because I figured Google would down-rate that. It appears to have worked because it never appears in search results for either or both of my names.
My domain is a .co.uk so I've taken advantage of Nominet's anonymity service and no details are visible via public WHOIS.
I haven't asked Archive.org to remove the archived versions of my site, if someone knows about it, they could look there. At present I don't actually have any publicly accessible storage to place the robots.txt so I keep procrastinating about it.
I submitted a removal request to 192.com which is a site that publishes UK telephone directory data. They honour removal requests.
I occasionally google myself (especially from new devices and new locations/IP addresses to see if Google is presenting different results for different searchers) to check.
I feel super fortunate that I have a relatively common first and last name, and you pretty much cannot find me through search engines. I have several name-doppelgängers out there that do ample SEO for themselves. Plus we have the rapper now. I have close to zero presence on social media. You would be hard pressed to find a single photo of me by doing basic name and location searches. Really didn’t have to do any scrubbing or “reputation management.” I consider it a real, rare blessing in this world where online privacy is disappearing.
I have no doubt a highly motivated and technical individual (or nation state adversary) could find and dox me, but the average curious HR person or run-of-the-mill stalker will likely not have much luck.
>I feel super fortunate that I have a relatively common first and last name, and you pretty much cannot find me through search engines.
Same here. My ultra-common first and last name means I'm also essentially unsearchable. On occasion as an experiment I'll try to find myself using combinations of my name (including an also-super-common middle name) and birth city, cities I'm lived in, jobs I've had, companies I've worked for, hobbies, and other things would normally narrow down a person in a search engine. I've never found myself. I've gone a hundred page deep in google, bing, duckduckgo, and others (both regular and image searches) and I've never once found me. It's like having an invisibility superpower.
I too stripped away my online presence a few years ago. I even went ahead further and deleted all my accounts I don't use, aren't privacy-oriented, etc. I now have a spreadsheet of the very few accounts I have for specific products and services. To that extent, I rarely sign up for anything new these days and or use a lot of applications and services.
I also say nay to having an online presence. I prefer silent, out-of-sight, deep work. On the other hand, I do support having a blog to journal and or log about anything you'd like, public or private. If public, I suggest to not use your real name, etc, but an unusual name like a 8-bit binary number.
Not having an online presence is free-ing. Having an online presence feels like you're a brand and are subjugated to update. Cal Newport might have talked about something along these above things in his latest book, "Digital Minimalism".
If I was an online ghost I would never get hired. In my line of work you need a CV with publications. While you become a public figure in the process of publishing papers, its actually proof of work vs. trying to talk about your proprietary little thing you worked on at company X that you aren't really allowed to go into specifics about, or doing an interview exam on one tangential problem you may or may not ever encounter in the job like you are in undergrad again. If the recruiter wants to see what I can do, they can just read what I wrote, and ask me for clarification rather than total explanation.
Another massive benefit of being a public face is that collaboration is now possible. Two people in the same Uber pool ride in SV could be struggling with the exact same issue and have no idea that the other person exists because the CS field is closed off and proprietary for the sake of shareholder profit. Think of all the investment and engineering by a half a dozen companies towards the same exact goal of a self driving car. Imagine if all those NDAs were ripped up, and every engineer met up at a conference, gave talks, held poster sessions, troubleshooted common problems, set up meetings, emails, collaborations, joint efforts, shared resources and data, etc.
But then, of course, no company will be able to 'win' and dominate market share and print money for the shareholders.
Except that makes it super easy for anyone to fill that void. Someone who you've pissed off could write some trash about you and it would become the #1 result on google.
I've had some interesting conversations sparked by my personal website (linked in profile). Friendships, even. I don't blog as much as I like to, I'm embarrassed by some of the content at times, but overall I'm pleased with it.
As much as i would like this...taken to a logical conclusion, not sure if it would help. Walk with me a bit, and see if this makes any sense (or not)...
1. A new search engine appears and focuses on "personal presence" sites - however a personal presence would be defined.
2. Google, bing, etc. begin crawling this new search engine, and its index of sites.
3. Users by default simply use google, bing, etc. to search for people...but how would google, bing, and other search engines resolve the conflicts of "which is the correct John Doe site?" between the results they've captured (such as on silos/walled gardens) vs results from this new personal site search engine?
Well, if its google, i suppose they'll use some signal like relevance. And, as i recall google uses link authority (big boys pointing to YOU gives you authority, which leads to "relevance" in the eyes of google)...which would suck because the big boy silos likely have a bit more "authority" by way of quantity of links, no? Unless i'm missing something, having another search engine - focused on personal sites - may not help the layperson find your personal site any more than current environment. Please someone correct me if my logic is flawed here, because my scenario is quite depressing.
(Let me caveat that I'm very much a proud supporter of personal websites, and would love having a new/additional "personal site-focused" search engine...I'm just not hopeful that it helps much.)
In Finland it is illegal to google for applicant's online presence, because of the possibility of judging the candidate because of misidentification. You have to have applicant's permission to that. And I am glad, because one of my name doubles isn't very representative person according to their online presence.
This also holds for eg. age and sex discrimination - find out who they are, reject them for something else. Not being able to easily enforce a law doesn't mean one should break it.
I have the opposite problem, I share the name with someone else working in the tech field who is academically and professionally my senior.
I frequently get emails and phone calls from recruiters offering positions with a salary up to 200k more than I'm expecting at my level because they think I teach at Stanford
Did you ever try to bullshit your way into one of these positions? Obviously it's a bad idea, but I'm only half joking since it might be an interesting experiment to see how people rate and value you if their mind may have already been made up.
I have a more minor issue, in that my mum once mistook a SciFi/horror film director for me, because of his website. I also share a name with a Victorian era author. As I’m now writing a novel, I’m going to have to publish with a pen name.
I'd be curious to know how well that's enforced. There's an ocean full of HR tech startups that are doing just that programmatically, to produce scores on all sorts of things to rate candidates.
Sounds like all those HR tech startups would violate GDPR in Europe and they should be fined out of existence.
If you want to hire people, look at their CV and talk to them. Don't go behind their back making judgements based on websites, facebook profiles or reddit accoints that are likely to be wrong.
> violate GDPR in Europe and they should be fined out of existence
No they shouldn't. What they should do though is geoblock all access coming to their sites and services which they can identify as coming from EU origin, plus add to their site EULA that anyone under EU jurisdiction is not authorized to use their site under any circumstances and such access will be considered unauthorized access, which is a criminal act.
> If you want to hire people, look at their CV and talk to them
That's two of the most likely sources of lies. Neither has much value.
The only page where my full name appears in on my LinkedIn page; I tried searching for it, both on bing and duckduckgo my LinkedIn page was on the second page of results, with a handfull of LinkedIn profiles I've never seen and which are not linked to my profile beforehand. Google got it as the first result, though.
The author mentions learning how to properly format metadata to have links unfurl nicely in Slack and other social media platforms. Are there any debugging tools that let you see what an URL would look like on all platforms at once, without having to post it everywhere and deal with caches when you have to change the content ?
Something about this comments page plays the Trogdor the Burninator song (in the premii HN app on Android). I've never had that happen before, anyone else experiencing it?
I wouldn't expect a younger person to have a personal website, given that it's almost impossible to come up with a domain name that's not taken. For instance, my real name is also Mark Christian. What am I going to do, register markchristian1.org? theothermarkchristian.org? Might as well not have a website at that point.
No it isn't. There were like 100000 new tlds added. Basically any name you can think of is available on one of the tlds. Also most personal websites don't use the authors name as the domain name. Most dev blogs I have seen have some strange name but have their real name in the text of the website so it will show up when searched.
The domain is irrelevant, provided you own it. Choose whatever you like from the remaining .coms or the hundreds of new TLDs. If your name is in the content and you're smart about meta descriptions and title tags, the domain isn't an issue for a personal site.
Over a decade ago, I had a website. But it seems to me that Facebook killed that urge. As people are now moving off of Facebook, it does make sense for personal websites to return. But people will return with a new perspective.
I’ve done the same, and made one via github about a year or two ago. But it is very different than my older sites. I feel like I have less room to express personal thoughts or design ideas. Everything is more scripted, sanitized, and is trying to sell me to employers.
I actually started startablog.com to help people with this. We'll actually set up someone's wordpress site for free. We've done several hundred and we're hoping to help 10,000 people make the move.
People keep moving to privatized networks and there's nothing that beats owning [yourname].com
IMHO, a personal website that is super out of date looks worse than one that doesn't exist. My website is a good example of this (being out of date). So I recently removed it from my resume.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 360 ms ] threadWhy is this a bad thing?
I've run into this same issue as more and more internet interactions moved onto walled garden platforms, and an unfortunately-named programming language from the fruit company destroyed my previous decade of SEO...
A vast and positive online presence is an insurance.
If someone tells me I am a ghost online, I'll smile and says "correct!!". And if the person is interested, I can explain why.
Questions are opportunities for meaningful conversation.
It is not. :)
I kept myself out of the internet for most of my life. Once I reached my 40s, I decided that I was wise enough to share my experiences in a way that can enrich myself and others. And, I think that it was a good call of judgement. I have never hold extreme opinions (ok, I like Windows) but I didn't have enough knowledge to know how companies will value my writing.
Now that I have a career and a long life experience, I feel confident to publish online. I value young people writings, so being young should not be a stopper to have an online presence. But, you need to evaluate how you feel about it and how much you really know what are you doing.
So, maybe to be a complete ghost online can be a good sign that people are thoughtful or that they have a less extrovert character and none of them is a bad thing.
Except for all the reasons you shouldn't. The biggest reasons is that if putting up a website doesn't feel like a good use of time, it's probably better to just not have one.
An alternative way to think about it is this... is it a good business decision to de-prioritize talking to people who don't have a website? I'd be real surprised if the answer was yes.
A good personal website isn't only about presenting yourself, but also about respecting the viewer/reader, aligning interests, sharing and the promis to do so in a consistent way, and caring about things in general. If this goes with some brilliant content, this should be making a difference.
I agree absolutely, as the party seeking individuals this would be foolhardy. But even if all hiring managers acknowledge this, it can still pay for individuals to put up a website, because this allows one to frame and refine ones own ideas, and thus catch the fancy of a potential hiring manager or collaborator preemptively, without requiring that person to be in a room with them and ask the right questions at the right time. Think of it as a way to increase serendipity.
I've been told several times that I was Googled prior to interviews/meetings and have heard great things about my website, my online presence, my books (I have an "author" card when people Google me), etc. Whatever you do to make you stand out is a boon.
A logical consequence is that you compete with other vain people online who might choose to stretch the truth a bit more than you do. At which point does telling convincing lies about yourself become a useful skill to have?
Since… forever?
I think it’s an equally delightful experience to journal about things though. I do it from time to time, when some subject just needs to get written down, almost as though the journaling is me thinking out loud on something. I could certainly do this in an old fashioned journal, or keep things to myself, but in my experience, I’ve learned a lot about something by having to write about it in a way that anyone could read. Which includes explaining things that are obvious to me, but not to you.
I know it’s not for everyone, and I respect that, but if you do think out loud, then do us all a favour and share the things that are most important to you. I think it’ll help keep the internet much more interesting in the age of social media.
If we can find it anyway, with google down-prioritising personal blogs.
Once, in the functional programming rabbit-hole, a coworker advocated for a hypothetical Indian food truck named Haskell's Curry.
And when I was studying propositional logic I certainly wouldn't have said no to a side of De Morgan's ColesLaw.
Hmm, where have I possibley seen this before? :)
Gyros and Villains
Spaghett-about-it
It's an endless source of entertaining ideas. "Moscow Mueller", "Manafort on the Rocks", "Cohen Kvass". Or you can go for drinks that are flavored after their namesakes: dry, sweet, bitter, sour.
Park it in front of Trump Tower on central park, and Instagram fame would be instantaneous! Feel free to steal my idea.
Ages ago, in the age of Usenet, I had a huge collection of such bits (plus quotes of others) for use in .signature files.
A series of disasters hits the restaurant before its ultimately opening (fire, pests, etc) and the respondents (exterminator,etc.) has a new, funny name each time. Also, the neighboring stores' names vary in funny ways.
Hmm, I wonder if there's a search engine tailored to this sort of thing? As in search all the blogs for human knowledge and experience.
How possible would it be, to build something like this?
The hard thing is distinguishing personal blogs from blogspam and other worthless content. Performance is a huge issue since you want to spend at most double digit milliseconds per page, but maybe it's getting viable with ML becoming commoditized. But getting this perfect would make or break the project.
Or worse, you expressed an off-hand opinion about some social issue back in 2006 in an otherwise technical blog post that the wrong person stumbled upon and now the world is going to cave in on you.
I would love to write more, but censoring myself for the sake of future employers, psychos, etc. tends to make anything I do produce come off as bland and uninteresting.
You want to maintain a certain image for employers and that restricts your freedom to rant.
I don't point potential employers to my personal website (which I also don't associate with my real name). It's just none of their business. When I want to share work that I've done, I put it into a standalone presentation that I provide on a memory stick.
Just write about your favorite hobby. When I started my personal blog a decade ago (yikes...), I chose a topic and made a rule that I would stick to it. No politics, no tech, no personal drama. I still enjoy writing about it, and have almost always stuck to the rule, so I don't think an employer could take offense at any of the several hundred thousand words I wrote.
Political views have never been much of a problem for me. I’m strongly opinionated, but I also work in the public sector, which means I leave my personal political views completely out of my professional life. That is certainly a form of self-censorship, but even though it it’s forced upon public servants, I can’t think of a single time I regret keeping my political opinions to myself. There are certainly political movements I wouldn’t work for, but over all it rarely seem like a good idea to get into politics unless you actually want to make a career out of it.
Personally, a website I can just do whatever on is great and I don't have to be worried about a platform's limitations, requirements, or nuances.
Most people prefer simplicity of networks like Twitter, facebook, etc but I really like having my own blog where one blog post is 50 words and another is 1500 words and many other things at the same time. And my individual pages can be anything from experiments to documentation.
Furthermore, if you judge every candidate by the number of linkedin posts and stackoverflow answers or whatever superficial metric than you will miss out on a lot of talented people.
I'm not the type who has an urge to express my opinion or feelings on anything. I've been on Youtube for years and never posted even one comment. Although I always like videos, if I liked them of course.
Operation Flashpoint
Virtual Battlespace 2
Virtual Battlespace 3
ARMA
ARMA II
Side project with Titan Vanguard/Outerra. Then left the game industry. Got married, had kids, and now divorced and getting back into larger projects.
In my case, I often feel like my opinions are so asinine and generally not worth sharing that I just don't feel the urge to set them in stone, so to speak.
The author's reasons for having an online presence don't appeal to me personally. I can practise skills that I will find useful and I can learn, all without publishing evidence of it online.
So can and do I. This nickname belongs to a "fake identity" I use online for services where I don't want to be connected with my real name. I got an fitting email address and thought about a first (Martin, obviously) and a family name, too, so I can pass most registrations. Took me about half an hour to set it all up, you should try that too.
Also, have you considered going a "middle path" where you are searchable but no info comes up besides your name and face? With how things seem to be evolving I lean torwards a "grey man" strategy because some day you will be suspicious by not being searchable online. At least that's what I kinda fear.
I've tried to strike a balance between anonymity and retaining 'placeholder' accounts with my name. I can't rule out a change of heart in the future.
I removed all data from facebook manually by using Social Book Posts Manager. Clunky but it works. It took about a week of different sessions to allow it to work through all of my facebook content. My FB account still exists but is effectively private, all the settings are as locked down as I can make them.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...
I deleted all my tweets manually and set my account to private where possible.
I stripped my LinkedIn profile back to basics manually because I didn't really use it anyway. I don't need it, I have a job I'm happy with that pays the mortgage, I don't feel the need to network myself.
I removed the content from my website (<firstname><lastname>.co.uk). I left it displaying my domain registrar's holding page because I figured Google would down-rate that. It appears to have worked because it never appears in search results for either or both of my names.
My domain is a .co.uk so I've taken advantage of Nominet's anonymity service and no details are visible via public WHOIS.
I haven't asked Archive.org to remove the archived versions of my site, if someone knows about it, they could look there. At present I don't actually have any publicly accessible storage to place the robots.txt so I keep procrastinating about it.
I submitted a removal request to 192.com which is a site that publishes UK telephone directory data. They honour removal requests.
I occasionally google myself (especially from new devices and new locations/IP addresses to see if Google is presenting different results for different searchers) to check.
Streisand effect came to mind, too.
I concede that Google track me everywhere, I can't stop it so I live with it. I aim for a managed level of visibility.
I use uMatrix and uBlock Origin to reduce some of my digital footprint.
I have no doubt a highly motivated and technical individual (or nation state adversary) could find and dox me, but the average curious HR person or run-of-the-mill stalker will likely not have much luck.
It's an interesting consideration in naming a child.
Same here. My ultra-common first and last name means I'm also essentially unsearchable. On occasion as an experiment I'll try to find myself using combinations of my name (including an also-super-common middle name) and birth city, cities I'm lived in, jobs I've had, companies I've worked for, hobbies, and other things would normally narrow down a person in a search engine. I've never found myself. I've gone a hundred page deep in google, bing, duckduckgo, and others (both regular and image searches) and I've never once found me. It's like having an invisibility superpower.
I also say nay to having an online presence. I prefer silent, out-of-sight, deep work. On the other hand, I do support having a blog to journal and or log about anything you'd like, public or private. If public, I suggest to not use your real name, etc, but an unusual name like a 8-bit binary number.
Not having an online presence is free-ing. Having an online presence feels like you're a brand and are subjugated to update. Cal Newport might have talked about something along these above things in his latest book, "Digital Minimalism".
Another massive benefit of being a public face is that collaboration is now possible. Two people in the same Uber pool ride in SV could be struggling with the exact same issue and have no idea that the other person exists because the CS field is closed off and proprietary for the sake of shareholder profit. Think of all the investment and engineering by a half a dozen companies towards the same exact goal of a self driving car. Imagine if all those NDAs were ripped up, and every engineer met up at a conference, gave talks, held poster sessions, troubleshooted common problems, set up meetings, emails, collaborations, joint efforts, shared resources and data, etc.
But then, of course, no company will be able to 'win' and dominate market share and print money for the shareholders.
That includes personal website and social media.
PS: I am not qualified to write such thing any time soon.
1. A new search engine appears and focuses on "personal presence" sites - however a personal presence would be defined.
2. Google, bing, etc. begin crawling this new search engine, and its index of sites.
3. Users by default simply use google, bing, etc. to search for people...but how would google, bing, and other search engines resolve the conflicts of "which is the correct John Doe site?" between the results they've captured (such as on silos/walled gardens) vs results from this new personal site search engine?
Well, if its google, i suppose they'll use some signal like relevance. And, as i recall google uses link authority (big boys pointing to YOU gives you authority, which leads to "relevance" in the eyes of google)...which would suck because the big boy silos likely have a bit more "authority" by way of quantity of links, no? Unless i'm missing something, having another search engine - focused on personal sites - may not help the layperson find your personal site any more than current environment. Please someone correct me if my logic is flawed here, because my scenario is quite depressing.
(Let me caveat that I'm very much a proud supporter of personal websites, and would love having a new/additional "personal site-focused" search engine...I'm just not hopeful that it helps much.)
Sounds like a well-intentioned eurocratic nightmare.
I frequently get emails and phone calls from recruiters offering positions with a salary up to 200k more than I'm expecting at my level because they think I teach at Stanford
So what is the definition?
This is certainly legal.
"Well you see uhh thats not me but uhh..."
"I think we are done here."
And you've just burned a massive bridge.
It's never turned into an awkward situation just yet but its also never gotten further than that.
(I don’t except a publisher would let me do that).
If you want to hire people, look at their CV and talk to them. Don't go behind their back making judgements based on websites, facebook profiles or reddit accoints that are likely to be wrong.
No they shouldn't. What they should do though is geoblock all access coming to their sites and services which they can identify as coming from EU origin, plus add to their site EULA that anyone under EU jurisdiction is not authorized to use their site under any circumstances and such access will be considered unauthorized access, which is a criminal act.
> If you want to hire people, look at their CV and talk to them
That's two of the most likely sources of lies. Neither has much value.
This was the early 2000s, and I was easily able to knock him from the top spot on the major search engines.
http://www.w6rz.net/gameofthrones_season8_episode3.png
http://www.minions.com/
I’ve done the same, and made one via github about a year or two ago. But it is very different than my older sites. I feel like I have less room to express personal thoughts or design ideas. Everything is more scripted, sanitized, and is trying to sell me to employers.
People keep moving to privatized networks and there's nothing that beats owning [yourname].com