You shouldn’t have posted that. Now what? |
ILLUSTRATION - 19 January 2026, Berlin: A young woman stands with her smartphone at a subway station in Berlin. Photo: Elisa Schu/dpa (Photo by Elisa Schu/picture alliance via Getty Images)
The internet is an archive of so many different versions of ourselves. If you’re Gen Z or a millennial, there’s a good chance you preserved almost every stage of your life online: old fandoms, old friends, old opinions. And with that comes an inevitable cringe.
So what do you do when you see something embarrassing you posted years ago? You may be tempted to go scorched earth, but journalist and Wall Street Journal contributor Alexandra Samuel says that’s not necessarily the best course of action. “I think that you need to think about deleting things you’ve posted as curation,” she told Vox.
“The Internet Archive keeps snapshots of all kinds of things on the internet, so you need to be aware that when you delete something, it might be deleted for you,” Samuel said. “That doesn’t mean it’s deleted from the internet. I think when you delete things, it’s always a good idea to back them up before you delete them.”
What other options do you have when you look back on an old post and cringe? And how should we be thinking about our life’s digital archive? We answer these questions on Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Samuel, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or........