darkSpyro

These are thoughts that honestly really creep me out.

Thoughts I strongly prefer not to think about because of how uncomfortable it makes me.

I don't know, though.

I don't even know what to else to say.

It'll all likely be archived. This is the same with all newspapers.

my first thought is "what a waste of usernames" tbh

Well, family are able to contact at least some websites about shutting down literal dead accounts. Though it's easier to have the password and just terminate the account normally.

I think websites should employ a system where if a user hasn't logged on for, say, 15 years, it will terminate the account after multiple e-mail warnings (in case they aren't dead). A website I went on, NationStates, had something like this. If you didn't log on in so many months it would freeze your account and then you had like a year until it was completely deleted. I like this because if someone has a username you want, but they don't get on any more, there's still a chance to get that username after their account is deleted.

I think it would be interesting.

Don't worry, I'll still be alive by then c:

The ghost account...

The problem with this idea is that most of us will outlive dArt, Facebook, etc. Even if the companies might still exist, servers will eventually be switched off to avoid having Petabytes of data stored for no reason. Something like this would be easier to justify for sites like Facebook over sites like DevientArt, however.

This is something that worries modern historians, because while there is plenty of physical evidence of what happened in the past, over half of everything these days is stored on computers, which won't last the test of time, and even if future archeologists discovered a perfectly preserved computer, it would be a nigh impossible task to decipher the computer code.

Given how many human's die every day there are probably already millions of accounts on the internet owned by people who are dead, you probably just don't realise. The difference is that this number will only grow.

The only thing that will change is that more websites are going to have to delete inactive accounts, it's something that YouTube already does on a regular basis. But that raises an interesting dilemma, like whether or not the literally dead people on Facebook (for example) should still have an account. If people are going to get mad when Facebook delete the account of someone deceased. So something like that might not happen any time soon if a moral objection is raised (probably not in our lifetimes) but in 100 years when the number of people around to remember these people is most likely going to be 0 they could do it anyway and no one would notice.