25 Things You've Done Online That Will Haunt You Forever

Many a bored high school summer vacation has been spent curating TV fan sites. From the Internet stone age when shows like Dawson's Creek attracted young, web savvy admirers to the present day cults of Vampire Diaries and True Blood, there are ample examples of fan sites that live on well past the expiration date of the show they venerate and embarrass their creators for life. Long after you've stopped being inspired by the adventures of Pacey and Dawson, the Internet keeps a record of your admiring, gushing ramblings and lightly photoshopped screenshots. We were also going to warn against the writing of fan fiction, but our understanding is that the authors of most fan fic develop the ability to not feel shame or embarrassment as a defense mechanism.

Leases have been broken, stray stuff has been picked up, and all that's left to do is take care of those pesky photos. Untagging photos from an recently ended relationship is one of the most uncomfortable parts of breaking up in the twenty-first century. Often, one party would like to keep more photos tagged than the other, while the the other ex-lover goes on a rampage, trying to erase the memory of their relationship from the Internet. No matter how hard the significant other who is trying to wipe the Internet clean of the relationship might try, the efforts are in vain. Even if the couple is no longer tagged, photos exist in someone's album, from some party, vacation, or family function, that will show them together and happy. Every relationship that ever existed since the dawn of Facebook lives on via social media to be stumbled across on a bad day that you thought couldn't get any worse.

We don't remember our friends' home phone numbers or the formulas we learned in math class, but we will always remember our friends' dumb AIM screen names. The greatest thing that Facebook ever did was force you to use your real name when signing up for the service, rather than asking you to invent a "cool name" to impress your friends. With each passing year, the names we went by in the early days of the Internet get more and more ridiculous in retrospect. Now that we no longer like those bands, no longer define ourselves by the sports we played in high school, and rarely use the letters "69" as a joke, these screen names have become embarrassing relics of our Internet past. Here's hoping that a new social network involving screen names comes to prominence. It would be a shame if future generations were able to avoid the painful embarrassment of childhood noms de Internet.

In the era of identity theft, data mining, and hyper accurate search engine algorithms, you might have thought the only place you were safe was behind the veil of anonymous comments. A recent Lifehacker article made some great points about how your anonymous comments aren't as anonymous as you think. If you use the same pseudonym across numerous sites, a curious offended party might track you with little trouble. Author Adam Dachis points out, "Your name may be tied to that pseudonym on as little as one web site and people will be able to find out who you are with a simple search." Be sure you're willing to have your name attached to anything you post online, because you might find that someone has attached it for you.

You can buy anything on Amazon these days: it is the Internet's version of Wal-Mart, both in the variety of things they sell and the ethics of their business practices. Unfortunately, the way they track customer preferences won't let your forget anything you've ever purchased from the online retail behemoth. Every time you log in to the website from now until the end of time, those Dragon Ball Z condoms you bought with complimentary cosplay masks will influence the algorithm that presents you with suggestions on what to buy, no matter how many literary books you may purchase just in hopes of getting the results into a less embarrassing place.

"Oh sure," you said, "I'll let my friends keep tabs on what I'm listening to." You failed to consider the true implications of your decision. Now, every guilty pleasure song, every tune a friend suggests you "check out", every artist you loved in high school and are just revisiting for nostalgia sake, they all pop up on your Facebook feed for all to judge. Though you present your hard exterior to the world, everyone now knows that you like to unwind by bopping around your room to Katy Perry jams. All of your Facebook friends also know that whenever you hit the gym you listen to "Firework" like clockwork because it motivates you. What once were your personal dark musical secrets are now out there for the whole world to mock: you can unlink the two networks in hopes that it doesn't get any worse, but the damage has already been done.

The curse of being creative, besides a lifetime of poverty and the inescapable feeling of failure despite your achievements, is the memory of the old, crappy groups you belonged to. The most common embarrassing juvenilia comes in the form of your high school rock band. You may fondly remember the night that you and your boys rocked the talent show with your rendition of Limp Bizkit's "Nookie," but if you ever look back at that old Angelfire website, you quickly realize that you guys weren't as cool as you thought you were. There are other groups that we would tell our little brothers and sisters to avoid creating web sites for, including sketch comedy teams, dance crews, and ventriloquism acts. Your youth is the ideal time for artistic experimentation. We just recommend that you keep that experimentation to the talent show stage and off of the Internet. You'll be spend most of your teen years doing a different, equally embarrassing kind experimenting on the Internet anyway, so we encourage the youth of America to limit their future shame as much as possible.

If we could reach out to all of the racist, homophobic, sexists assholes out there for a moment, (and deep down, you know who you are) might we suggest keeping your bigotry offline? It seems that every day, some backwards thinking fool composes a tweet, facebook status, or blog post that spreads like wildfire across the Internet to remind people that blind hatred still exists. Despite the innumerable examples of jobs being lost and reputations ruined after people have revealed their prejudices in public, there are so many out there who continue to spew their vitriol. Remember, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and the rest of the right wing goon squad are being paid to say these things. You have no excuse. We recommend you keep your opinions buried deep inside, between you, yourself, and once a week at meetings of your men's rights group.

BuzzFeed and the site's myriad clones traffic primarily in nostalgia. Just as often as you see a list of animals behaving like people, you will see something that taps in to a past that you reach for in vain, but is ultimately lost to us forever. One of the best ways that these websites (yes, including our own) do this is to show you pictures of celebrities from middle school and high school. This isn't so bad for the celebrity, because the general theme of these pieces is "look how much cooler/sexier/more interesting the celebrity is now than back then when he was a nerd/loser/ugly duckling." If you were friends with that celebrity back in the day and have gone on to become an accountant, you might look at one of these websites one day and see a picture of yourself at 14 with braces, coke bottle glasses and all, without the comfort that you are now a sexy millionaire. There isn't much you can do to prevent this, except, perhaps, distance yourself from your friends that show unusual amounts of talent.

Your cousin asked you to be a part of his stupid, vanilla choreographed wedding dance, and you said yes because, well, it's their wedding and you're supposed to get what you want on your wedding day. Then the video went viral. Suddenly, the most widely viewed and long-lasting image of you on the Internet is one in which you are riding the pony while the bridesmaid you are paired with awkwardly attempts a chicken dance as you walk down the aisle. We can't explain to you why these travesties go viral, but the fact that over eight million people watched the linked video should tell you that you need to avoid cheesy wedding choreography at all costs.

While you may have left behind your childhood Pokemon fetish, there are thousands of people out there who still get a chubby for Charizard. This means that the forum where you once waxed philosophical about Pikachu with your fellow nerds is still alive and well. As your old activity is buried in the history of these sites, any interested observer (i.e. a friend who wants to mess with you) can search for "jigglypuffluvr91" and find your old heated Dragonair debates and use them against you. Luckily for you, we were all interested in something incredibly stupid when we were younger, so there is certainly nerdy dirt for you to dig up on anyone who tries to use your incredibly lame past against you.

There was a time when teenagers documented their ride on the hormonally charged emotional roller coaster of their teen years in a diary, journal, or by repressing their feelings for a decade before going into therapy. The advancements of the Internet now allow teenagers to embarrass themselves in front of thousands of complete strangers. Admit it, we were all pretty well convinced of just how deeply profound we were after we were rejected by our first love and then found solace in a Salinger novel. Some of us were lucky enough to confine the pretentious, emotionally ramblings that resulted to doodles in journals. The rest of you have permanent video documentation to embarrass you older self with every time you stumble across that old youtube channel.

The odds that you will make a meaningful career connection on LinkedIn are pretty low, but the odds that you will receive an "invitation to connect" from every single person you've ever met are roughly 100% (we ran the numbers). LinkedIn is so considerate that they don't simply send you one email to let you know that the guy you went to high school with who is an accountant ten states away wants to "connect," but they will send you a reminder every three days until you finally break down and add him to your network. Even better, you can now endorse people you barely remember for skills they've acquired after you lost contact with them. The Internet is truly a beautiful and powerful tool.

We think it is pretty ridiculous that people are still being fired from their jobs due to incriminating Facebook photos from their past. We're pretty sure that we don't know one person who doesn't have a readily accessible picture of an them executing a perfect underwear keg stand or being covered in Sharpie graffitti ... well, there is one guy, but he is really weird. The point is that there may come a time when the debaucherous photos of the past cannot harm you, but we do not live in such enlightened times. You can untag photos and rejigger your privacy settings all day long, but somewhere deep in the bowels of the Internet there is photo documentation of something you definitely don't remember, but if it comes to light you'll wish you could forget.

You might think that the Internet forgets about your Facebook meltdowns just because no one likes or comments on the train wreck that results when you collide with a bottle of vodka after a tough day at the office. You would be wrong. Think about your Facebook friends who have strung together a series of existential pleas for help. It changes your entire perception of them. Whenever you stumble across one of their future posts, whether it is about the mundanity of what they had for breakfast or a major milestone like getting engaged, a small part of you remembers when you woke up one morning to see that they posted fifteen status updates between two and three am. Yes, your Facebook fiasco will be buried deep in your feed inside of a couple weeks, difficult for anyone to dig out without serious effort. That doesn't mean the lore of your drunken meltdown won't be remembered in social media history for years to come.

The way that we express love lust boredom these days is to strip naked and send pictures out to those we wish would sleep with us. You would think that this trend would start to decline eventually. Not only are regular people publicly embarrassed when their nudes are used against them, but politicians, media personalities and athletes have been brought low by x-rated jpegs. Sending nude pictures via the Internet puts an enormous amount of trust in the person you are sending them too. You had better hope that you never make the person angry or your junk will end up Google Image searches far and wide. We aren't sure if eventually people are going to stop sending so many nudes, or if people will stop caring because everyone will have a naked picture of themselves on the Internet ... but obviously we are hoping for the latter.