dumping digital clutter

I wasn't intending on deleting a bunch of internet accounts to be my New Year's Resolution, but that's just how things ended up happening.

While going through the account list in my password manager, I found some seriously old and crusty stuff there, and it was long overdue to do some jettisoning.

True, I could have just left those old crusty accounts as-is and nothing bad would have happened... probably. But that lingering doubt is something I couldn't shake, so I started deleting the old stuff.

I can best define the doubt as questions.

What if the site the account belongs to is bought by some corporation, and then all the personal data in every account is sold?

What if the site is run by idiots and everybody's account info is "leaked" later?

Then there is the most important question:

Why do I even have an account for insert-whatever-site-here in the first place?

There has to be an answer to that question, even if it's not a good one. If I can't come up with any answer at all, then that account has to go.

Of the deletions I made, some of them were:

"Free" email accounts I had and didn't use.
A "musicians wanted" account on a site that I probably hadn't used in over a decade.
Three link shortening accounts.
An email newsletter service account (for sending, not receiving) that I never used.
A formerly free comment system account that turned freemium.
An online cloud storage service account.
Some blog host thing account I tried out forever ago and then never used.
A social media management service account I stopped using years ago.
Four social media accounts. Or maybe five. I'll talk about that fifth one in a minute.

It takes time to go through all this crap, but it's worth it

No two sites have the same process for deleting an account, so I was not able to get all my deletions done in a single sitting. It took days, especially for sites that "require" you to email them just to get an account deleted.

A few of them do that 30-day wait thing. Yes, you can delete, but the account isn't 100% gone until 30 days later, which is annoying, but whatever.

A few things learned

Some accounts I deleted had some images and/or videos I posted years ago that I completely forgot about. One of them was an imgur account, and this is that fifth social media account I mentioned a minute ago. Does imgur count as social media? I'm not sure, but I'll say it does. Before deleting that account, I downloaded an archive of everything in there (which imgur thankfully makes easy to do), and there was stuff dating all the way back to 2014. Just dopey things for the most part. I had no local backup of any of it, so I was happy to get that archive.

Thing I learned: When you have too many accounts, you completely forget what you have out there.

Some accounts I kept around solely for the reason of, "I might need this someday". The cloud storage account I mentioned was one of those. I don't use cloud storage and doubt I ever will. And if I had to transfer files online that were too big for email, I'd just use a file sharing service since no account is required.

Thing I learned: Just-in-case is weak justification to keep an account active, more often than not.

And there were some accounts I had belonging to sites that were basically dog slow versions of desktop programs, such as online image editors. Better to just use GIMP, because every online image editor sucks.

Thing I learned: Don't use a site that "requires" an account to do something a free desktop program with no account required can do 100x faster and better.

Happy new year.

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Published 2026 Jan 1