For 7 or 8 years, I maintained a Tumblr account on alearningaday.tumblr.com where I shared notes I took from books I read. I accidentally deleted that account today.
It turns out Tumblr’s “Delete Account” user experience is/was really poor. I had multiple old blogs under that account and was hoping to delete them. But, before I knew it, my entire account was gone.
Doing the same on Bitly, for example, resulted in a mini tutorial.
Another service gave me 7 days before they deleted my data.
Tumblr, on the other hand, just deleted 7 years of content.
Poof.
Just like that.
Interestingly and separately, I was wondering just this morning if this practice of sharing book notes on my Tumblr blog was adding much value. Simplification was one of my themes for 2019 and I’ve been gradually simplifying both my physical and digital life over the course of the year.
After my initial “oh crap” reaction, I realized that this is another step, even if involuntary, in that direction and I’m looking forward to continuing on this journey in 2020.
PS: This exercise was part of an annual account and security audit. I abandoned the effort an hour into it as I realized that the effort would take many more hours. So, after deleting a few accounts identified on the Lastpass “high risk” list, I focused on identifying my highest frequency/risk accounts and ensured I enabled 2 factor authentication wherever I didn’t have it on and changed passwords.
I hope you’re able to get to doing that for your important accounts as well.
