By the way, to save everyone from the usual round of naïve questions (“do you store IP addresses?”, …), to dispel a few comforting illusions about what Terms of Service actually mean, and to give you a glimpse into what it feels like to run, moderate content, and support a website, we highly recommend Kevin Nguyen’s novel New Waves.

It’s a sad, sharp, and often very funny story about a website that differs from ours in only one key respect: it promised not to preserve content, but to delete it on a schedule. As you might guess, that promise becomes the most fragile and consequential part of the whole enterprise. The book captures something that anyone who has worked behind the scenes of an internet platform will immediately recognize: the gap between what users imagine, what policies declare, and what operational reality demands.

We doubt Kevin was OSINTing us—or even knew we existed—when he wrote it. And yet the parallels are striking. In fact, there are more accidental coincidences there than in some stories written by people who explicitly tried to study us.

If you want to understand not just how platforms present themselves, but how they actually function under pressure—read or listen it. It won’t answer every question, but it might help you ask better ones.