Beyond giving people flexibility in curating audiences when they share content, audience curation features should be designed in ways that allow for retroactive curation. As many of our participants described, it was often easier for them to delete their accounts and recreate them than performing retroactive curation. The ability to do so is helpful for a wide range of people who are experiencing life transitions, whether a break up, transitioning genders, or just wanting to give social platform presences a spring clean.
Allow for retroactive curation at scale
To reduce the burden of retroactive curation, social platforms ought to be designed in ways that make it easy to curate past presentations at scale. While editing the audience for a single post retroactively can be useful, if someone wants to edit audiences for more than a few posts, it can quickly become burdensome. As a result, platforms should offer ways for people to search their past posts and curate them selectively.
Allow people to hide past posts based on rules
Among our participants, the desire to retroactively curate one's social platform profiles could also be based in the desire to limit what new audiences see, not necessarily to remove past posts. To support this, platforms could offer to automatically hide posts created before someone follows you, unless given the appropriate permissions. Similarly, platforms can be designed to limit the visibility of past posts beyond a certain time window by default. For example, Retro, a new social platform app designed around photo sharing, only lets people see posts that are more than 4 weeks old if they have been given a special key. In this way, trusted audiences can be given access to one's full profile while new connections only see the most recent updates.
Maintain an archive of peoples' posts when retroactively curating (if they want to)
Social platforms are often used for personal remembering as they can be an archive of past moments. To support remembering, people should be given the option to hide content from others while maintaining it for themselves.