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Why Do I Save Things Online That I’ll Never Look at Again?

One digital native looks to the past to find out why she’s become a collector of online content

Kristin Merrilees
Debugger
7 min readAug 20, 2020

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Photo Credit: howtos101/YouTube

If there’s one thing I do online, it is save things. On TikTok, I have an endless feed of favorited videos, hashtags, sounds, and effects. And if I see a TikTok that I want to distinguish from the rest of my heap of TikToks, I’ll save it to my camera roll (where it becomes part of an even bigger heap of pixelated artifacts from both my physical and online life).

I’m constantly pinning on Pinterest, bookmarking on Twitter, saving on Instagram, saving on Reddit, saving and archiving on Medium, downloading PDFs of articles on my computer, adding to my “Memories” on Snapchat. I’m liking songs on Spotify, putting VSCOs into my collection, saving articles for “later” on my New York Times and The Atlantic apps, creating playlists of videos on YouTube, downloading episodes on Podcasts, putting books into my “Want to Read” on iBooks, adding stuff to my wishlist on all my shopping apps, and simply screenshotting anything else that I can’t find a home for.

The problem is, pretty much all the stuff I save I never look at again. There are thousands of ideas, videos, pictures, screenshots, and articles sitting somewhere, saved in my phone, this very…

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