I don't know how many users on Cohost are in that middle/high school age range, and even if you're not in that range still take this to heart. Please don't ever delete anything you've created. As someone who did ms paint doodles and made shitty youtube videos back when I was younger, I wish I still had them. I was a fool and did what I assume a lot of people end up doing and deleting everything because you feel like it's too "cringe" or whatever.
Now that I'm reaching my 30s, I regret it. I regret it everyday of my life. You have no idea how much I wish I still had my shitty youtube videos or silly ms paint doodles. I swear I must've had like, 30-40 videos on youtube that were just dumbshit like a bunch of pictures set to music or just like 10 minutes of random gameplay from some game I played on an emulator. Pretty much all them edited in Windows Movie Maker. I had a deviantart gallery full of just the most random and silly ms paint doodles. Just the most shit child train of thought drawings I did because I was bored and had way more dedication than I do now.
With getting older and not being able to remember stuff you did as a kid, I wish I could look back on any of these. It's all lost to time now. I have a select handful of ms paint drawings by happenstance because I was a freak and uploaded them to some of the weirdest places... but everything else is either dead links or just gone. So just a message from someone who made that mistake. I urge you to not delete your creative works, no matter how "cringe" they may seem now.
I lost a lot of the first 4-6 years of my work to hard drive failures and wish I had that stuff. I remember doing a drum n' bass remix of T.I.'s "Bring Em Out" that I swore was the song of the summer and I just wanna know what that sounds like now
when i was a teenager, I lost a bunch of shit because I formatted the wrong drive when trying to install Ubuntu on my PC AND I let my teens-era DeviantArt rot away and The Wayback Machine hasn't been particularly helpful in recovering it.
Even if you delete it from the public eye, keep backups of your old stuff somewhere.
one day in my late teens i decided to just delete every picture i took. i was embarrassed by them at the time and figured i'd not want to see them again. i couldn't have been more wrong, and now i miss those memories that are lost forever.
