This might not be an issue of the web being less open, but a recent change in online socializing. This is my (completely thought on the spot) interpretation: More users of social platforms who set their content as public, are expecting stranger visitors to simply consume their content on a superficial shallow level. Like maybe just gloss through the past few weeks or something. And then from there gain the simple impression that this user is interesting/happening/whatever positive. So it's a bit of peacocking on the Internet. Digging deeper would sorta "violate" the social customs these users are used to. They don't really want strangers to know what they did months or years back, because only their close friends would be the relevant parties who deserve to know that, on the basis of the long time spent together. But to have to tweak the settings of each piece of content that becomes "too old/far back" is troublesome. It's an interesting variant of the online diary. The user wants people to know his/her recent activity, but going further back breaches his/her threshold. Probably why things like Snapchat are getting popular, where the microbursts of content have extremely limited lifetimes. It's short enough for users to simply share their latest activity, yet make it somewhat harder for strangers to trace back far enough. (I mean viewers could just quickly download the content but it's still a significant enough barrier to deter curious strangers)
Thanks, I guess it makes sense in that way. Maybe it's that I see this social media content on the web and liken it to web sites in general, whereas it could be more like IRC or something, where sometimes it's not cool to keep logs and make the ephemeral persist. It's still weird for me though. Seems silly to try to restrict content socially instead of technically. Or maybe it's that I would use social media differently, in that I wouldn't put out anything I wouldn't want any given person to know about me, and in that way I would want others to view as much of it as they want, because all of it makes up the image I'm presenting. I feel like there's a whole different mode of thinking, or maybe a whole different analogy, of these things, which I'm only barely scraping at.
I think that a lot of what ccc is noticing is the natural cultural shift from tech savvy early adopters to main stream users. In the more wild west days things were small and honestly less overt sharing was going on. Even if the web was a central part of your life most of what you were doing was behind closed doors and you were aware of the distinction. The mainstream audience just doesn't care to understand it as much. They see it as exclusively a gateway to social networks. And social networks encourage you to over share and then make it very hard to reel things back. On most sites I know of you can't have different privacy settings for older posts. Because social networks make it so easy to over share and so difficult to hide the past, there is this apparent movement to make it socially unacceptable to look back too far in the past. At best I think it'll give users a false sense of security, but Facebook has already proven that once you have critical mass and become the social hub people feel unable to leave, even if they want to.