Proof of concept
It already works — by hand
Before there was a product, there were personal experiments. Each is a working prototype of what Ephemeral now automates. The gap between doing this by hand and doing it for anyone — that gap is the company.
LinkedIn
The clean slate
Unfollowed all ~6,000 connections; the noisy feed went blank. Rebuilt it deliberately — following only people I could imagine becoming. ~3,500 requests last year, accepted one.
Six real connections in a year, versus thousands of shallow ones.
YouTube
Seed and erase
Deleted all watch history, turned tracking off. Re-enabled it for one hour, watched only aligned content, then locked history off. The chosen direction held for a year.
One hour of intention, locked in; everything else expiring by design.
Email
Closing the loop
A paid removal service plus a sweep through unsubscribes cut the noise — but it was manual, ongoing, and limited to what one tool could see.
The approach works; doing it by hand demands scripts and constant vigilance.