The argument
Nothing on this site is a mistake
Every habit filed here is right somewhere. Most of them are right almost everywhere. That is not a softener put in front of the advice. It is the reason the advice is shaped the way it is.
There is a genre of writing about this subject that treats the reader as the problem. It lists things people do, calls them errors, and implies that anybody sensible would have known better. It is satisfying to write and it does not work, and the reason it does not work is simple. You cannot stop doing something you have never once been punished for doing.
Consider what actually happened over twenty years. You were taught, by consistent daily reinforcement, that saving a password is prudent, that letting a browser fill a form saves time and prevents typos, that backing up photos means never losing a picture of somebody who has since died, that asking a question in public gets you a good answer within the hour, and that keeping a receipt is what a competent adult does. Every one of those lessons was true. Every one of them was reinforced hundreds of times. None of them ever cost you anything.
A habit is not a belief. You cannot argue it out of somebody, because it was never argued into them.
This matters practically, not just as a matter of tone. If a reader accepts that a habit is stupid, they file it under things stupid people do, and then they stop watching for it, because obviously they are not stupid. The habit then runs undisturbed for years. The readers who actually catch themselves are the ones who understand that the habit is sensible, that it has served them well, and that it is simply pointed at the wrong place this time.
Why "here" is the operative word
Nearly everything that goes wrong on this site goes wrong because of a mismatch between two sets of assumptions. Ordinary web software assumes there is a company behind the site, that the company wants you to come back, that it can send you an email, that it has a support queue, and that a mistake can be undone by somebody whose job it is to undo mistakes. That assumption is baked into every convenience feature you use.
On a market reached over Tor, most of that is missing. There is nobody to email, no reset link, no reversal, no support queue and no institution that competes for your goodwill. The features on your machine do not know that. They behave exactly as designed, which means they behave as though the missing infrastructure were there.
So the failure is not in your behaviour or in the software. It is in the join between them. That is why the advice on these pages is almost never "be more careful" and almost always "turn this specific thing off before you start", or "keep this in a different place". Carefulness is a state of attention, and attention runs out. An arrangement made in advance does not.
What follows from taking this seriously
- Do not try to fix forty things. Fix the three you actually do. A person who changes three arrangements permanently is ahead of a person who resolves to be vigilant about forty.
- Expect to fail and plan for the failure. Every page here ends with a way of catching the habit afterwards, because catching it afterwards is realistic and never doing it is not.
- Separate the arrangement from the moment. Anything you have to remember while you are tired, distracted or in a hurry is a thing that will not happen. Anything you set up once and never touch again is a thing that will.
- Do not feel clever about the habits you do not have. Everybody has a different four, and the ones you find silly are somebody else's daily routine, and vice versa.
What this site refuses to do
It does not tell anybody what to buy, whether to use a market, or how to do anything unlawful. It does not describe how to hide from anybody. It sticks to the level of turning off a browser feature, choosing where to write something down, and knowing which folder a file landed in, because that is the level at which habits actually operate.
It also refuses to frighten people into paying attention. Fear is a short lived motivator and it produces bad decisions, most of which involve trusting whoever sounds most confident. Every page here would rather be dull and correct. If you want the shape those pages take, see how a page is built, and if you want the whole set at once, see every habit in one place.
What readers ask about this group
If none of these are mistakes, why change anything?
Because correct behaviour in one place can be wrong in another, and this is one of the places where several of them are. Changing the arrangement is not an admission that the habit was ever bad. It is the same thing as unplugging an appliance before you take it abroad.
Is this just being nice to the reader?
No. It is the finding. Habits formed by consistent reward are extremely durable, and a reader who has accepted that their habit is foolish stops looking for it. Being accurate about why the habit exists is what makes it findable.
Does that mean nobody is responsible for anything?
It means blame is not a useful tool here. Whether a habit was your fault does not change what it does or how to arrange around it, and the pages on this site spend their time on the second question because it is the only one with an answer you can act on.