Can you remember how you were feeling on this day last year? How about three years ago? Facebook can, and if you’re a regular user of the service, you may have noticed that for the better part of the last year, it’s been ready to remind you.

“We care about you and the memories you share here,” the platform warmly intones, offering a confetti draped image of a photo or status update from some time ago. Theoretically this is a sensible idea – we upload massive reams of stuff to our online networks, and our fleeting day-to-day engagements with these services are easy to forget, and occasionally fun to remember. Sure, you’d like to be reminded that your friend’s wedding was six years ago now, and look how much fun you had then! Or look how three years ago you posted about your favorite coffee shop, and now just today you did almost the exact same thing. Ha ha! Good times!

Except all too often the algorithm chooses posts that we’d really rather not “like to look back on,” as Facebook suggests. At best there’s some comedy in the idea that you’d appreciate a tender, wistful reflection on the time you took a picture of a snack. At worst, announcements of job loss, photos of happy days with your now-ex, a pet that has died, or a family illness are suddenly unearthed without warning, served into your day along with Facebook’s chirpy, intimate good-day wishes. When I polled Twitter to ask about some of the most egregious violations, one person recalled having Facebook “warmly” remind her of the time she shared the missing persons poster for a friend who ultimately was not found alive.

Someone else once used Facebook to keep family and friends updated about how their mum’s cancer treatment was going – she’s fine now, but seeing those old daily updates were an unpleasant reminder. Frightening times packaged in a “caring” Facebook memory box. It’s common for people to get lovely party pictures from weddings that led to divorces, or friendships that ended acrimoniously.

It seems Facebook is still experimenting with the feature, which it calls On This Day. In October it added some filters that allow users to control the experience by excluding particular dates or people – one woman said the ability to exclude periods of time was crucial to her wish to forget the time before her transition. But as with lots of Facebook features, these controls can be tough for the average user to find (here they are in the Help Center), and there doesn’t actually seem to be any way to reliably turn On This Day off (we got in touch with Facebook’s external PR firm to confirm details of how the feature actually works, but they were unable to help).

Though many users might not like On This Day, few are surprised – we’ve come to expect unwanted “features” to keep sprouting up out of Facebook like spores. We tolerate this sort of encroachment as so many of us have come to depend on Facebook as a hub for social connections, daily chat, and as a way of keeping up with people we don’t know well but would like to. Admittedly, my personal user file is massive – what would happen to all my pictures, my personal history, if I tried to get away?

But there’s more to learn from the On This Day feature than simply another lesson in how creepy Facebook is and how difficult it is to get away from. Certainly the discomfort we feel in the face of these unwelcome “looks back” is partially to do with Facebook’s invasive qualities, and the revelation of how much of ourselves we have volunteered to it. But part of the palpable dissonance clearly comes from the fact that many of our posts were never intended to become “memories” in the first place. An important question gets raised here: what’s the purpose of all this “content” we serve to platforms, if it’s useless in constructing a remotely valuable history of ourselves? Are we creating anything that’s built to last, that’s worth reflecting on, or have social media platforms led us to prize only the thoughts of the moment?

These platforms have led to a shift in the daily computer user’s thinking and self-expression. In a world of status updates and tweets the longform idea starts to become a luxurious rarity; our primary means of receiving and processing news and culture becomes the “take”, a shareable response designed for live conversation and the ideas of the day, not for the authority of permanence. So many of the things we post lose energy and purpose outside of their intended moment. Even some of my own columns I’ve written on daily issues startle me, in that in five years – no, even in one year – the context will have well and truly passed, leaving ideas dangling, illogical, useless outside their time.

We generally think of social media as a tool to make grand announcements and to document important times, but just as often – if not more – it’s just a tin can phone, an avenue by which to toss banal witterings into an uncaring universe. Rather, it’s a form of thinking out loud, of asserting a moment for ourselves on to the noisy face of the world.

The mostly useless On This Day feature makes clear how fragile our histories online are becoming. If we’re channeling our energy into hot takes, context-dependent tweets and fleeting daily status updates, where are we storing our actual histories?

Though I’m an avid, dependent social media user, my childhood is documented in a shoebox of physical photos and a couple of notebooks. My parents treasure a few photo albums and a little set of squiggly VHS tapes, and that is all we have. I grew up with the idea of memory as intimate and owned, significant events and times folded lovingly and tucked away in the home. Today we stagger under daily records served up to us without our permission, by platforms we hardly trust, in formats that mean little to us, of snippets and half-thoughts we never intended to remember. Sometimes it’s even impossible to permanently destroy the things we want to forget, and they remain etched forever on the internet’s endless memory for strangers to find.

In 10 years, will you want your daily weather complaints filed alongside your ancient political causes, your cries for help, your old relationships and your minor headaches – in a theoretical cabinet owned by someone else? How can we reliably access the things we’d like to remember, instead of the mental clutter we’d like to forget? What would a more permanent, more substantial, more valuable “disk image” of ourselves look like online, and what kind of solution could arise to host it?

It’s an interesting technology and culture challenge. Lots of my friends and colleagues use Timehop, an app that well pre-dates On This Day. Timehop can aggregate your history from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Flickr, and even your phone’s own Camera Roll if you opt to let it. A cartoon dinosaur mascot offers users a daily update featuring anything you shared on that day in previous years, and you can also view updates from Timehop friends you’ve elected to connect to. You can even re-share the “memories”, with your choice of decorative frames with captions like “STILL TRUE” – this element of customisation is small but significant. Unlike Facebook, Timehop offers a dedicated, curated space, and its users are basically in control of how and what is shared.

But this ability to control what you see of your past, to manage who sees it and how they can engage with it, and the ability to delete it should you choose to is becoming rare. In many senses, we’ve lost control of our own stories online – the ongoing “right to be forgotten” discussions that began in the European Court of Justice in 2014 act as a partial concession to that point.

Instead of a shoebox of pictures and a diary, your child will grow up depending on interconnected platforms and services. Her entire history, from the first ultrasound picture you share to your network to the day she has a headache to the day she makes a snack, and on like that, will be documented – and could belong to service providers.

Unless we can regain control of our narratives online, unless we can discover a way to value our social content, thisflickering constellation of forgettable “moments” and social media “memories”, is the main way our histories will be kept.