The impossible census: who has really died on internet forums

The impossible census: who has really died on internet forums

A colon cancer announced in public. An obituary found on Google. A user who stopped posting and nobody knows whether they changed their nick or their world. On Spanish financial forums, with almost two decades of history, the question of who has died and who has simply left has become an exercise in digital archaeology where half the cases are certainties and the other half are suspicions.

The distinction is no small matter. There are deaths confirmed by relatives, by friends or by the deceased's own obituary. And there are disappearances that are just that: accounts that stopped writing, with no more proof than silence. The border between mourning and rumor is marked, almost always, by an administrative detail: whether someone outside the forum can verify that the person existed and then ceased to exist.

How a death gets confirmed

The recurring criterion is the same: confirmation comes from friends or acquaintances of the deceased, not from the forum itself. One cited case is that of a poker player known outside the internet: a quick Google search for his real name turns up the public trail of his death. Another is that of an air conditioning businessman from Valencia who announced his illness and whose obituary appeared online.

The cobi19 left its own list. One participant who wrote about investing and about nightlife died during the pandemic, according to the count made at the time. Another, a man in his fifties with cancer, died in the middle of the health crisis. The names pile up in a collective memory built out of fragments.

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The problem of those who simply stop writing

Most absences are not deaths. They are abandonments. And that is where the swampy ground begins: accounts inactive for years, users who got tired, people who left fleeing harassment or toxic dynamics. One mentioned case is that of a participant who stopped showing up after running into what she described as obsessive behavior from other users.

The pessimistic calculation circulating is that, with a forum founded around 2006, the real number of deaths could be extremely high and not even one percent would be known. It is an estimate with no statistical basis, but the order of magnitude makes sense: two decades add up, and the average age of the crowd does not invite optimism.

Some even argue that certain accounts presumed dead are in fact the same individual under several aliases, and that the silence of one of them proves nothing. The suspicion of multi-nicking hangs over more than one virtual obituary.

Illness told in the first person

The most repeated pattern is that of the user who announces their own illness. One documented case is that of a real estate professional who shared his diagnosis and how much time he had left, contributed data from his sector and then disappeared. Another is that of a man with ulcerative colitis who claimed it could be cured with kefir and lashed out at doctors who considered it incurable.

These stories have something of a public testament about them. People write their ending in a place where they have spent years arguing about everything, and they leave instructions, opinions and, sometimes, even the wish that someone announce it when the moment arrives. One of the most repeated messages: "I'll post a warning if I see I'm about to kick the bucket, it'll be the last thing I do."

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The memorial nobody has built

The proposal to build a memorial out of bricks —a kind of CIA wall but with account names— remained a joke. Nobody knows whether there is a budget for decent burials or who would pay for them. For now, the memory of the fallen rests on threads that are peine every so often and on the informal list of names each person remembers.

The underlying question is uncomfortable: how many of those who stopped writing are dead, and how many simply walked away? The honest answer is that nobody knows. And it probably never will be known.