I want to kick off a discussion, that hopefully leads to the wording of an RFC poll on an issue I have been thinking about lately that popped up last night.
The issue is, what do we do about a user requesting posts of theirs be deleted? I think a lot of times it can be a reasonable request - particularly in the case of trainwrecking concerns. I would like to have the right to delete something like say, my blog or certain posts in the mental health thread if they were being used against me in some way by a nefarious individual.
But, I don’t think it’s a good idea letting a user just delete any post they like for any reason. This seems ripe for abuse and would potentially make the site’s content worse.
So I want to start a discussion here and talk about what circumstances we should allow requested post deletions, if there should be any limitations to this, etc. Please share your opinions below and I will try to craft a RFC poll around whatever the read of the room is.
My 2c - I’d like to have this ability, but with some limits. I don’t know what those limits should be.
I think it’s very unlikely to be abused and the policy should be to delete if there’s a request that seems reasonable (not too much work for anyone) and deal with abuse if it happens ad hoc.
Definitely in favor. I’ve had to remove posts on other sites after getting weird messages from unknowns. Remember those MAGA Catholic threats on 22? @Goofyballer was recently stalked back to here by some MAGA donk from an apolitical discord that’s unrelated to this site. I really feel like forums should operate more like Twitter with accounts having an ability to protect their posts. Not sure if that’s even possible though. I believe posting personal stuff pseudo-anonymously can be therapeutic and/or helpful in ways that may not be possible otherwise, but hanging it out there for public search / warehousing seems like a fairly big weakness. Even more so for women given the extremely high rate they seem to be doxxed / harassed online.
I think you should absolutely have the right to do this, immediately and without process.
I dunno, it doesn’t seem like it would be that big of a deal to me in practice. Is there a hypothetical example you were thinking of that demonstrates a way it might be abused? I think the pros outweigh the cons by a lot.
I’m generally in favor of letting users have any post deleted for privacy concerns, and I doubt there’s any real objection to that. What I think is the more difficult case is whether or not people should be allowed to delete their own OPs, which may delete the replies of posters who didn’t want those deleted.
The ability to delete old posts you’ve made. I don’t think requesting other people’s posts be deleted is really some common use case or something we should cater to, barring extreme circumstances (like someone posting someone’s name/doxxing them)
yea but ninja deletions much longer after the fact can ruin the flow of conversation and ruin threads. I don’t think it should be done without good reason. But apparently we’ve had the ability all along.
You guys are weird, just do what twitter does. The poster can delete any content they posted at any time even years later, and OP’s in threaded posts are just “blanked out”. Why is this controversial? People should have full control of their own content.
It’s not controversial, no one’s making any controversy. I mistakenly believed that posters could not delete their posts. We got a request last night to delete several users’ posts. I didnt know our policy.
If what exists is fine, so be it. I think there should be tighter limits and it should be done on a request basis, to protect the integrity of the content here, but I also agree user’s should be able to do whatever they want with their content.
