Don't Delete Stuff
You should expect anything you post here to be permanently, publicly available on the internet.
If Basecamp had a setting where I could disable people's ability to delete stuff (or to make significant changes in edits), I would use it.
If Basecamp had a setting where I could disable people's ability to delete stuff (or to make significant changes in edits), I would use it.
And when people delete stuff, they usually don't want you to write down your best recollection of what it said. They're implicitly asking you to help them erase the contents of it from the public record. They usually don't say they're asking that or thank you for the help, but will get upset if you take actions they dislike.
By preventing people from deleting anything ever, I think you are unnecessarily limiting the number of people who would be willing to become involved with you. People like their privacy and for good reason, in our culture. There's a lot of irrationality out there. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that someone could lose their job by being associated with your website.
People are fallible which means that even anonymous accounts aren't sufficient protection. I think you should have policies for when deletions are permitted, and be more tolerant of people's desire for privacy.
Also, privacy about personal information and private discussion are separate matters. And deletion is a third matter. Not 100% separate but mostly.
Deletion (particularly unilaterally) is also impractical in various ways, e.g. people may have a page open at the time you delete it and be able to save a copy that way, or they may receive email notifications containing the whole text you deleted. And people can and do make backups of digital data, e.g. I just yesterday posted a backup/export of this group's posts for public download. Fighting with the nature of the internet doesn't work well and generally requires implicit demands for the cooperation of others (often done with no thanks, appreciation, or acknowledgment of how intrusive that is to try to control the actions of others), as you've made of me today re the thread you deleted here.
I can assure you that I do not intend to delete anything else. I will be more careful about what I write in future. I'm sorry for the disruption it's caused you. Thank you for responding to my questions in this thread.
Feel free to kick me off, if you are worried that I will do the same thing again.
But you deleted text from the post that I'm quoting this sentence from.
https://twitter.com/ArsonAtDennys/status/1362153191102677001
There are multiple mirrors linked at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/lm36nk/old_scott_siskind_emails_which_link_him_to_the/
Good point.
Do you mean that you own the copyright to our posts? Do you mean that our posts are public domain? Creative Commons with attribution? I think this needs more clarity.
It is permitted to take parts of youtube videos, and then put them in your own youtube videos and comment on them. It can even be fair use to take an entire youtube video and put that inside of your own video and comment on that. And then later, if the original poster takes his video down, that doesn't affect your videos. He has no way to make *you* delete your videos that have parts of his videos inside of them.
But when you deleted your topic, you actually deleted my writing. And now, I don't think you want me to repost my writing along with your quotes & references to you. My writing was actually meant to respond to your entire post, so it would make sense (from my perspective) to repost the entire thing.
If your post had instead been a short youtube video, and I had put it within my own youtube video, then I would get to keep that up after you took yours down. But I don't think that's actually what you want - you don't actually want something with those kinds of terms. You want the ability to remove all of your writing, even from other people's content.
I don't want to post things about you that you don't want posted. So I won't repost my full response to you including the context. Instead I could re-write my point in a different way, that doesn't rely on your context, and then post that somewhere else. (I think the content of what I said is good, and I did want to share it with other people.) But that is work for me. I can be more careful in the future to only reply to you in ways that don't rely on your context, but that is difficult.
This response I am writing right now relies on your context, and wouldn't make sense if I reposted it without the context. So, from my perspective, I am doing work (and I am actually writing this to try to be helpful to you, to try to explain a different perspective to you), and you might end up demanding in the future that I no longer have the ability to use my own work that I already did. So that's a risk for me.
There are multiple websites for viewing deleted Reddit comments.
You are right that I would prefer that you don't post my words from the post I deleted. Thank you for offering to do work to meet that preference. I appreciate it.
I now understand Elliot's (and I presume your) rationale for not deleting things—or even making edits. It makes sense and I have no intention to do such a thing again. Please feel free to quote anything I write from this point on.