After sleeping on it, I realize that I have inadvertently attempted to relitigate this topic, which I explicitly said was not my intention. I apologize to everyone for that.
I just feel strongly about this because I find this notion of textual permanence (especially publicly and online and outside of professional settings) to burden everyone with the dread and terror of having our words recorded, retained, and reused by strangers without our consent; this is something that average people do not expect with their every spoken word, and in fact consider it an affront to their persons. This threat looming over everyone’s online text chills our “speech” in exactly the same ways that mass surveillance does. This is because the indefinite retention of all text on the Internet is the modus operandi of mass surveillance, which weaponizes our communication against us through the increasingly necessary tools of our daily lives.
So as far as I am concerned, the popular “wisdom” that “when it’s online, it’s there forever” is as repugnant and false a logic as “I have nothing to hide”, and both derive from the same surveillance ideology. They are not true, and they should not be true, and we should be committed to fighting their realization, for otherwise they are proof that the Panopticon is real and we are all living in it.
But regardless, even if this decision were to be seriously reconsidered, it is no longer a matter of sitewide deletion policy, but of project-wide deletion policy. Any attempts at restoring user control over post availability will thus need to justify disaggregating it from the new unified project standard, which involves overcoming much more inertia than before the decision was made. I frankly don’t think that my philosophical musings are going to do that, if only because they are too long and abstract to be immediately persuasive.
There are also problems with all of the alternatives, some of which are not readily available due to the limitations of Discourse. So even if alternatives were considered, such as a conduct policy prohibiting deletion abuse or a stronger account “anonymization” feature that blanks the user’s posts as well (but not delete them), or limiting deletions to only being of replies and not topics, they will also need to be discussed and explored as adequate drop-in replacements for the current decision.
So practically speaking, the decision is likely here to stay unless we can somehow choose an alternative solution and come to a new agreement that project-wide user data retention should err on the side of user consent and data sovereignty, with data management being limited by the capabilities of the context and not by those of the least capable one (mailing lists), as opposed to the “unified” no-deletion policy we now have. (Technically even public mailing list archives can be modified and its entries expunged, but it’s rare.) I could argue that this would be a change back to a more “Qubic” direction, since it is context-based, user-controlled, and differentially limited in its access to user data (in contrast to the monolithic and system-controlled posture this decision establishes), but I think that is too unfair an appeal.
I have much more I can say on this topic, since it has been a thorn in my side for longer than I can remember, but I have already said more than enough. At least for the time being, it seems this decision will stay, at least so long as only a few are criticizing it.
It is disheartening, too, since I joined this forum with the comfort of knowing that I had the power to erase myself from here whenever I wished, something that distinguished it from the mailing lists, but that is no longer the case. That is a troubling change of tone for me, and causes me to be much more hesitant to post, since I now have no sovereignty over my own contributions. I can only wonder if others might quietly feel the same.
Regards,
John