Hello @Sven,
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I was concerned that I seemed too confrontational before, but you at least do not appear to have taken it that way. I only hope you can tolerate another endless scroll. 
I agree that the ability to edit after the fact allows one to exercise that power maliciously, but that is a given of power as such. With great power comes great responsibility, as I learned from my years among comics. 
So while that is a problem, I do not think the solution therefore must be to divest everyone of that power for fear that it can be abused. Such a thesis on power is fundamentally hostile to the very concept of freedom.
But malicious activities like that are ultimately beyond the scope of the present issue, which was originally about otherwise innocent abuses of post deletion that inconvenienced some fellow members. They are also able to be handled without the need to restrict global user control, as well, since sanctions and restrictions can be applied to problem users who stray into malicious abuse.
Anyway, a technical solution to this very well may be appropriate (at least when it comes to edits), at least in that there can be a time limit on how long one can edit a given post, which prevents malicious changes long after the fact. Even this is likely unnecessary so long as edits remain public, however, since anyone attempting such an attack can be quickly exposed and sanctioned by simply seeing the post’s public changelog. Deletions are more difficult to address, but typically the flow of a conversation is such that any omission tends to be obvious unless it was so insignificant that no one else acknowledged that it even occurred.
But I object to the notion that editing and deleting posts infringes upon anyone else’s rights because it implies that I do not actually own my own contributions. Who owns this post? As far as I am concerned, I do, as do you own yours. Why do you have a “right” to access my creative works, which may constitute personally identifiable information (I consider writeprints to be PII), unless I consent to that? Why would I have a “right” to yours? I ask these questions as moral questions, not legal ones. By arguing against the modification of my own creative works as I see fit, at least in-so-far as my modifications do not malign others, you are effectively arguing that I do not own this post because my submission of it relinquishes its ownership to The Community.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it institutionalizes the community and renders it institutionally adversarial to the interests of its own members. No longer are we fellow members who collectively decide our interests through discussion and aggregation, but rather mere members of a Community whose interests trump ours and which owns everything we create, not because we have collectively agreed upon that through discussion and aggregation but because we have alienated the system of our collectivity from its individual parts and assigned it an authority over its namesake. This alienation deforms what it means to be a community, to have community, and ultimately leads to the death of community through the rise of an estranged Other that governs for us. For whom is this community? Its members? Or itself?
Exemplary of this logic is the notion that preserving the context in its original state preserves the original intent of its members, even though it is the members who determine their intent and not the representations they have crafted. The context, and its content, is preserved only to the extent that its members wish it to be so. Anything more or other than that is a thesis that the members are not the owners of their own creations, having been supplanted by those creations through the abstraction of their relation to them.
Coming back down to earth, what I am saying here is that it is extremely dangerous to posit The Will of The Community separate from the concrete wills of its members, since doing so renders us superfluous to the system we have produced. This is why I ask who owns these posts, for if your answer is “the community” then that illuminates yet another schism between us—one in which I think the “freedom” you seek is the freedom of the only entity under discussion that is not real, namely the “community” as such.
I think freedom only means something if the freedom is real, and freedom is real only if the free are, too. I do not consider The Community to be real, at least not real like you or I are, and so I am not interested in its “freedom”. I am interested in my freedom, in your freedom, in our freedom, and I think that is not served by denying us power over our own contributions just so that The Community can be free to preserve them.
On the matter of having community members worthy of the responsibility and respect we wish them to have, this is only achievable if it is possible and right now it is not possible, at least not with respect to responsible use of deletion. Such character, of both individuals and the communities they form, is cultivated through the social efforts I have described before and demonstrated through their exercise. This cannot be done if there is no possible way to exercise that power and cultivate such standards through it. Of course there will be those who abuse their power, but part of our responsibility as members is to address those abuses with the same mutual consideration we seek to establish and preserve.
As I mentioned before, all of the actual cases described above appear to have been failures of “netiquette” or other frustrating but ultimately innocent breaches of norms. The malicious scenarios you have described can occur, of course, but have they? Even if they have, but especially if they have not, does that warrant limiting the freedom of all just on the chance that it may happen (again)?
On the specific experiences you mentioned here: As I said before, those are unfortunate and unacceptable and should not occur. But is such frustration at being unable to reply sufficient justification to eliminate an entire degree of freedom from all community members? Regarding quoting, should we as members not also have a responsibility to be careful and judicious in our quoting others, erring to omit when unnecessary and editing quotes to exclude potentially sensitive information? Yes, these edge-cases can be difficult to navigate and they are ripe opportunities for asynchronous decision-making resulting in frustrating outcomes. But if we allow these to dictate our basic freedom to participate here, especially at a technical level and not just a social or normative one, then we may just be sacrificing control over the very software we use just to satisfy hypothetical faux pas that rarely occur.
(For the record, I would be opposed to any deletion that deletes the original content of others without their express consent. This includes deleting topics and thus all its replies, but does not include deleting quoted text from within replies.)
You are talking to a pessimist here, Sven. I do not have a high opinion of humans or of the current state of humanity. So, I am not one to be polyannish about the noble character and great integrity of strangers, or very trusting of them either. Nonetheless, I do not think that the appropriate response to the threat of freedom should be to render us unfree.
I especially do not consider such a response to be acceptable when this did not even achieve consensus throughout the community, only a slim technical majority among the handful of original participants in this thread. Many of us were simply not informed of these decisions affecting us and relying on our vigilance to preserve our freedom is not how any society should operate, not even small online communities like this.
Some side points to show that I am not just being contrarian:
- I (too?) have an archivist/data historian impulse that mourns the loss of any information and desires the preservation of all human works as the collective legacy of our species, so coming to terms with how antithetical these romantic notions are to basic principles such as autonomy and privacy is still a struggle. Many days, I am still genuinely angry that we have lost some of the works of important thinkers from hundreds or even thousands of years ago, and I still find it tragic that almost none of the writings of every-day people have survived the centuries, yet here I am arguing for the permission to ensure precisely that within digital systems that were literally designed for indefinite data retention. We must always remember that while information does have a life of its own, its life is never as real as its author, whose interests should take precedent.
- Most of what I have learned over the years has also come from forums, message boards, mailing lists, Usenet posts, even chan threads if you give me enough bourbon to admit it. Their eventual loss is always a tragedy, in much the same way the loss of any information is, but we should not let our desire to preserve knowledge be a justification to disregard the lives of its creators.
- I hate the fact that Discourse requires cookies and JavaScript to function properly and consider this to be an entirely avoidable failure of the software. I also dislike its locally centralized architecture (compared to peer-to-peer networks), but at least Discourse permits many self-hosted instances, which is far better than can be said of most alternatives (including email for all but the technically inclined and motivated sysadmins among us). Some of the problems of Discourse aesthetically and spatially are also apparent to me, which I have seen others describe on other Discourse forums. My use of Discourse anyway is mainly because of the features it provides over email, though, and thus is despite these flaws. It is also easier to keep segregated from my work and personal life, since it’s not all flooding into the same mailbox.
Lastly, I think we can both agree that the original specific problem cases for which you created this topic are legitimate and real and really annoying and deserve a community response of some kind that halts their occurrence. You were right to raise the topic, of the particular deletion abuse you noticed; I only disagree with the conclusion that it is apt to restrict deletion capabilities altogether. So whatever happens, let us at least ensure that experiences like those you had are minimized.
Kind regards,
John
P. S. I am aware of the other thread that is currently ongoing. This essay (plus my complicated support request topic) has been enough Discourse for me today, so I will address that thread another time. Much of what I say here is relevant to that thread and may help explain my views on these subjects, but I chose to post it here anyway due to its focus on the thread topic. I hope you understand.
And probably too late for any comments to matter… But FWIW, since I also feel strongly about this, a few thoughts in case this ever gets resurrected: