Recently, someone asked about advice on a PC build, collected a lot of useful feedback then deleted their post once they had what they needed. Now all that work other users put in is inaccessible, and all that valuable knowledge can’t help anyone else. I think that’s a problem.
Kind of wish deleting posts wasn’t a thing. Would rather just the user-association was removed or something. Just because OP doesn’t want to be involved in the thread anymore, doesn’t mean everyone else feels the same.
I think deleting posts is an important feature, but it should only remove the content of the post, not hide the associated comments. The post is created by the OP, so they should be able to remove it, but comments are created by other users and so there’s no reason why the OP should have the power to remove them.
How would that work in practice though?
Changing the post title, content, and author to something like “[deleted]” while keeping comments visible should be sufficient.
I appreciate having control over my own data though. I would like to keep an option to delete all my posts/likes/dislikes/accounts as I desire. If someone wants to save a copy of my data, they have an option to do so before I delete my data, but not after.
I get what you’re saying, but as you kind of mentioned, it’s a falsehood to believe any of your posts and comments here are under your control anyway. They get federated to other instances, maybe mirrored or crawled by bots. And these may or may not abide by your deletion of the content.
Might be best to just expose/enforce this reality to users. You send data publicly onto the Internet, it’s forever out of your control. And there’s no system in existence that can change that reality.
Also why it’s important that a doxxed Internet never becomes reality.
issue title for context: [Bug]: Display deleted or removed posts when they have children
Surprisingly the ticket has no upvotes. (Well, had. I left one.)
