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votes
A good discussion, deleted, *again*?
I've noticed a trend (with Reddit, but I don't exclude the possibility it could be happening elsewhere) that people post a topic, then a day later they delete it. I've always been of the opinion that the best use of a discussion forum is to leave an answered topic for future posters to find. Especially when a community is hardcore anti-repost.
Am I the only one who gets annoyed by this, or have others come across this too?
Eh, it annoys me but I've also been threatened over the internet (and then deleted all my stuff) so I sympathize with those who are worried about doxing
I've use shreddit in the past. It's a matter of privacy.
It can be annoying, but i want to have the option.
What i see a lot is people deleting the comment after being corrected by more than one person. That is a problem of ego.
At least for me a part that holds me back from posting is it might not be anonymous. In the sense that someone I know could put put enough together and figure out it was me. It might make my opinions knows including ones I consider private.
With that train of thought it might be to help remain anonymous.
I've seen this too, and my theory is these are privacy-conscious people trying to prevent their post history from being used against them in the future. Even innocuous posts with no personally identifiable information can still be used to profile someone, if there are enough of them. A motivated adversary could perform stylometic analysis of their writing, given enough sample data. Attempts could be made to correlate accounts on different sites. Other metadata like post timestamps could be used to partially reveal someone's location (or at least timezone). Point being, you can infer a lot about someone from their post history, if you want to badly enough.
I've had a mind to take this approach myself. I don't have any adversaries I'm concerned about, but who knows if that could change in the next n years. Should the need arise in the future, I'm not going to track down every comment I ever posted on every site I've ever used. So it makes a certain sense to clean up behind yourself as you go, after your comment has served its immediate purpose.
Who knows who these people are? Maybe they're celebrities or politicians or others in the public eye, posting pseudonymously but afraid those posts could be linked to their identities someday? Maybe it's about proactive public image curation, or protecting against potential stalkers. Maybe they're nobody special but they're just paranoid. Who knows.
Or it could be something totally different, that's just my theory.
Yes, it's annoying, and I hope it doesn't happen here. I think if you're going to ask questions then you should also participate in the community, and disappearing messages don't count. That's just using people without contributing.
A good point is made about safety, privacy, and doxing. It's an angle I hadn't considered. But then, doesn't it become a question of whether discussion can even be fostered on that platform, and what steps need to be taken to protect user privacy? Or does the question go even deeper than that? Have we reached a point where discussion boards (at least larger ones, and thus larger targets, like Reddit) have reached their end of usefulness?