It is, and it can never be a good one, IMO... largely due to the many privacy concerns it brings up, which are especially problematic given the site's founding principle of Privacy by Design....
Is it a bad idea? It doesnt have to be.
It is, and it can never be a good one, IMO... largely due to the many privacy concerns it brings up, which are especially problematic given the site's founding principle of Privacy by Design. However, since you want to avoid having that focused on up here in ~test, I'll focus on some other issues I see with it instead. E.g.
While you may have perfectly good intentions, others will not, and by making all the data so readily accessible and easily available it would result in Tildes effectively giving tacit support to everyone, both good and bad actors, who utilize the information contained within. And that would not be a very good look for the site should someone abuse said information, regardless of the fact that it could have been scraped, since even though scraping can't be prevented, abuse due to scraping is a far cry from the site actively enabling bad behavior by making it trivial for anyone and everyone to get their hands on absolutely everything available here in one convenient package.
Not only that, but what you're asking for here could also potentially be a violation of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act in Canada (where Tildes is based), as well as the GDPR in Europe, unless every user on the site is explicitly asked for their consent to share all their submitted content in that collated manor, regardless of the fact it's public facing.
But even if it doesn't violate either statute, ethically speaking this is also incredibly iffy, IMO... since by doing this you would just be making it that much easier for users to completely lose control over their own data, by virtually guaranteeing that deleting things later would serve absolutely no purpose. Yes, there already exists the possibility that users can have their data scraped and archived somewhere, which grows increasingly more likely the more popular a site gets and the longer they leave something up, but it's not necessarily guaranteed to be archived if you at least force it to be scraped.
That's my personal opinion on this, anyways. Sorry for poo-pooing it so hard, but it unfortunately does strike me as a pretty terrible idea, regardless of the fact that you have good intentions for wanting to access all the data. :(
While this is not a good idea in general (I agree with @cfabbro), there can be some good uses of its modifications. Definitely, general users should not have access to such dumps. However:...
While this is not a good idea in general (I agree with @cfabbro), there can be some good uses of its modifications.
Definitely, general users should not have access to such dumps. However:
Selected users might be given access to generating metadata dumps (without the topic/comment texts, possibly also anonymised). I specifically mean https://ts.bauke.xyz/ here so that generating those stats does not require scraping.
When the site gets bigger and groups get their own mods, it might make sense for such content dumps restricted to a given group to be available to (some of) that group's mods.
It is, and it can never be a good one, IMO... largely due to the many privacy concerns it brings up, which are especially problematic given the site's founding principle of Privacy by Design. However, since you want to avoid having that focused on up here in ~test, I'll focus on some other issues I see with it instead. E.g.
While you may have perfectly good intentions, others will not, and by making all the data so readily accessible and easily available it would result in Tildes effectively giving tacit support to everyone, both good and bad actors, who utilize the information contained within. And that would not be a very good look for the site should someone abuse said information, regardless of the fact that it could have been scraped, since even though scraping can't be prevented, abuse due to scraping is a far cry from the site actively enabling bad behavior by making it trivial for anyone and everyone to get their hands on absolutely everything available here in one convenient package.
Not only that, but what you're asking for here could also potentially be a violation of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act in Canada (where Tildes is based), as well as the GDPR in Europe, unless every user on the site is explicitly asked for their consent to share all their submitted content in that collated manor, regardless of the fact it's public facing.
But even if it doesn't violate either statute, ethically speaking this is also incredibly iffy, IMO... since by doing this you would just be making it that much easier for users to completely lose control over their own data, by virtually guaranteeing that deleting things later would serve absolutely no purpose. Yes, there already exists the possibility that users can have their data scraped and archived somewhere, which grows increasingly more likely the more popular a site gets and the longer they leave something up, but it's not necessarily guaranteed to be archived if you at least force it to be scraped.
That's my personal opinion on this, anyways. Sorry for poo-pooing it so hard, but it unfortunately does strike me as a pretty terrible idea, regardless of the fact that you have good intentions for wanting to access all the data. :(
While this is not a good idea in general (I agree with @cfabbro), there can be some good uses of its modifications.
Definitely, general users should not have access to such dumps. However:
Selected users might be given access to generating metadata dumps (without the topic/comment texts, possibly also anonymised). I specifically mean https://ts.bauke.xyz/ here so that generating those stats does not require scraping.
When the site gets bigger and groups get their own mods, it might make sense for such content dumps restricted to a given group to be available to (some of) that group's mods.