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What does the delete button on a post do?
what does the delete button do exactly?
sorry if this isn't an appropriate question for this group, I couldn't seem to find the answer in the docs.
what does the delete button do exactly?
sorry if this isn't an appropriate question for this group, I couldn't seem to find the answer in the docs.
It removes the post. But that's a very selfish way of looking at it. If you post a question and someone answers it, someone else can find that thread in the future which could help them. So just because it isn't useful for you anymore doesn't mean you should delete it.
From the site's documentation page on content:
Anyone on Tildes is allowed to delete the content they post, at any time, for any reason.
So I want to push back on the idea that deleting anything you post is ever selfish. It isn't anyone else's choice whether I get to delete my content, nor should it be. If I post something and later want it gone, no reason someone else could possibly have for wanting my content to remain is more important than my right to have it removed.
I don't think there should ever be strings attached when a user wants to delete their content. We should respect that decision 100% of the time, and not fall for the trap of thinking that anyone's content should be preserved against their will, just because of its perceived value. It's not up to us.
Of course you’re right! But, it’s what my people call an asshole move.
Unless keeping the post or comment interferes with your well-being, it’s not a matter of rights, because it genuinely does not matter to you.
You are participating in a forum where if everyone deleted their comments on a whim, it would sieze to exist. It’s give and take. It’s etiquette. It’s about sensibility.
It would be healthy for the forum as a society if people viewed deleting their contributions with severity and did not do it out of principle or habit.
It might help to understand that I view this issue through the lens of consent. When a user withdraws their consent to have their content hosted on this site, it would be pretty wretched of us to vilipend them for that choice.
I don't think this community should have a culture of judging users for their choice to delete their own content. We should want to promote the agency and autonomy of users, not discourage it.
So I disagree with the idea that someone choosing to delete their own content, at any time, for any reason, is something that anyone else can reasonably judge them for.
I never want a user on Tildes to feel conflicted between wanting to delete something they've posted, and worrying about what others might think if they do. It's that user's decision, not ours. There should be neither rules nor a culture that disparages a user from making that decision for themselves.
It also might help to know that in May 2023, I asked Deimos to temporarily ban me for a year, and delete everything I had previously posted to Tildes.
I certainly wouldn't entertain the idea that my choice to delete the thousands of posts and comments I had written up to that point was in any way selfish or an "asshole move". Participating here is entirely voluntary afterall. None of us owes content to anyone else.
To be frank, it would be weird for someone to tell me I'm somehow selfish or an asshole for choosing to not host my old content here anymore. It's not up to them. It isn't their choice. I don't think it's a decision they can reasonbly criticize.
No one here is responsible for populating this forum with content, no one is responsible for keeping this place alive.
If there ever actually came a day that Tildes was going to 'die' because all of its users deleted all of their posts, it would be such a slap in the face of what this site was supposed to be, to prevent them from doing that.
@Halio @sparksbet
EDIT: I realize we're all in agreement that mechanically, anyone should be able to delete their content. Apologies for not making that clearer.
The only pushback I have for you is that I also do not believe you should be prevented by the site from deleting your own content (you made it seem at the end that perhaps this is what I am arguing). I hope that clears that up.
I actually don’t find the idea of being judged so bad, to me it seems to be a part of the societal fabric and we navigate it in part by picking up on social clues.
I however don’t think you have the right heuristic here. If he could do it with the flip of a switch, should Hemingway be allowed to delete all his contributions to society as well? Maybe because he disagrees with the publisher? We’re not important enough to generate that kind of dilemma because we’re not writing monumental works of fiction here, but in the society that is Tildes, the only reason your contributions matter at all is because you are a part of a chain of comments that builds up an exchange of ideas. Taking your ideas back breaks the chain in a tiny tiny way and sucks for everyone else.
It’s honestly not a big deal because on important topics, just like you get a few upvotes, there are also other comments with similar ideas, but it truly does not affect your life to leave it up and it is an annoyance for others nonetheless.
I mentioned that it’s about give and take. I think giving something to society and then taking it away is actually a horrible practice and your principled stance entails something of that sort. It’s the „nuclear option“ of social media and there probably is a reason why we use the world nuclear to describe it. You’re not the one getting blown up.
So for me this is a case of defending your right to do it, but never agreeing with you.
And you can replace Hemingway with Marcus Aurelius or a contemporary writer. My point is independent of the agreements we make with platforms or publishers because it’s about the exchange of ideas.
We're all in agreement that you should be able to delete your own posts and comments whenever you want for any reason. But I and anyone else is free to have an opinion about whether deleting a post for a given reason is a dick move or not. I don't think the consent framing changes that at all, as it only really serves as an argument for why you should have control over whether your posts stay up or not -- something we all already agree you should have. There is, as I said in my earlier comment, no incompatibility between believing something should be allowed and believing that doing it under some circumstances is a dick move.
Ultimately you can't control other users' opinions of your deleting your posts, and my position remains the same as when I left my first comment. You're free to think that's unreasonable -- but that opinion is fundamentally no different than my opinion about deleting posts. We're simply going to have to agree to disagree.
That‘s a pretty silly mistake!
I agree with you that people have the right to delete their posts and comments, but I also think ”deleting it because it serves no purpose for me anymore” is a selfish mindset, if that’s the only reason you want to delete it.
There are lots of things that are both allowed and selfish. It's perfectly possible to both believe that users should be able to delete their posts whenever and to also think that deleting a post because it's "outlived its usefulness" to you is selfish. These are not incompatible beliefs.
EDIT: That said, I don't necessarily think the post OP is probably talking about would have been super useful to other users, since it was a pretty specific relationship advice post. It seems unlikely that his actual reason for wanting to delete the initial post is that it's outlived its usefulness and more that he doesn't think it reflects well on him, especially if it's linked from his profile. I can understand wanting to delete a post like that.
eh partly. most of the comments were helpful and insighful, which I appreciated. but towards the end 2 people came in and instead of answering the question, started passing judgement and throwing around wild accusations and basically calling me some sort of assaulter and instead of ignoring the accusations like I should have, I reverted to how I would act on reddit and fired back in kind and deimos understandably shutdown the convo.
although I am sure people on tildes would disagree with my characterization.
yeah, even without being able to see those exchanges (they were gone when I got there), I can see why you'd just wanna delete the thread and disengage. Even as someone who agrees with the comments that are left, it was a lot of response to something that's a pretty specific personal issue, so I can understand not wanting it to stay up.
As a reminder for people reading this, tildes has an ignore feature. If you mark a topic as ignored, you will no longer get any notifications for that topic. If you get into a heated conversation and want to disengage, I highly recommend trying out this ignore feature. It's not really reasonable for this circumstance, because being the OP of an advice thread is different than being a participant in another thread, but I thought I would shout out this feature for people who may not be aware of it.
just to clarify, I can hit ignore on a comment on a post I made or I can ignore a whole post only?
Ignore on a post. It's at the top level.
Interesting discussion from you and others but I want to add a perspective that I think hasn’t been covered…
On the internet there’s never a guarantee of true deletion. You can delete a post from Tildes but it may continue to live on in browser caches, search indices, the wayback machine, in untold screenshots or pastebins or who knows where else anonymous strangers have decided to duplicate it to.
Which isn’t to say that any or all of those things are necessarily true in a given situation, only that they could be. And we have no way of knowing. I think we’d all benefit from treating content we share online as if it’s permanent, even if we know that’s not strictly true. Better to employ an opsec mindset in the authorship phase, then to post cavalierly and then try to clean up after it’s loose in the wild.
I think OP is probably asking more about unimportant, “disposable” content than sensitive data that they want to purge for privacy or reputational reasons. Even so, this angle is worth at least considering. Personally I don’t bother deleting anything because I’m careful never to post something I wouldn’t mind preserving in perpetuity. And (as others have said) I’ve personally benefited from finding enough answers to odd questions in old forum posts, and been frustrated when my only lead had been deleted at some point after it was posted, that I try to pay it forward in case my post might help others in the future.
Like it or not, folks, this is the correct answer. In fact, if I were to go to google and search for the keywords "tildes.net" and my own username, then narrow the search results to a timeframe that includes when I deleted a post, that post will show up in the results.
(As an aside, it also goes to show you that Google's indexer still "works," they just continue to thwart the results in many other ways to keep the investors happy.)
I honestly think it raises some concerns about authorship, the act of publication, and even delves into the topics covered by Roland Barthes in the essay The Death of the Author. There are many rumors that J.D. Salinger wished he never wrote The Catcher in the Rye. Should Salinger have been allowed to destroy his work for that reason? I realize it's not the same, we are not literary giants, we are not printed and sold, or paid for our writing here, but we contribute to a discussion that is evolving, and allowing readers to interpret our words in their own meaning. Isn't something taken away from those readers if we delete our writing?
I suppose the best solution for now is to leave the choice with each user.
To add another perspective on this: We're creating one giant library of history. Not just of what happened, but of what ordinary people like you and me are thinking of current times. While I like the idea of the 'right to be forgotten' I also like how we're writing so much in one go.
I do still agree with @hungariantoast on ownership of our own material. Still, it's also a valid perspective to consider imo.
And that library will be, unfortunately, scraped by someone wanting to add more data to an LLM.
It's like the "You made this? I made this" meme.
One of the more frustrating things on reddit is when you find an ancient post that asks exactly what you want to know and the top rated reply is deleted.
It is enormously frustrating, but perhaps the author meant for the deletion to be a protest against the repository. =..=
Another way to look at it is that the author meant for the past helpfulness to be between community members of a certain size, creed, and time frame, and that those words should not be taken outside of that context, or regurgitated into near-helpfulness by AI.
I speak as someone who (probably poorly) tried to delete a decade plus of comments.
Yeah I deleted a lot of my old stuff when I nuked my account during the API drama. Privacy, Reddit's business model, AI... there were quite a few reasons. In the end, I decided that it was my effort, and that sometimes, selfishness is also self asserting.
That said, it was also quite emotional as I helped a lot on the mental health side of things, and even received occasionally a PM that I saved their live. Still, I don't regret my choice. Though I sometimes do miss it.
Same..... I still receive the occasional "I don't know if you're still around but--" PMs and so far I have not responded.... =..= it is selfish but there's very little stopping me full blown being back on a platform that broke my heart. It's a line I have to draw
Yeah it's why I deleted my account. :| Otherwise I'm pretty sure I'll go back eventually. I needed to draw the line for myself.
So all the comments and etc are deleted and no longer visible?
It wasn't a productive post. partly my fault but still.
I'm pretty sure that the comments are all still visible, and if someone navigates to that URL they can read them.
I see, wasn't sure if the admins had some sort of cron job that would wipe the post from the db or something
thanks for the info
Without elaborating: the topic was productive and you received a pretty definitive answer. It's not unproductive simply because it wasn't the answer you wanted to hear.
I say this because this is a pretty unhealthy attitude to have, especially here on Tildes.
If you delete a topic you have posted, it will no longer show up on the front page of the site. Anyone with the link to the topic can still visit it and view all the comments, but they won't be able to easily discover the topic any more. The topic's body text or link will also be removed.
Any comments on the topic will stay, and you will have to individually delete your own comments on the topic to get rid of them. You cannot delete anyone else's comments on a topic, whether you delete the topic itself or not. (Only Deimos, the admin, has that ability.)
I'm pretty sure, for legal reasons, deleted topics and comments are retained in the database for thirty days, then purged afterwards. (Might be wrong about that though.)
I tried to reply to a comment that I believe was your reply to me. I was unable to. I searched unsuccessfully for the post before I realized that you probably deleted it.
I don't have the URL. I can't find the comments although I am curious what else was said.
Your comments on deleted posts are still visible on your profile, and you can click the link from there view the other comments (though the text of the initial post is gone and presumably you can't reply anew on a deleted post). Can confirm that I'm able to find a recently deleted post (no idea if it's OP's, though it'd be bizarre timing if it wasn't) and read the comments from your profile.