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Do topic logs get deleted after a period of time?
I was going to post a question regarding the topic logs but looking through my old posts, I see that much less than I remember have any topic logs on them.
I can't tell if I am imagining that alot more of them used to have topic logs or Deimos coded it to be a temporary record of the changes that the mods here make?
and if so, why temporary?
Yes, topic logs are deleted after 30 days. I understand that the idea is to avoid storing anything that isn't necessary as a matter of course. Similarly, individualized voting data is also deleted after 30 days, and only the aggregate score is stored.
I'm sure I've seen Deimos comment more specifically on the reason for topic log cleanup (something about it no longer being pertinent after a month?), but I may be misremembering that part.
edit: Here's the announcement post with a few more details.
Another thing worth mentioning related to the reasoning behind the 30 day data purge is this part of the Announcing Tildes blog post:
And, IMO, the two videos in those links are especially worth watching (YouTube versions below):
Haunted by Data - Maciej Ceglowski
We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | Zeynep Tufekci
cc: @b3_k1nd_rw1nd
thats a bit....unsettling.
I mean, I guess I shouldn't care too much. I am careful when talking on here that nothing can lead back to my real identity so even if a mod pulled a spez and started editing stuff in a misleading way, it wouldn't impact my real life but still, the idea of a mod being able to edit what I write here and have that transparency be short-term is a bit bothersome.
The 30 day deletion isn’t meant to be a cover-up or anything. It’s meant to be part of Tildes’s private-by-design nature. Accumulating data indefinitely is what gets sites and users into trouble when they get breached, for example. That data is also now a huge target for LLMs.
It also is a sort of tacit guarantee that the site won’t sell us out in the future. Deimos isn’t sitting on years’ worth of individualized voting data, which is undoubtedly worth a lot to advertisers, because the site gets rid of it.
Data can’t be leaked or harvested or sold if it doesn’t exist in the first place, which is why the site has a policy to discard unnecessary data in the first place. I find the policy comforting, rather than worrying. On a wider internet that’s eager to hoover up every single click and mouse movement and piece of information it can get from you to sell it off to tracking and advertising companies, Tildes stands out as a shining counterexample that treats personalized information as a liability rather than an asset.
Another part about Tildes that I like is that titling and tagging is collaborative, not corrective. For people coming from other sites, especially reddit, mod actions can have the implicit message of “you did something wrong.” That’s not the case here. Instead I encourage you to see anyone editing your titles or tags as helping you out. I’m immensely comforted by the fact that when I post, even if I don’t know exactly how to tag something, I know that someone else will help me out with it. I love that if I make an embarrassing typo in my title, it doesn’t have to live persistently on the front page for all to see, because someone will fix it for me. I love that, as an American, the titles of news articles I post are often clarified for a wider global audience, because many people here aren’t from the US, but a lot of headlining treats America as the default (for example, saying “Supreme Court” instead of “US Supreme Court”).
Finally, a key part of Tildes is built on trusting users. I have title and tag editing permissions and, if I wanted to, could maliciously edit stuff. I don’t though, and neither do the other people that have those permissions. It simply hasn’t been an issue because the people doing the editing, particularly @mycketforvirrad, have proven themselves trustworthy. If one of us did suddenly go rogue, then our permissions would likely be revoked, our changes reverted, and, if it were egregious enough, we’d be banned. It would be a huge breach of Tildes’s norms and culture.
At times there are some titling judgment calls that have to be made. If you’re finding that your posts are being edited to carry different meaning than you intended, or that someone else made a judgment call you don’t agree with, then reach out to the person who changed it. At Tildes we try to assume good faith, and it’s been my experience here that all of those changes were made with honest good intentions rather than a malicious or corrective mindset. We’re all just humans trying to make this a good place, so please reach out if you don’t like something and we’ll be happy to talk it through and revert the change if needed.
Mods (ie. users with certain permissions) cannot edit what you post. They'll never gain the ability to edit your comments on the site. They can't even remove comments right now, though such an option could come in the future.
They can however make changes to topics that you submit (for example, by swapping out a link). That is because submissions are not specifically "owned" by the submitter. It shouldn't be assumed that a link, title, or listed tags were always chosen by the original author. The idea is that they are curated and maintained by the community at large.
It is of course possible that Deimos himself could make changes in the database if he really wanted to. But in such a situation, a topic log would make no difference anyway.
Until the submitter chooses to delete the post.
I meant they can change the title, that's part of what I post. and I am not necessarily against that, sometimes they think of a better way to word it, but having a permanent record of a title change specifically seems kinda important for transparency imo.
It seems to me that if you don't notice the changes within 30 days, they aren't concerning. Certainly anonymization is well worth the tradeoff.
Also the folks who edit titles and whatnot at Tildes have never done anything questionable as far as I know. Hypotheticals are an endless rabbit hole that doesn't benefit anyone.
I'm guessing that being able to change the link is a thing exclusive to link posts? What I'm really asking is if I'm correct in the assumption that the content itself of text topics, including links within, are immune to modification in the same way as comments are.
Yeah, only link topics can have their link edited. See the topic log here for a link I edited recently:
https://tildes.net/~society/1mqh/texas_arrests_midwife_and_associates_on_charges_of_providing_abortion_gifted_link
For text topics, anything in the body of the topic itself, the "text" that makes it a text topic, cannot be edited by anyone except for the original poster.
For example, this topic I posted in ~test a few days ago:
https://tildes.net/~test/1mmn/u_n_i_x_y_u_n_i_x_no_strikethrough_s_t_r_i_k_e_t_h_r_o_u_g_h_s_t_r_i_k_e_t_h_r_o_u_g_h_s_t_r_i_k_e
No one but me can edit the body of that post. The "body" in this case being the repeating lines of
y no strikethrough in title. Doesn't matter if that text is just text, fancy unicode, or a link pointing somewhere. The only person who can change it is me, because I'm the one who posted it.So as far as regular users (so not Deimos, the admin) are concerned, no one can edit the body of another user's text topic.