Longwinded question/discussion about user/mod deleted or edited content on this or really any forum?

First off, I haven't used forums that much anywhere. So maybe what I'm about to ask/talk about is used or even common place forgive my ignorance! I'll put forth a couple questions***** and why I think it could be good if there was more options and transparency for users and mods.

Also I don't think as far as I know that GB has any problems with their forum, this is more about internet forum posting in general and thinking about how to improve and empower it looking forward for everyone and not just one group.

Many people are thinking more about how to improve things but there has been a lot of focus on speech and basically what people post, when you boil it down. I've been thinking about it and ways to improve it at least on forums, but at the same time also not be too easy to manipulate for anyone.

*****What about only allowing people to hide their old posts not delete them, but still be publicly accessible? Also in the case of editing them it would also retain the original post that would then be hidden and probably even each version of multiply edits wouldn't be an issue either.

This way people can't cover up things said and that is more information for all involved. Things like baiting people and then edit what was originally said, or editing tone of a post or many many things really. Also it would give a good feeling of trust to any forum user knowing the original would still be there if they felt a website was trying to force a view or silence their view or what have you. For the mods it wouldn't probably give them anything new, except for the fact that people would see what they were doing more which I feel like would engender more of a good attitude toward them. Obviously there would need to be the ability to censor some words by mods. But I'm more of the school that believes it's more effective to see how someone really is from example and learn from it than to have to assume or wander what was really said.

Again maybe this is a thing and I'm ignorant to it. But I'm thinking it's never good to hide or cover up the past or the doings of people, as we need to learn from them. Lest we, you know history, repeat yadda yadda...

*****I'm not just blindly missing that sort of functionality on the forums here right?

I'm sure there are a million other idea's for forum posting I and other people have or could come up with, but in the grand scheme I guess forum posts really aren't probably making much of anyone change anything about themselves anyhow, so probably doesn't really matter that much, huh?

I would say that if something is deemed to be of so little value to the site that it's worth hiding, then it's worth deleting. No need to keep it around in some form so it can keep getting dunked on.

What if you just make a mistake and do not want your mistake entombed for all eternity.

If you speak to someone you can't undo what you say. Doesn't seem like a big deal since it'd be hidden in like a drop down or something, I don't think it should stay in the way or anything. And people would see the edits you made to correct your mistake, as well as you can just say, "sorry, I made a mistake, now it's fixed". But people can still see what the mistake was, like in a face to face conversation.

Like I said, not GB now far as I know, but other sites and for the future on the net in general... the things which are deemed of no value could hold value but just get removed because they don't fit into that society... like in other countries. We are already being massively reminded just how backward some parts of ours society is... what stops it from becoming worse?

This seems pointless.

Mainly just wondering if I could see deleted posts or not since I didn't seem to be able to and it just made me think.

I'm alluding to the idea that it's not hard in our world at this point to quicken the movement more toward dystopian like societies.

...but honestly, yeah it's probably pointless, but if I give into pointlessness, as I'm personally apt to do, well it's kinda hard for me to say anything has a point.

Just from a technical standpoint I don't think we have any intention of allowing deleted posts from being visible, even optionally. There are dozens of spam or porn posts that show up every day that we don't want people to see. And if people want to delete their own posts I'd like to respect that - sometimes people wind up saying something that they regret, sometimes years down the line, and hey: if someone says they want something to remain invisible then I'm fine with letting them do so rather than asking the engineers to build some convoluted system to let people see stuff that people want to delete.

Sorry, but this isn't going to happen.

Edit: I'm going to go ahead and edit this to say: no, no, there's no way we will ever let this happen. Shit gets deleted for a reason and I don't think there's any forum on the internet that has ever implemented anything like this and I cannot ever see us being the first.

why on earth do you want us to move more quickly towards "dystopian-like societies?"

@tonal: Really not trying to wax philosophical either it's just that it sounds like an unambiguously bad idea.

@rorie: Didn't think about the spam and porn... guess it'd be hard keep those out of people's view or any business trying to get some views off on the back of GB. So if you had to delete those guess it's not going to matter much other that having faith in the website to which forum you are visiting.

But at the same time, you can't deny that other countries abuse their power to personally edit peoples speech... really in the light of everything I've been thinking a lot on it and just really hope that we don't end up in a sort of similar place in this country in the future. The fact that we have sweep whole races of peoples right under the rug for this long... it's hard to say what we are possible of!

But yeah, maybe this sort of visibility on privately owned sites is a bit too much

Regardless of anything this kind of the request would be absolutely illegal from a GDPR or California privacy law side of things. People have the right to delete their content.

If your thoughts and opinions *don't* change over time, you're probably not thinking very critically, or you have emerged from mother gaia a fully formed unstoppable beast that requires no introspection, personal, or character development.

So in the event you're not Kratos, this seems like a bad idea. Also I have edited this post about 5 times. It would be even less funny if it had all of my weird edits all over it.

Maybe it's worded badly. But I'm saying that we are moving in that direction and I'd hope that we steer away from that course.

I was thinking about people taking responsibility for what they say and not just writing something without thinking. I can understand not agreeing with me, but not sure why my idea has to be "unambiguously bad".

You're right, people do have a right to delete their own content. It's just all the stress as of late that's making me conflate different issues together that need to be thought more about separately in order to see if things could be improved.... and to clarify I mean in our country/world, not GB.

In full agreement, I think that critical thinking development should actually be our top priority in our school systems. Actually above any traditional subject in my opinion, facts are so easily lost, but correct critical thinking I think helps us love to learn.

I'm thinking about posting on forums too much like if they were a face to face conversation. Which they are not. You can't delete something you say in person, but it really doesn't relate or work when applied to posts. This type of discourse doesn't really belong on a private video game website anyhow, that's my bad. Just getting all worked up trying to figure out ways to help and wasting peoples time instead.

But one positive is that my questions were answered!

Just wishing people would be a little better to one another maybe some of our problems could be worked out a little quicker and easier.

@tonal: Keep your head up, never stop trying to think of ways to improve things. I see the bigger picture of your point, and it's valid.

Thanks, helps a lot right now. Here's to everyone keeping their heads up. You have a good one.

@tonal: I can definitely see what you're getting at, making folk think more about the stuff they post online knowing that they can't just disappear it later is a nice idea that I agree would improve people's attitudes to each other online.

Personally, I edit grammatical errors occasionally or when I feel I didn't convey my intentions well/misunderstood something tangential. If I write something I later come to regret I generally leave it there rather than trying to hide my mistakes, I like having the reminder there to do better but I wouldn't want to force that attitude on anyone else.

I think it's interesting to note that things written on the internet can have much more permanence than things spoken. When speaking you might say something you come to regret to someone but they can't make you repeat it ad nauseum in the same way as a post can be re-read or shared and that makes a lot of people understandably anxious. If someone doesn't want their mistakes to be forever recorded I get that.

I really don't want this to be disparaging though, it's clear you're trying to suggest ways to make things better for everyone, god knows the internet in general could do with more of that and I appreciate it.

I think the goal of making the internet a less shitty place to be is noble.

Like most noble goals I also don't know that it's possible. People being aggressively, dangerously shitty online don't care about something like this. They don't care if they have to post under their real names, they won't care about hypocrisy, it won't matter if you can point out their own dumb contradictory bullshit. They don't play Defense.

So the realistic outcome is that maybe you stop someone from being casually rude for no reason but the true underlying problem won't be interested in any of it.

Sometimes I misspell words, I'm dyslexic. So, I will go in to posts to edit for clarity, but never content. Often, I do these corrections within a few minutes, which is not in keeping with the philosophy or "Measure twice, cut once". However, I think fixing spelling/grammar errors, adds clarity and reduces distraction for everyone. These posts always says "edited", and that fine with me. When I make 'updates' that are not spelling, grammar, or sentence construction issues; I typically add "UPDATE" to the top of the post while highlighting that update's text very clearly.

I wrote a number of posts during a severe period of mental illness that lasted for more than a few years. I wrote some stuff back then that I would say are not true to my general character. I would not like them to stand in the way of my future, say come up during a job interview or the like. As a former law student and philosophy student, you soon understand the difference between philosophical idealism and the real world that the law has to operate within. So my point is this, you are talking about some unworkable ideal to placate your wanting to supposedly know what people really are or have been in posts, which is fantastical, as opposed to someone who has to live in this very real world, who should be able to move on from their minor transgressions and missteps in life. Some things should just be deleted from time and people should be allowed to move on with their lives.

Imagine the headache it would bring if i dropped 10 links to all kind of illegal activities on the GB forums and the best they could do was make it less visible.

The internet is still the internet so search engines will keep telling people that the GB forums is a portal to this illegal underworld. Advertisers might wonder why they are featured on the same site. CBS might wonder why they fund GB to facilitate criminals from finding the illegal stuff. The best option for sites under this rule set is to not have the audience post their own content, which pretty much achieves the opposite of what you wanted to see. Less opportunities for people to present their opinions and add valuable information.

Same goes for normal activity though. Posts on the internet are in many ways different from verbal speech. It will be documented and saved and searchable for a long long time. The entire internet population can stumble on it and spread it around or comment on it. If i tell a really bad joke to a friend and he doesn't like it, that's quite limited in reach and it's not anonymous so we could actually meet up again and talk it out and leave that joke in the past.

I will say that if you feel like a person might be a troll and your words might sound awful without the context, quoting the person you reply to is a pretty good tool to have to make sure that you have control over the context your words are meant to be read in. I remember i was in this discussion on reddit where a guy was very eager to label all kind of stakeholders in an aggressive way ('so you say farmers are imbeciles?' 'Why are you agreeing with a bunch of pencil-licking bureaucrats etc.). People were not really addressing his points but mostly shouting him down, but i felt like there was a chance of reasoning with him. At least providing him and others who might think a similar way with a serious answer. I still assumed he was arguing in bad faith and trying to make me adopt that kind of language so i made sure i only reacted to his own words. Felt pretty good i quoted his posts when he decided to delete his account, because otherwise you would only see a bunch of very angry people railing against a deleted post. 'Look at all those weirdo's foaming at the mouth for no reason! Are those the calm, rational people?!' Just as with the protests, everyone is doing whatever they can to frame words and actions in a light that's best for their own cause. If you don't want that to happen, make sure you proof yourself against that as best as possible.

Also, this last paragraph wouldn't have been here if not for the edit button ^_^

@onemanarmyy: @uriarra-heap: @monkeyking1969: @efesell: @someoneproud: I hear and agree with what everyone has said here. And thanks so much for being so civil with discussing it. I absolutely know that it is idealistic what I'm suggesting and it just comes from a place of wanting things to be better. Honestly I knew before writing it that it's really not possible to get people be better to one another, trust me on that. Just spitballing out of frustration if for no other reason than to hear from people to help me not want to give up hope... which is difficult a lot of time when you are isolated.

I even have another post that was going before this one talking about that isolation, but in the form of loneliness as a human condition where I was trying to discuss the idea that as part of the human condition we all are isolated by our very nature. Going through some personal tough times and without enough support structures in my real life, I'm turning to the internet which is obviously also not supportive enough since everyone is so disconnected from one another... but it's better to have something more than nothing, right?