I think it would be useful to distinguish between “deleting” content, and only allowing the OP to see it. While reasons for not being transparent about what you’d delete make sense, having to back stuff up* in case it gets deleted (as opposed to “taken down”) would be a pain.
*Particularly posts (etc.) which require time and effort to polish into a good, publishable (“post worthy”) form.
Oh, yes. To be clear. Whenever we delete anything, we still allow the author to access the content. We’ve never deleted anything in the sense of making the content inaccessible to its author and don’t plan to ever do so.
Also, as we discussed this a bit more today, we realized that in most cases we can probably address our concerns by changing the post to “unlisted”, rather than removing it from the site entirely. So, people can continue to have discussions there, but they’ll need to get a link to it from somewhere else.
(It might also make sense to add some kind of flag on those posts to let people know that the mods don’t consider the content representative of LessWrong, since people who get linked to random articles from reddit don’t always have the right context to understand how LessWrong relates to the post, a la some neoreaction culture war stuff)
I think it would be useful to distinguish between “deleting” content, and only allowing the OP to see it. While reasons for not being transparent about what you’d delete make sense, having to back stuff up* in case it gets deleted (as opposed to “taken down”) would be a pain.
*Particularly posts (etc.) which require time and effort to polish into a good, publishable (“post worthy”) form.
Oh, yes. To be clear. Whenever we delete anything, we still allow the author to access the content. We’ve never deleted anything in the sense of making the content inaccessible to its author and don’t plan to ever do so.
Also, as we discussed this a bit more today, we realized that in most cases we can probably address our concerns by changing the post to “unlisted”, rather than removing it from the site entirely. So, people can continue to have discussions there, but they’ll need to get a link to it from somewhere else.
(It might also make sense to add some kind of flag on those posts to let people know that the mods don’t consider the content representative of LessWrong, since people who get linked to random articles from reddit don’t always have the right context to understand how LessWrong relates to the post, a la some neoreaction culture war stuff)