Add Ability To Delete Own Posts
liquidkarma
Member Posts: 80 ★
I am new to the forum, I was perplexed at my inability to delete my own posts.
I did discover an EDIT feature, but it expires 15 minutes after posting.
After some searching on google and within the forums here, it would appear that there is no easy way to delete ones own posts. I encountered several dubious suggestions for a workaround, but they seem to run contrary to what the forums stated rules are. (IE, sure you could flag your own post, but i believe erroneous flagging is grounds for punitive action, so doesn't seem a productive solution.)
Anyway, I'd like to make a case for the ability to delete ones own posts. I saw several threads asking why it could not be done, but I did not see any that contained a Moderator response. As the great Stan Lee once said, perhaps "one man really can make a difference."
Actually, what am I talking about, I saw a Mod reply on a "2019 suggestions and improvements board," but that thread was closed, and I take issue with the mod response i read, which was that the lack of a delete feature is considered a "pre-emptive strike" toward curbing bad actors hiding their own bad behavior by deleting ones own posts. this was said moderators first week on the job, so I will take their response with a grain of salt, but, it was the only mod reply i was able to track down re: this particular topic.
now granted, what will follow will probably be construed as exhibiting qualities similar to those of which I deride in that particular Mod response, the issue being that that is a moral stance to take, and any argument I may offer could be viewed as morality based as well. Believe me, I get that.
However.
Am I the only one who finds this silly? I have never been on any other forum which had an inability to delete ones posts.
This is odd, is it not?
(for that matter, so is not being able to publicly call out cheaters, or publicly dispute things. I have seen Mods say that they prefer to deal with these matters privately. I would assume this is again meant to curtail crying-wolf type situations, or perhaps even Libel, who knows. If Kabam were a boyfriend or girlfriend, however, who you were telling your therapist about, your therapist would label their behavior as emotionally abusive, manipulative, controlling behavior. "don't you ever talk to me like that in public again! *slap*" you may laugh at my comparison, after all it's "just a game," but it's not really just a game, as it has a forum attached to it, where people talk about real human feelings, and the mods themselves often try to explain things in term of the "in-game economy" as though it were analogous to our real-world economy. so although it may sound like a stretch, within the pre-established confines of this very forum and the game itself, it is not a huge leap, on a fundamental level at least. anyway...)
personally, I have been using the internet for a very long time. well, just over 20 years, at least. that feels like at least "kind of" a long time.
the internet has done and continues to do things to our collective psyche.
it has affected the way in which we think about the very fabric of our society and what it means to be human: where is the line between public and private? what falls under intellectual property? these lines have been decidedly blurred by the ever-increasing ubiquity of the World Wide Web. the old adage, the internet is forever; you already have thought about all these things in your spare time as they have come up, I do not doubt.
in a world (insert that voice from all the trailers that you have probably also picked up on... "IN A WORLD!!!") ...
in a world where we increasingly have less control over something as fundamental as our own private thought processes (*cough* algorithm based search results and auto-generated ads *cough*), where the trust is put in the greater good of an always bigger and more complex algorithm beneath all existence, and where the writing has DONE BEEN on the wall that this is maybe not the best nor healthiest idea for our collective consciousness,....
doesn't it strike anyone else as just the tiniest bit messed up that this forum chooses to take a side and normalize that? that once you say something, sorry, you can't take it back? isn't that kind of petty? isn't that kind of reactive? doesn't everyone have things they did as kids or teenagers or even college-aged that were, kind of brash? or rude, or inappropriate, or just unpleasant memories? things that you would only tell your closest friends or family?
privacy and control over one's mental landscape are really important. we see this is in psychiatry and psychology, and there's a lot of academic research and anecdotal evidence to support it. Living In Public does things to a person, things that don't really feel that great, or have a net overall benefit.
is this really the thing you want to work to normalize?
this isn't about me, but I'll give me little personal slice here at the very end of an already long enough post.
i have a very hard time regulating my emotions. i can do it, but it's been a lifelong struggle for me. it takes constant conscious effort, and it most likely always will. in every online forum or site I have ever been a part of, I ALWAYS end up deleting at least a few of my comments, that I made in a very short burst of misguided anger or some other negative feeling.
that ability to delete those temporary embarassments has been absolutely FUNDAMENTAL to my ability to continue to have a healthy relationship with my mind and this crazy thing that we're all just kind of, STUCK with, this Internet Thing.
only today have i signed up on this forum, and I already wish I could delete some of my comments. it feels very bad to think about them being stuck there forever. from an outsider's perspective, they probably aren't even really that bad. most people have probably said worse things to their mother, for crying out loud. but for me, they hurt to think about. and i'm sure I'm not the only one.
i really think there should be an option to delete one's own posts. thank you for reading if you made it this far. i think a lot about this kind of stuff all the time and i might have tried to fit too much of it into this one post, but thanks for hearing me out.
p.s. i forgot, one other thing that rubs me the wrong way is, why mold the community to fit around a lowest common denominator of "bad people will abuse the ability to delete their own comments"?? i think that is a lazy decision and one which does not address the problem, it ignores it by rendering it a not-able-to-be-an-issue issue; "sorry you just can't delete it." i think we should all be thinking bigger than that, which, this is what I was kind of trying to do with that whole Internet and Privacy stuff i was talking about. anyway, again, thanks for reading.
I did discover an EDIT feature, but it expires 15 minutes after posting.
After some searching on google and within the forums here, it would appear that there is no easy way to delete ones own posts. I encountered several dubious suggestions for a workaround, but they seem to run contrary to what the forums stated rules are. (IE, sure you could flag your own post, but i believe erroneous flagging is grounds for punitive action, so doesn't seem a productive solution.)
Anyway, I'd like to make a case for the ability to delete ones own posts. I saw several threads asking why it could not be done, but I did not see any that contained a Moderator response. As the great Stan Lee once said, perhaps "one man really can make a difference."
Actually, what am I talking about, I saw a Mod reply on a "2019 suggestions and improvements board," but that thread was closed, and I take issue with the mod response i read, which was that the lack of a delete feature is considered a "pre-emptive strike" toward curbing bad actors hiding their own bad behavior by deleting ones own posts. this was said moderators first week on the job, so I will take their response with a grain of salt, but, it was the only mod reply i was able to track down re: this particular topic.
now granted, what will follow will probably be construed as exhibiting qualities similar to those of which I deride in that particular Mod response, the issue being that that is a moral stance to take, and any argument I may offer could be viewed as morality based as well. Believe me, I get that.
However.
Am I the only one who finds this silly? I have never been on any other forum which had an inability to delete ones posts.
This is odd, is it not?
(for that matter, so is not being able to publicly call out cheaters, or publicly dispute things. I have seen Mods say that they prefer to deal with these matters privately. I would assume this is again meant to curtail crying-wolf type situations, or perhaps even Libel, who knows. If Kabam were a boyfriend or girlfriend, however, who you were telling your therapist about, your therapist would label their behavior as emotionally abusive, manipulative, controlling behavior. "don't you ever talk to me like that in public again! *slap*" you may laugh at my comparison, after all it's "just a game," but it's not really just a game, as it has a forum attached to it, where people talk about real human feelings, and the mods themselves often try to explain things in term of the "in-game economy" as though it were analogous to our real-world economy. so although it may sound like a stretch, within the pre-established confines of this very forum and the game itself, it is not a huge leap, on a fundamental level at least. anyway...)
personally, I have been using the internet for a very long time. well, just over 20 years, at least. that feels like at least "kind of" a long time.
the internet has done and continues to do things to our collective psyche.
it has affected the way in which we think about the very fabric of our society and what it means to be human: where is the line between public and private? what falls under intellectual property? these lines have been decidedly blurred by the ever-increasing ubiquity of the World Wide Web. the old adage, the internet is forever; you already have thought about all these things in your spare time as they have come up, I do not doubt.
in a world (insert that voice from all the trailers that you have probably also picked up on... "IN A WORLD!!!") ...
in a world where we increasingly have less control over something as fundamental as our own private thought processes (*cough* algorithm based search results and auto-generated ads *cough*), where the trust is put in the greater good of an always bigger and more complex algorithm beneath all existence, and where the writing has DONE BEEN on the wall that this is maybe not the best nor healthiest idea for our collective consciousness,....
doesn't it strike anyone else as just the tiniest bit messed up that this forum chooses to take a side and normalize that? that once you say something, sorry, you can't take it back? isn't that kind of petty? isn't that kind of reactive? doesn't everyone have things they did as kids or teenagers or even college-aged that were, kind of brash? or rude, or inappropriate, or just unpleasant memories? things that you would only tell your closest friends or family?
privacy and control over one's mental landscape are really important. we see this is in psychiatry and psychology, and there's a lot of academic research and anecdotal evidence to support it. Living In Public does things to a person, things that don't really feel that great, or have a net overall benefit.
is this really the thing you want to work to normalize?
this isn't about me, but I'll give me little personal slice here at the very end of an already long enough post.
i have a very hard time regulating my emotions. i can do it, but it's been a lifelong struggle for me. it takes constant conscious effort, and it most likely always will. in every online forum or site I have ever been a part of, I ALWAYS end up deleting at least a few of my comments, that I made in a very short burst of misguided anger or some other negative feeling.
that ability to delete those temporary embarassments has been absolutely FUNDAMENTAL to my ability to continue to have a healthy relationship with my mind and this crazy thing that we're all just kind of, STUCK with, this Internet Thing.
only today have i signed up on this forum, and I already wish I could delete some of my comments. it feels very bad to think about them being stuck there forever. from an outsider's perspective, they probably aren't even really that bad. most people have probably said worse things to their mother, for crying out loud. but for me, they hurt to think about. and i'm sure I'm not the only one.
i really think there should be an option to delete one's own posts. thank you for reading if you made it this far. i think a lot about this kind of stuff all the time and i might have tried to fit too much of it into this one post, but thanks for hearing me out.
p.s. i forgot, one other thing that rubs me the wrong way is, why mold the community to fit around a lowest common denominator of "bad people will abuse the ability to delete their own comments"?? i think that is a lazy decision and one which does not address the problem, it ignores it by rendering it a not-able-to-be-an-issue issue; "sorry you just can't delete it." i think we should all be thinking bigger than that, which, this is what I was kind of trying to do with that whole Internet and Privacy stuff i was talking about. anyway, again, thanks for reading.
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looked at this way, that is, me thinking about your reaction, like you might have been thinking about how your experience compares with mine as you read my post, reminds me : we affect each other. if our temporary negativity is forced to be permanent, then our psyche maintains that permanent negative energy scar. whereas usually in the real, organic, non-digital world that was the norm for thousands of years of human societal advancement, something can be done about it.
obviously there is always the ability to add a clarifying post later on, but that can be messier than simply a deletion. to me, it just makes more sense in a way, like the pros out-weigh the cons.
so yeah, that's why I wish we could delete our own posts.