I'm getting annoyed with people that ask a question, have the community answer their question and troubleshoot over several days, only to delete their post and the solution.

The person asking the question is often providing the least amount of effort, so why should they have exclusive right to delete the contributions of others?

Possible fix: have a per-community option to only request deletion.

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[–] 8 points 3 months ago (16 children)

This would be considered breaching the law. People have the right to delete their shit, you can't take it from them

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    What law are we talking about here?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    I think it should have to go through a mod. You can publicly hide your name from the post (it still needs to be visible to mods for moderation purposes), but you should have to ask a mod for total thread deletion.

    Although that may not be the answer either, someone pointed out apparently mods are nuking threads too???

    ¯\(ツ)/¯

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Maybe legally, but a federated collection of social sites like this doesn’t operate under a single model. If you post something to Lemmy, you can never fully control what happens after.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Yes legally, and while I understand technical failures may happen, we are talking about people claiming loud and clear they would rob users of their rights. They would deserve to go in court if they did

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    I’m with you about their rights, but does not society come into the consideration at all?

    If a user posts a help request, a lot of the time that will be indexed by a search engine. Deleting that message completely then leads to dead search results. That’s not only frustrating, it’s a waste of time and effort for everyone.

    It costs people their time to answer questions, it costs time and money to host a Lemmy instance. I don’t think a middle ground is ridiculous. Let the user anonymize themselves, but outright deleting a thread harms the network.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (8 children)

    There's copyright, but that is easy to get around by just making it part of the terms and conditions of a website that by posting you grant a right to republish.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (7 children)

    Any part of such contract that implies giving up rights is void and cannot apply

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (6 children)

    If that was true open source software would not exist

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (5 children)

    You have no rights on someone elses property by default. Licenses grant under a specific scope, they don't actually forbid

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (4 children)

    The point is that once you have released something under an open license, it's permanently under that license and you no longer have the right to demand that other people stop publishing it (which admittedly you do have by default). Giving up rights is a thing.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    A thing that doesn't apply here

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Can you elaborate? To me it really seems like it does apply. A more related example might be Wikipedia, which has open licensed content. Or even the whole concept of writing for pay with a contract; the person who pays you gets the rights, because you agreed to that, and you can't just demand they delete it later. These things are within how the law works. Why wouldn't it also be within how the law works to have a social media website where the condition of posting is granting a non-revocable right to publish what you wrote?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (1 child)

    I'm not a lawyer, but in at least the US, that would make sites publishers. They're not. They're basically hosts, which, as I understand it, they would otherwise be legally responsible for the content that users post on their sites. No company wants that, but will at least try some form of rules and/or moderation so as to have a defense of good wiill, should they ever have to appear in court due to content users posted on their site.

    Edit: clarification

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago*

    As I understand it the distinction between a website hosting user content and another publisher is Section 230, but that is about limiting liability for publishing user content, and I see no reason to believe that this law would prohibit users from granting such websites non-revocable rights to publish their writing.

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