deleting stuff

I wish this would come as a warning whenever someone starts up their browser because apparently there are a lot of people who don't know this yet.

Whenever you post something online, backups are made by third parties.  Especially of a publicly viewable site like permies.

Most of the time we don't delete stuff, but even if we do, we have no control over sites like the waybackmachine.  It's a really bad idea to share personal data on the internet.

The internet is forever.

I can't remember, is there any step in the permies.com new-member registration process where a new user is informed of the site's "deleting stuff" policy?  Or do folks just have to find that out organically on their own?

As an analogy, imagine going to a permaculture workshop, perhaps at a local public library, and then [embarrassing human activity] happens; immediately the hosts mentions "oh yes, our workshop is being video taped live by the local news station camera over there."  I bet there would be fewer [embarrassing human activity] happenings given a quick heads up upfront.

Today I went to an event.   Aside from the cctv, I counted over 100 people filming.   I got tired of counting after an hour.  In addition,  10 people were live streaming.   Not one person asked if it was okay to film me or my friends.  It was a public space,  they assumed that it was okay.

I generally assume if I'm in permies,  there is a chance of being filmed.  Even without it,  I still behave politely.

The internet is a public space.   Even when something is removed from one site,  there are 3rd party backups.

But upthread goes into this in more detail.  

The site is free to view.  Free to post.  It seems like this almost always means there is some sort of catch.

Everybody thinks there needs to be another rule added to signup.  Not ten pages of rules, but just their one rule.  Maybe two.  And when everybody gets what they want, it ends up being ten pages.

Every site will be less than perfect.  Every site will be some flavor of klunky.  Every site comes at some sort of cost.

I think that for a free site, for which I pay a lot, this is a pretty excellent site.  Less than perfect.  Klunky. And excellent.



Further, our way of doing stuff is not very etched in stone.  So what would we say is our "rule" or even "policy" or "guideline".  We tend to operate on vaguaries.

Further still:  if there is, say, five rules:  how many people will actually read them on sign up?  2%?


There have been a lot of people that felt it would be wise to warn people at the beginning of what an awful person i am.  And for every one of those people there seems to be a dozen or more that think I'm pretty great.  


I made this site, and I continue to pay for this site to talk about the things I wanna talk about in a way I wanna talk about them.  I thought there would only be a handful of people that would be cool with that, but it seems like there are a LOT of people that are cool with that.  And that's cool.  But once there are a lot of people, then there are a few that think that once there are a lot of people, things need to be done a different way.  Their way.  

I think we're good just the way we are.

Editing away a post is disrespectful of the community that replied and the volunteers that keep this site running.   It's a big reason for taking such a strong stance on deleting content and why the edit button disappears after a while.

Threads evolve organically and sometimes they don't always go in the desired direction.   One can walk away from a thread if it doesn't give you what you need.  

If you want your post deleted,  editing it alway is a good path to not gett the desired result .

Use the methods outlined in this thread.

Creating a thread and asking nicely are important steps.

Thank you for your understanding.