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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   22984 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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Maybe this isn't the best place to ask but, can you please disable the ability to delete one's own posts or edit them after they've been replied to?

don't allow edits

Ruinous! Posting functions should trend towards forgiving so as to encourage contribution from would-be or marginal posters. Locking people into mistakes that demand more clarifications might be tedious.

don't allow deletion

More reasonable. Ideally users can delete their profiles and history, but the contents of their posts remain up. Maybe an edit lock that only goes into effect after so many days would make the most sense.

Which part is the major issue? Is it mass deletion or user edits bamboozling your replies?

Ruinous! Posting functions should trend towards forgiving so as to encourage contribution from would-be or marginal posters. Locking people into mistakes that demand more clarifications might be tedious.

Or locking people into bad temper posting which runs afoul the rules, but which they might think better of after seeing it posted.

Wouldn't keeping editing but removing deletion be pointless? You could just edit your post, change it to the text "[deleted]" and get effectively the same result as deleting it.

If you didn't freeze edits at that point as well, yes.

I don't think they should remove edits or deletion because of one or two serial delete guys. Freeze edits and deletes after a week. Allow authorship to disappear on account deletion. A balance of considerations.

Noting that when I paid dues to The Motte's Conservative Party treasurer I was told the motto was "Change? No!" All these so-called suggested "improvements" are making me a little uncomfortable.

I come back to a thread after a few days only to see a string of user self deleting their posts, random replies to them still hanging. I guess I could just run a scraper slamming the site for every single reply so they can't be removed from posterity, but that shouldn't be the solution.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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