If they were one of the mods, they could. That’s an important difference with forums – the smaller the scale, the greater the leeway for mods to apply much more granular rules than what you get on a mass-scale website with billions of users. So even though who holds the keys may be different, I do actually think the standards of small forums are more similar to the standards of classic blogs in that way, and that’s a good thing.
Oh I’m sure they’re not happy but that’s just the reality of the world we live in. Does it suck to be where we are now? Yes.
That is obviously not true. Is it a lot harder? Sure. Is it impossible? No. There are plenty of artists, writers, musicians who are finding ways to make money outside of the big social media platforms. It just takes a lot harder because you’re not relying on the massive reach those platforms provide.
The problem the web is facing right now is that A LOT more people are on it creating and trying to make a living out of it but at a certain point we have to realise this is unsustainable. And I say that in a very pragmatic way as someone who has tried for years to do all sorts of side projects but still had to work 10+ hours a day in order to actually earn a living.
But all this has nothing to do with the original discussion. Social media is not just a place for creators. Social media is a place for human beings to interact with eachother—in theory—and so we can’t only think about what creative people need to do.
It is an important question. And you’re right, current efforts are probably not enough. But I don’t believe letting you delete my posts is an answer either. Because that’s obviously going to be abused by people who are interested in building eco chambers. And social media already is a massive eco chamber.
If you ask me, the only practical solution is to let the platforms only remove genuinely illegal content (and we can have a discussion about how to define that) and then let everything else in the hands of each individual while also providing powerful tool to apply moderation layers on top of their experience.
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Well, yes, I even acknowledged that in my post:
But that’s a clear distinction: a moderator has a specific role on a platform and should try to behave according to guidelines that are transparent. For the sake of argument, lets say the rules here on the forum say “no personal attacks”.
Now imagine I just decided, instead of writing an actual post to answer yours, to simply call you a dick or some other stupid nonsense. I’d expect a moderator to intervene, to delete my comment and maybe to ping me via DM or even publicly here to let me know what the rules are.
That make sense and if you ask me is how a sane platform should work.
Not Imagine an alternative scenario where I don’t call you a dick, I simply reply to your message, but you felt offended for some reason and had the power to simply delete my reply to you.
That would be pure madness because there are no rules at that point and you’d have people just fucking with eachother, deleting replies, creating chaos. Maybe not here becuase the people on this forum all sound reasonable but you can see how something like this is not really scalable on social media.
I 100% agree and it’s also obvious that the smaller the scale the easier it is to moderate a community. Especially because mods can learn how those users behave and they can understand them at a more personal level.
It’s also why I always argue that small communities are the best communities. Above a certain scale some things become impossible and you need to start relying on automation and AI and all that nonsense to help out.
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I definitely agree that small communities are best (32 bit cafe being a great example) but I have to disagree with you about deleting replies on social media. I think the function of social media and forums are inherently different, thus how replies are handled should be different.
We agree that on a forum the thread maker shouldn’t be able to delete comments, that should be up to the discretion of the mods. After all the whole point of forums to to talk in a public space and invite opinions on topics. A topic on a forum is posted so that everyone on the forum can see it and is generally encouraged to reply to it.
But on social media it’s different. You only see posts from people you follow (ideally). You can typically block people and put your account on private to restrict who sees your posts. Fundamentally I think you should be able to delete the comments someone made on Your own post (I don’t see forum topics as ones own post, but as a convo starter). If someone says something derogatory on my post I would want to delete it right away rather than wait for moderation (which is typically slow and bad on large platforms). Sure that means that some political poster can delete any comment that disagrees with him, but we can always post a refute to political misinformation on our own profiles.
I’ll ask you the same question I asked before: what happens if someone else replied to that same reply you want to delete and a discussion has branced out from there already?
Should you be able to delete the entire conversation? Do you only delete the first reply? In a binary world where you only have one post and a direct reply things are easy and in that context sure, I agree that letting you delete that reply could be good.
But that’s not the reality of social media from a technical stand point.
Sure. I’ve done that on my posts before.
Some of this conversation is reminding me of “deleting reblogs,” a Pillowfort post where someone objected to the ability to delete others’ comments off of posts. This post was met with a lot of confusion, and not just because the post was using the terminology wrong. It’s just an accepted ethos over there that your post is your domain to manage, you comment as a guest in someone else’s space, and you don’t have an inalienable right to subject other people’s posts to whatever you want.
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I find this incredibly interesting. So hypotetical scenario: you post something, someone replies to you in a way you don’t appreciate.
You don’t notice this reply at first and by the time you do an entire conversation has developed where dozen of people have posted. You think you should be able to just go “Nope, I don’t appreciate that first reply” hit delete and the entire conversation is then gone, even though it might have nothing to do with your original post?
As it is, the nuclear option discussed in the comments below the JWZ post is the only option for users on Mastodon who don’t want to signal boost a reply to one of their own posts.
Deletion of the entire thread isn’t the only moderation option available to the OP on other platforms. On Elon Musk’s X.com:
Post authors have the option to hide replies to their posts. Everyone can still access hidden replies through the hidden reply icon, which shows up on the original post when there are hidden replies.
The OP of the top level post has some ability to moderate comments and replies on all of the popular platforms. X, TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, Instagram and Facebook all provide options for users to moderate replies and comments on their own posts, profiles, and channels.
Curiously, Facebook provides an option to either delete or hide.
the entire conversation is then gone, even though it might have nothing to do with your original post?
Having an entire unrelated conversation under somebody else’s post would be a breach of etiquette on most platforms. On the old forums this is “hijacking the thread” and against the rules.
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Sure.
Now depending on the particulars, I think my first inclination would generally be to say “Hey y’all, this is off topic and I don’t want to play host to this. Please go make your own post” or “I’d prefer if y’all would quit replying to this thread please.” I’ve said things like that before and had it said to me. But in case someone doesn’t listen and/or in cases where the subject matter is particularly objectionable, I still think the original poster should still be able to give the whole thing the boot.
Worth noting, as well, that I’m coming from the perspective of a blogger operating in contexts where there’s a clear structural division between Posts and Comments. It’s my understanding that Mastodon software and some of its ilk may not make as much of a distinction.
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So in the context of personal blogs this is for me a non issue. On a site I control it’s obvious that you’re going to follow my rules and I have the freedom to delete what I want because it’s my space. And as you said, the distinction between my post and your comment is obvious.
It’s also clear that in that context you, as a commenter, can’t even post on the site. Commenting is the only thing you can do.
But on social, especially on some socials, there really isn’t a clear distinction between a post and a comment. Maybe i’m wrong but on Twitter and I think also on Mastodon, if I reply to you, my reply will also show up on my profile with all the other posts of mine. So my reply is nothing more than a regular post with some extra info attached.
In a way, it’s a different type of quote reply. And yes, the obvious distinction is that it will show up under your post and I suspect that’s is the main problem and why people don’t want to signal boost or whatever.
But that’s the part that’s confusing me. By deciding to be part of a platform like Mastodon or Twitter or Threads or Bluesky, one is impicitly accepting to be part of this ambiguity where boundaries are blurred and your post might sit in a timeline right next to something despicable.
So this idea that users should be able to essentially curate what other users have poted simply because they replied in a thread rather than making a standalone post is fascinating to me.
So my experience with Mastodon lasted I think 15 minutes before realising it was a confusing mess and I wanted no part in that so I don’t really know what’s possible there.
As for other platforms, it’s quite interesting that deleting other people’s content is allowed but i’m not surprised considering most of those platforms don’t really have threaded discussions and everything is kept shallow on purpose.
And in a way, comments on YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, and Instagram are more similar to comments on a blog post. The original content is vastly different from the comments.
That’s clearly not the case on Mastodon, Threads, Twitter, and Reddit where the original post and the replies share pretty much the same structure and type of content. And so there, the playing field is a lot more even and being able to delete other people’s reply is a bit more problematic.
On a forum yes. Because the thread have a clear title, it’s posted inside a specific category and there are global rules around it. But on social media? If you post something on Mastodon how am I supposed to know where are the boudaries of that conversation? Discussions are fluid and can branch out in weird directions.
One place where I see it happen often (even though I don’t really look at the site anymore these days) is hacker news where sometimes you see, especially on popular topics, hundreds of posts are all threaded under one reply. And most of them are nested replies so they’re not even addressing the original comment.
In those context, being able to delete replies or entire threads is incredibly problematic imo. It’s honestly too much power to give to individual users on a shared platform.
So I think the whole issue of deleting content comes down to the specific design of the social paltforms itself.
As for Mastodon, it becomes even more complicated because of the whole federation aspect and the fact that you’re dealing with multiple copies of your own content.
Because if you post something on Server A where you decided to create your mastodon account, can you claim ownership of the replies to that post even if those aren’t even happening on Server A but are actually happening on Server B?
It’s a mess and as much as I like the concept of federation, it will create more issues that it will solve imo. But I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.
This is an awesome discussion btw, thank you for thaking the time to share your thoughts on the subject, I really appreciate it.
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