Deleted post means deleted post?
I was called out by Nick Hayes in No Upvote Means No Upvote for a post I had made, talking about how I circumvented a hidden toast button (which I'm not gonna do again even though it was funny to me).
Then recently I saw this unrelated post by Steve
I'm disappointed that seemingly as a result of Ava's post, the original article (and blog posts) were taken down entirely.
Yunzi's original post has been deleted from the internet. Ava linked to it; Ava quoted it.
If you're not familiar, archive.org allows you to paste any URL and pull up old versions of the given web page. Not all pages are archived - Yunzi's post is not.
But anyway, it got me wondering...
As Nick Hayes wrote:
Boundaries don’t stop being boundaries just because they’re digital and “unseen”. If someone removes a feature for peace of mind, they’ve made a choice; and that choice deserves the same respect we’d give in any other space.
Does this digital boundary extend to the deletion of blog posts or other articles? Is it wrong to keep and share an archived copy of a post if it's been deleted? Is it wrong for Ava to keep quotes of Yunzi in her post? Is it wrong for me to plug URLs into archive.org to make sure they live on forever?
I don't have a solid answer about the ethics of this. And I can see the deletion of a post as a setting of a boundary: "I don't want this out there any more."
On the other hand, posting something online is an act of consent. It is saying "HERE'S THIS THING FOR THE PUBLIC TO VIEW", and even if you change your mind later, this was still a choice you made.
There are different contexts for these considerations - the ethics of it are different if you're archiving a government or politician's post or webpage, for example.
I'm probably not going to stop archiving things online. I don't archive a ton. But I do sometimes. Sometimes its other people's blog posts (because I'm linking to them or something). This is something I've quite literally never thought about before. But regardless of my ethical curiosities, I doubt I'm changing my behavior here.