Super-Trafalgar

Previous post is here. I'm making a new post because last time I tried making a re-blog with my comments added it threw the whole lot away. (And, ironies, I hadn't backed it up either. Sigh.)

So, first thanks to @ThePervyGirlCollection, @CravingOwnership and @TrentEvansAuthor for their comments (as well as everyone else who re-blogged to a wider audience.) Here is an update on the problem, which also includes a long screed from me on why I think it's a problem, together with a possible solution to the problem which appears to satisfy everyone's concerns.

The summary of the problem, in case you haven't been following along is this:

1. Joe Bloggs makes a new post with a hot picture he found somewhere. 
2. Mary Jane writes a fucking hot story based on that picture because she likes it as well and makes a re-post of Joe's post.
3. Loads of people like the picture and Mary Jane's hot story. Life is sweet.
4. Some time later Joe deletes his post. Maybe he left and just deleted his whole account, who knows?
5. Mary Jane's post with her fucking hot story based on Joe's post has now also gone. Disappeared. Never to be seen again. Sorry Mary Jane. Sorry everyone else who liked it a lot. 
6. Oh, and by the way, Mary Jane has no idea this has happened. If she looks in her blog, then her story is not there any more, but chances are she won't realise that.

Note that this is different from the behaviour of "the-site-that-shall-not-be-named" (as Trent calls it): on there, each re-blog lives independently from the original blog. If the original is updated, or deleted, any re-blog lives on untouched. 

I reported the problem on the support site. They came back and said yes, this is a deliberate policy, because privacy. Namely that if someone wants to remove some content of theirs, e.g. due to it being re-blogged without their permission (e.g. due to Joe being an asshole and posting private pictures of his ex) then it should be removed everywhere, including any re-blogs.

I responded with something of a rant. I won't reproduce that bit here, just the final suggestion of mine, which is this:

" ...

If you don't (or can't) retrofit the model to allow re-blogs to be clones, then maybe you could fix the situation where deleting a post doesn't delete the re-blogs. (I guess, worst case, a dummy, blank post is inserted in place of the original. It really would be better to maintain the original though.)"

They responded (yesterday) with this:

"Sorry, we will not be reversing that decision. It is for privacy reasons and we have actually only gotten positive feedback about it before. We understand your point, but we always go privacy first. Privacy reaasons absolutely make sense and have done so multiple times already (do note that plenty of users post their own content).

However, yes. We can possibly look into blank post / original post removed kind of solution for it in the future. We of course wanat to find a solution which works for everyone."

And I responded with this: (Sorry, it's quite long.)

"Once again, thanks for your swift reply.

I understand the privacy concerns: more so once I'd made a post about this alerting other users to this situation and some of them agreed with your point about privacy. However, the way you've elected to adress those concerns does cause other issues for other users, which has nothing to do with privacy. Many times, people will just leave, deleting their whole blogs on the way out, not because of privacy reasons, but just because.

The current situation as it now stands for the relatively small number of people who post longer pieces of content, together with the much larger number of people who consume that content because they like it, is not great. We have two workarounds 1) manually backup everything you write if it's important to you and 2) don't write such important pieces on a re-blog, always make it an original post.

The problems with that are:

1. Having to back up your writing is something of a pain. It's not a massive one, granted. However it does make it slightly less likely people will bother writing such stories, which in turn slightly decreases the amount of happy people on here.

2. Even if you do back something up, we have absolutely zero idea if a story of ours which we made as a re-blog, gets deleted. I only found out because I had a big fan who happened to notice it had gone and then let me know. I have *zero idea* how much other content I've written has disappeared since I first posted it. So even if I had backed it up, how do I know that I should "restore" it. Keep my own private log of what I post, and then periodically go through my whole blog cross-checking? Not very feasible...

3. There is now a great asymmetry in control between "original posters" and re-blogs. If you make your own post, then you can be assured that that post will live forever, until you choose to remove it. If you make a re-blog, then it can just disappear at the whim of someone completely unknown to you. Why should they have such free and easy control of your content? When you say "show my blog" there's an implicit assumption that it actually is your blog. But actually it's now clear that it isn't really, because it can completely disappear overnight if you happened to only make re-posts and those people you re-posted killed all their posts.

4. The problem with workaround 2, namely, not doing re-blogs for your posts, but just making original posts is not great in two cases. First is when you want to respond to someone's comments on that post. This happens quite often: they may make a one line comment, and then you write a big caption expanding on that comment.

5. The second reason is when you want to re-blog someone's post because you know them - and then they want to re-blog that, because they are responding to your post. In other words, there's some public play going on here. This is one of the great fucking reasons for being on a platform like this - the interactions! And then of course, other people can see those interactions and make their own comments, and so on, and so on. So, just writing original posts doesn't work now ... "backing up your work" is not much good in the case that the whole series of blogs and re-blogs gets deleted because the original poster deleted their original post. Bang! the whole tree of interactions is gone, not just the single story you backed up. There is no way to restore that tree.

So given your non-reversibility on this decision, the compromise solution is the blank post. That fixes all of the previous problems.

As mentioned, I'd prefer not to have a blank post, because very often the story is written around the original picture... but equally, if it's a personal picture and they want to delete all copies of it on the site, then fair enough, their wishes should override. Perhaps a compromise here is that when you delete an original post then you can have an option which asks whether you want to delete all references to your original post. (If yes, then a blank gets inserted, if no, then it doesn't.) Alternatively, you could add a switch on any pictures you upload which could say, "personal property" vs "common property". If something is marked as personal property then deleting it, means all references to it are replaced by blanks if you delete it, otherwise the original post is retained.

Not sure how we move this forward? Should I copy this to the general discussion page and mark it solved? I don't want it to get forgotten about though, because it's important (IMnot-veryHO.)

(Either way, I intend re-blogging this whole discussion because I don't think many people on there will see any discussion on here and I think it's useful that they do know so they can voice an opinion.)"

There you have it, as of today.

If you couldn't be bothered to read through all that (and I don't blame you if so) here's the summary of what I am proposing as a possible solution. We carry on from step 4 in the original scenario:

1. ... Some time later Joe deletes his post. Maybe he left and just deleted his whole account, who knows?
2. Mary Jane's post with her fucking hot story based on Joe's post has now not gone. It's still there, and everyone can still see it. However, Joe's original photo is now blank, because ... privacy.
3. Or, maybe it's still there as well, because when Joe made his original post he set a switch on it to say, "not personal" and the default then is to allow it to be retained in any re-blogs.
4. Life is still sweet. 
5. Maybe even for Joe because he's not being an asshole and re-blogging his ex's photos without consent.

I'll carry on keeping you posted as to progress on this. Feel free to add your own thoughts and suggestions - including any which suggest that I'm a fuckwit. I can take it.