The discussion revolves around whether quoted posts should be updated when the original post is deleted. Sevenoak argues that quoting a post via a public link should result in the quote being updated if the original is deleted, similar to how Twitter handles quote tweets. pfaffman explains that searching all posts for quotes upon deletion is impractical and could disrupt context, using an example where a quote might become nonsensical. elijah suggests Discourse already tracks quotes and that cascaded deletions could be an option, though not default. codinghorror notes that quotes are actual content and compares it to Twitter’s retweet system, where deleting a tweet doesn’t alter the retweet. Sevenoak clarifies that their concern is about the behavior when pasting a link to quote, not literal quoting, and that they expect the quote to reflect the deletion with a placeholder like ‘This content is no longer available.’ codinghorror reiterates that a quote is content, not a link, and thus shouldn’t be altered by the original’s deletion.
When I quote another user’s post (via pasting the public link), and they subsequently delete the original, the text of their post still remains visible in my quote.
I’m curious as to the logic behind this. Why allow deletion in the first place if anyone can publicly preserve another user’s post via quoting?
First, it would be pretty difficult to search every post in the database when a post was deleted to look for the possibilty that some other post had quoted it.
But also, it would be much more disruptive for someone to have the text of their post changed without their knowlege. For example, what if they say "<quote something from Pat> I disagree with what was said here` and Pat deletes the post and then the post becomes “I disagree with what was said here”. It would then make no sense.
Edit: I never seem to notice that things are in the feature category.
The “But also” example is kinda what happens on Twitter now so I think people are used to it.
As for the first, does not Discourse already track where things are quoted (if the quotes have the quote="username, post:NUM, topic:ID" attributions already? I don’t think Discourse should do these deletions by default, but I can certainly imagine places where it might be preferred.
If removal is really that important, do a cascaded delete where all replies to the post are deleted as well. I’m not sure why there needs to be a feature here, when a mod could handle it with a few clicks in the rare event that posted content is so dangerous that it has to be eradicated completely.
Yeah, the interaction I’m talking about is the one @elijah mentioned-- the equivalent of deleting a tweet and having the relevant quote-tweets/subtweets also modified with a placeholder of This content is no longer available. Maybe I’m too used to Twitter but that’s definitely the expected outcome of a deletion for me.
Not really the same thing though; a quote exists as actual content in the post. When people “quote” a tweet or “retweet” a tweet they are linking to it through the built in twitter UI. Imagine if I tweeted this on twitter:
Well,
@joejust said ‘I like apples’ and I find that outrageous!
If Joe deletes his tweet that said
I like apples
There’d be no expectation that my tweet quoting him would be removed or modified.
Ah-- I personally ‘quote tweet’ by pasting the quoted tweet URL into my new tweet, which is also how I quote on discourse.
RE your example: Of course if I just literally manually quoted something here on discourse I wouldn’t expect it to disappear after the reference got deleted. But that’s not what I’m talking about.
Just so we’re on the same page, this is what I mean:
Maybe I’m too used to Twitter but it just feels inconsistent that the box above wouldn’t change to ‘This content is no longer available’ if you were to delete your post.