A "post ownership" shallow dive

~inquiry

Yeah, yeah... I get the historic yadda yadda about how a site owner can do whatever they like with it.

But I'm wondering what others might think about an author at a site like this retaining controlling rights to their posts.

My thinking on this was recently affected by an article talking about visual art and music creators losing control of their work through the miracle <coughs> of copyright. The scenario goes something like a broke artist sells their work for immediate cash needs, but those in the position of buying get to set the terms for being in a capitalist position of greater relative power, which generally includes their becoming exclusive owners, and then the original creator loses all say in what's done with the art/music for all time.

(I might be botching the details of that, but I'm getting old, so... pardon my "bidening" my way through this....)

So... when I post here... should I be able to delete it? Or, if not, at least replace it?

Thing is, doing that (note that I've already done it to several of my recent posts) requires being able to delete others' replies to the original content, otherwise those replies "dangle" meaninglessly out of context for having nothing to do with the replacement content in the top level post.

You know?

I mean, there was recently a passively aggressive uproar about someone emptying their posts, and replacing the titles with '-', leading to what some considered some major confusing ugliness on the site's front page.

So a little light bulb went on over my head, and I thought, "Well, I don't like my posts hanging around indefinitely *either*, so how about I just continue to replace them with new titles and body content until they fall off the front page, and then empty them for good, thus leveraging the "out of sight, out of mind" principle so that others are far less likely to experience the aforementioned ugliness?

But, of course, right away there was the big BZZZZT! in realizing what that did to replies to the original title and body content.

That got me thinking that if the posts are "mine", and the site *permits* my replacing their titles and body content, perhaps I should be able to delete replies as well in order to avoid reply-dangling-ugliness?

Yes, yes... I *KNOW*... why not just create a new post?

I've explained that elsewhere. I've come to dislike my posts enduring indefinitely. And yet I like the participants here a lot, value their interaction, and want to do right by them while also addressing my need to let old posts of mine die.

Thoughts? Are the posts "mine"? If so, should I be able to do what I want with them, including deleting replies if/when I replace the post content? Or do originators of replies have rights to what's done with their replies that the post owner ought not be able to muck with?

And please note this isn't criticism of m15o for not building such capability in from the start. I'm just feeling like I've discovered a posting paradigm that works better for me, and might work better for others, but it needs a bit more server-side functionality to robustly leverage.