When you make a post on the Effective Altruism (EA) Forum, you can edit your post, you can move your post back into draft, but you cannot delete your post.
When you make a comment, after a period of time, you cannot delete your comment at all. You can however edit it, or retract it.
When you send a message, you can either edit or delete it.
There is room to strengthen the pseudonymity offered to potential contributors. This would encourage greater participation. In particular for this community, there will be a number of people who's advocacy for human rights, or criticism of regimes, would make them a target in places they work, live or visit.
For example, if I am an expert on malaria and I want to travel to certain parts of Africa for work but I have promoted LGBT inclusion in the EA community, and my identity were to be leaked, I could be targeted by criminal groups for my identity.
If I have written critically about authoritarianism and visit certain Gulf countries to raise funds for my startup, I could be arrested at the border.
We live in a world with increasing harvesting of data, stylometric correlation that unmasks users, and powerful artificial intelligence systems used by regimes around the world. The Overton window about what is acceptable is rapidly changing and it is unclear what direction it might go.
It is irresponsible for the EA Forum not to provide the easiest and best opportunities for users to preserve their anonymity while participating in the community. This is not available through big Tech social media websites, where the options are unsend after an indefinite timeframe or delete data is rarely offered, and if taken up, does not stop those companies forming a back end snapshot about people that don't even have profile. The EA forum does not have that limitation because it is not aiming to maximise profits by on selling data to advertisers or government agencies.
There is a tail risk that data about AI safety advocates may be particularly valuable.
Draft amnesty can achieve its objectives better if it bundled with ephemerality.
Thanks for this post, I had no idea posts or comments couldn't be deleted after a certain time. This seems like a pretty major privacy flaw, and as someone who cares strongly about digital privacy it certainly makes me more hesitant to post or comment in the future.
As far as I know though, it's still possible to change the username and email attached to your activity? This could be a way of anonymizing yourself, although of course this isn't perfect and doesn't let you take action on specific posts or comments.
It also seems a little ironic that a community that is so concerned with future AI capabilities could seemingly ignore one of its dangers and make it impossible to remove personally identifiable data, given that in a world with powerful AI systems personal data could potentially be harvested significantly more efficiently than they are now.
I love the EA Forum but I'm personally quite glad I chose not to use my real name on here...