I hope those who clicked on to this diary know by now that this is the quintessential meta diary, although I'm posting it because I think the issue is important enough to sort out in this online community. Also, I wanted to get an idea about whether there is consensus about this topic since in the past I haven't been able to get a response from admin on the handful of inquiries I've sent (on other topics).
I'm going to keep this as straight forward as possible... I'm not sure if this happens to other diarist/writers or not, but on a few occasions I've written a diary, sometimes spending a couple of hours writing it, and after publishing it and re-reading it I realized that I don't like the way it came out, and I go ahead and unpublish it, or delete it. Out of the almost 500 diaries I've written I may have done that maybe 6 or 7 times (if my memory serves me right).
Also, the handful of times I've done that, I usually unpublish the diary within a couple of minutes after having published it, trying not to inconvenience those who may have already engaged in the comment thread.
Now, here's why I think doing this sort of thing is not kosher... Imagine somebody writes a diary and right after publishing it, for whatever reason, the diarist feels that there is sensitive or potentially damaging information (maybe to him or herself, or to others), and after further consideration decides to unpublish or delete the diary? Or it could be that the writer feels the diary was poorly written, etc. It could be anything; it seems to me that's why we have the publish/unpublish/delete features.
In my case, the particular user in question has made comments questioning me about why I unpublished particular diaries, which I find kind of bizarre because it seems to me that one could answer "because I goddamned wanted to deleted and I don't owe you an explanation about it," but what I find truly bizarre is for this user to go out of his way to first get a cached copy of the deleted diary, and secondly, post a link to it in unrelated diaries.
What is the purpose of doing that? Maybe it's just me, but it seems to me that the person doing this is somehow trying to make some kind of point by posting the link to the cached copy of the deleted diary...
But the larger question I have for the Daily Kos community is this: Do you think this is acceptable behavior and that it contributes to an atmosphere of intelligent and respectful debate (as much as that is possible)?
Would you feel Okay if somebody did that to you? Let's say you write a diary, then after re-reading it you decide you don't like it (for whatever reason) and unpublish it, just to have somebody take a cached copy of it and post it in links to unrelated comment threads?
Also, as I said, keep in mind that I've written almost 500 diaries and I've unpublished only a handful (6 or 7), and usually within minutes (not wanting to inconvenience potential readers).
Let me know what you think by participating in the poll below.
Thanks!