I asked this question which I later learned was apparently preposterous and was heavily downvoted.
I was still positive that someone will one day come across my question who will be generous and patient enough to look through my question and help me understand it better.
So a few days ago I wanted to check the status of the question, but to my surprise, I did not find it in my list of asked questions. And then I looked through my "all actions" tab and "reputation" tab entries. Nowhere!!
After like 30 mins of search, fortunately, I found an old conversation of mine, in a chat room, where I had mentioned the link to my question, So I was able to retrieve the question. And it said to undelete the question it required votes.
How are the upvotes from others are possible if you hide the question from everyone?
So I commented the link to this question, on my other questions requesting users to analyze it and upvote for the undeletion if they found it right. But then I get a private message from moderators, that such commenting is not in line with the spirit of the website and I should instead ask in meta site or a chat room, which I found completely justified, so I messaged them back apologizing and told them that I would delete the comments that I posted on my questions requesting the undeletion and I go onto delete the comments, again to my surprise all of my comments are deleted without my permission.
I find this totally wrong on so many levels.
Firstly, we already have the privilege of downvoting the question. If we find someone's question to be inappropriate we can downvote it vehemently, but we should not have the privilege of deleting the question for who knows, after some time there may come new visitors who will upvote the question more, so by deleting it you are preventing the self-correcting mechanism of society. By deleting a question you are removing a data sample from the public access and I believe it is a violent invasion of freedom of speech. And the reason that is given is
Abandoned, unanswered questions can be a nuisance for readers when they appear in search results. While every question deserves a chance to be answered, at some point the annoyance to those searching for a solution outweighs the increasingly small chance that an answer will be provided.
For this reason, the Community user will automatically delete old abandoned / dead questions in the following circumstances:
"at some point the annoyance to those searching for a solution outweighs the increasingly small chance that an answer will be provided". This is dangerous as this chooses practicality over truth. That is not how science works, we will have to examine extremely annoying ideas and take on ordeals, to come to the truth of reality. Instead of deleting the question, question with high downvotes can be shown in the end, therefore fixing nuisance problem. And people who are searching the answer will notice the downvotes and will not engage in that question. Why don't we let people decide for themselves? Rather than saying here is a question, which many people think is bad, see if you want to spend time on it, it is objectively worse to hide that question from the "those searching for a solution". A question is not an atomic statement. The question and its description can layout an unprecedented way of thinking which can bring forth valuable insights. By deleting the question all this organic nuanced dynamic is thrown out of the window.
Secondly, even though we can delete the question, why are we removing every reference of the question, almost obsessively, from the website. In my personal profile, the question is deleted from my list of asked questions. How can we do it? Not just that, every reference of the question, from "all actions" and "reputation" entries is also erased? This was absolutely unnecessary, if I did not have the link to my own question somehow, I would have lost my question, I could have had some potentially valuable information or insight into that question. This is absolutely not acceptable, as this is almost equivalent to the destruction of my private data and infringement of my privacy and my access to my own data.
Thirdly, I can't ask any question, because if I try to ask a question it says
"You have reached your question limit Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account. See the Help Center to learn more."
Seriously? If we think that someone is not contributing to the community, we can take away that person's reputation. It is one of the purpose of reputation. But we simply cannot excommunicate the user. It seems to be a redundant functionality. And it's also not very effective, because all that someone needs to do is create a new account and start asking questions. This does not fix anything. Instead if we feel like someone is not genuine we can take the reputation off or make his/her reputation negative. So that particular person will obviously be neglected. And if some one spams with like 100 questions, I think we already have a system that you cannot ask more than one question in a fixed window time period. And lets say if a person just goes on asking gibberish, there should an upper-limit of questions for given reputation-downvote based history of previously asked questions. This is way better solution as compared to ban someone who has asked like 10 questions in my case.
In summary I agree there should be some measures to ensure the ease and quality of the website. And we do have such measures like downvoting, flagging, reputation loss. But I argue that deleting someone's question, and also banning that person from asking questions and obsessively removing references of the question thereby effectively taking away the access to the question, even to the person who asked it, is a blatant invasion of privacy and a violation of freedom of speech. A conflation of moderation with censoring. And a set of redundant unnecessary features which are arguably not the best practices in the field of Science, where truth is of the highest value.
I predict that this question will be met with rigorous downvoting, will be put on hold as off-topic or opinion-based, and in a couple of days closed and in a week or a month deleted and wiped clean from the face of this website. And then someone writes a blog on why stack exchange is hostile to newcomers. Seriously?
And I also speculate if Einstein was to be born in this day and age and asks something which is non-populistic, he will not be discussed with, instead his questions will be downvoted, he will be banned from asking questions, his questions will be wiped clean by the "routine" in turn operated by "moderators". This is not Science, this is online-mob-censoring.
P.S: Please do not confuse this with me blaming moderators and SE users. I am aware that deletion and banning happens automatically by present routine. And that is exactly what I am talking against here. This is me trying to point out that the present rules which guide the routine as of now, allow for blatant invasion of freedom of speech and privacy.
