Today I clicked a link to a question on SO and got, 404 - This question was removed from Stack Overflow for reasons of moderation. That took me to another page, Why and how are some questions deleted?.
I am accustomed to things like GitHub. All things can change, but all things have a history. If you push your credentials into GitHub, you can hide that mistake, but you can't delete it.
I was surprised that a link I have, i.e. a direct path to something that was not hidden from me and that I did not randomly run across, brought me to a 404 - Removed!
Searching on the words "removed" and "deleted", I found things about pet vacuums, private lists with lifetimes and privileged access. In fact, there are several places that lifetimes seem to be implicit in the automation associated with "deleted" content. There is also information on features related to "deleted" content and time limitations.
Since the documentation uses the words "removed" and "deleted", and the site behaves as though the content I am trying to access has been removed/deleted, I am trying to understand why content would actually be removed/deleted.
I understand that there can be economic and physical reasons for restricting resources. Do these reasons play an important factor when choosing to delete questions or answers (really, any content)?
I also understand why things get hidden. I don't want to stop anything from being hidden. I don't want to change why things are hidden. I don't want to unhide anything that has been hidden. I believe it is in my interest that the things being hidden are hidden.
I am interested in finding a way to be more liberal in allowing any person to access a hidden thing if the person knows the path to the hidden thing.
When I say, I am interested in finding a way... I mean, I am trying to determine if there is an important system requirement that would prevent a feature change that allowed any person to access a hidden thing if the person knows the path to the hidden thing.
I think that an important aspect of my thinking is hinged on the bit, if the person knows the path to the hidden thing.
Everything I have read so far implies the idea behind hiding is to remove disruptive content from people's view. For a few people, e.g. the ones that took the time to create a bookmark, the hidden thing is not a disruptive.
Nothing said so far has persuaded me that, for the general case privilege should be required to access hidden content accessed from a link. Requiring privilege for people that don't already have the link, that still makes sense to me.