I do wonder what the criteria is for thread deletion, though. Sometimes it seems arbitrary and not based on promoting active discussion. And since (from a user perspective) all traces of a thread is deleted, it's difficult to understand
why in virtually all cases. It's difficult to avoid these threads when the criteria is unclear and no apparent rules are being broken.
I'll tell you what I do personally. As a general rule, I avoid megathreads. They’re useless and repetitive, yet for some reason the mods seem to leave them alone. I look for relatively
new and
on-topic threads with
active discussion happening. Yet it seems like these are still threads which are often deleted.
I stopped posting in Bitcoin Discussion entirely some months back because of it, and Press too for the most part. I post pretty seldom and often go back to my last posts to see if anyone responded. So I noticed it simply wasn’t worth responding on those boards anymore, whether or not there was active discussion or newbies looking for answers, etc. Half the time I'd go to check, the threads were gone. To me, the current moderation seems almost worse than the spam because it actively discourages genuine people from posting. It just axes discussions right in the midst and leaves no trace.
The spammers don't miss a beat; they keep posting (particularly in all the megathreads which are seemingly always preserved). But others (like me) just leave and never come back.
Examples? Difficult because I don’t preemptively archive threads I post in...that would be insane.
I’m just one anecdote; take my words with a grain of salt. I only wandered in here because my posts over the last week (just a handful) were deleted without notice. At this point, I mostly just post Bitcoin speculation and TA—in on-topic threads in Bitcoin Speculation. I really hope the delete-happy moderation from Bitcoin Discussion doesn't happen to Speculation (preserving the garbage megathreads while deleting active discussions).
Whatever criteria is being employed, it’s discouraging. If my TA updates keep getting deleted, I’m probably done with this forum. There would be no point anymore, not worth wasting the energy. It's already devolved so much and most of the old timers have all left anyway. Again, just my anecdotal perspective. Take it FWIW.
* Note: I am talking only about thread deletions. To my knowledge, I've never had a reply deleted by a moderator before.
