I broadly agree that infinite perfect archival, and searchability of that archive, make an online discussion effectively public forever, subject to broadcast forever.

But, even if you disable search, disable history, there's the fundamental fact that _anyone_ can record everything they see, easily and silently. You can't just have a private authenticated space, you need to be able to personally trust every single person you let in that space.

At that point, the features around archiving or search are a bit moot.

"It's impossible to stop a truly determined attacker, so we'd better not take any steps to fend off the less-determined attackers" is a terrible approach to building safe spaces. Some applications of that logic:

- We shouldn't bother checking for characteristics of credit card fraud at transaction time, because a determined attacker might get a fraudulent card through.

- We shouldn't bother checking IDs at bars, because a determined attacker might get a fake ID through.

- We shouldn't bother trying to prevent email spam, because a determined attacker might get a spam message through.

- We shouldn't bother making laws against recording people without their consent, because a determined attacker might do so anyways.

Please construct a more plausible argument than "it's ultimately hopeless". I'm willing to consider alternatives, but I'm not willing to consider fatalism.

I apologize, I may have made my point a bit unclearly.

I don't argue that "it's ultimately hopeless". I think, with effort, it's quite possible to create a pseudo-private safe space online.

I just think that the bulk of your benefit comes from vetting the intentions and judgement of your participants, and not from technological means like removing search.

If you're able to trust your participants, technological means can be like a simple fence/lock, keeping honest people honest, but don't otherwise add a ton of extra benefit.

If you're not able to trust your participants, removing search will help _some_, but it might not be enough.

Three of the four items you list work because the government will use force against those who break the rule which prevents rampant abuse. If you want a government run and legally protected safe space then sure. I suspect most people talking about them don't actually want that.

As noted above, fatalism is an uninspiring argument here. "This won't work because you can't use force against those who break the rules" is framing-by-assumption that success is either all or nothing. Success is not all-or-nothing when it comes to creating safe spaces. If you take steps and someone works very hard to break through your steps, they will probably succeed. That does not implicitly guarantee failure, especially if success is defined as "safety improved" rather than "safety guaranteed".

The illusion of safety is dangerous because it makes people act in ways that ultimately make them even less safe once the illusion is broken. The current issues with social media posts coming back to bite people after years is a perfect example. It works until it doesn't and then you're in the deep end of the pool realizing you don't know how to swim.

The damage done by the items on your list is mostly limited to the single attacker.

If it was just "determined attacker can do a search, and use the results privately" it wouldn't be a big deal. But they can then spread the result to everyone else in the world in a way that almost negates the barriers.

The recording option is closer, but search can be done retroactively, which makes a huge difference.

My own opinion is that if these messages are on public newsgroups/forums/mailing-lists, then they should remain public. Those who do not wish to make them known all the time should use private communication (or use a "non-archive" kind of communication, such as speech or live chat or whatever, but then you take a risk). (I do think that even (especially) for public "archival type" communications, you should perhaps be able to hide your identity from being tracked if you wish, whether by occasionally changing your account, using a different account name on different forums, or whatever else you might want to do.)

I find this argument really compelling. But, I also find it interesting to contrast this with HN's reactions to a court declaring web scraping legal a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559

It is interesting but the proposal is entirely in line with that case as I recall. This issue was LinkedIn was complaining about scrapping of publicly reachable sites. And this new proposal is to keep the contents of discussions unarchived behind a login.

In some jurisdictions it's illegal to record a verbal conversation without all parties's consent. It's interesting that you don't often see anyone suggesting extending that right to online conversations.

I personally believe that stems from the popular social platforms forcing you to give up your controlling interest in copyright, preventing you from suing a troll forum for republication of your protected works without your consent, since you openly divested yourself of that right when you tweeted.

Under US law anyways, it is absolutely not okay to republish a written conversation without permission under copyright law to do so, unless you fall under the "fair use" exemptions. It is safe to say that most forms of attack would not pass a "fair use" test in the courts. So if more people were to sue over copyright violations and demand the unmasking of who posted and/or those who operate, that would certainly go a long ways towards resolving that imbalance.

Sadly, it's a very expensive process, and it's very cheap to violate copyright.

How about not showing any usernames or profile info for any search results? That way you get SEO benefits as well.

Do you want to improve SEO or do you want a safe semi-private public space?

If you permit full text search of content, you permit abusers to discover and harass your members, because they can just sign up to find out who posted something once full text search discovers it.

>Do you want to improve SEO or do you want a safe semi-private public space?

You're implying they're somehow inversely related. A site can be well represented even when it's users contents are not on display