Terms Governing Comment Drafting Deletion
The industry practice of composing a reply, reconsidering, and deleting it before posting has generated more deleted text than posted text in at least one documented case.
Field Notes: Comment Drafting Deletion Observed December 2021
He had been composing and deleting comments on the same thread for forty minutes.
He had made seven distinct attempts to explain why the original post was wrong. None of them were wrong. All of them were deleted for reasons that varied in quality and that he had stopped evaluating rigorously sometime around the fifth attempt.
The reasons were as follows: too long, too short, sounds defensive, sounds aggressive, uses a word that could be misread, technically correct but misses the emotional register of the thread, and, on the seventh attempt, a delete with no articulable reason, just a sense that it was time to stop.
He had not posted anything.
The deleted drafts now constitute a more complete record of his views on the topic than anything he has published.
This observation occurred to him and he began typing it into the text field as an eighth draft, which he then deleted.
Observable Patterns in the Drafting Deletion Cycle
The first draft is too long and accurate. It contains everything the person wants to say. It contains too much.
The second draft removes the parts that seem like overreach. The second draft is shorter and slightly wrong.
The third draft corrects the wrongness introduced in the second draft, which requires restoring some of the overreach from the first draft. The third draft resembles the first draft in length and is deleted for the same reason.
The fourth draft is brief. It says one thing. It says the thing in a way that could be interpreted to mean the opposite thing. It is deleted.
By the sixth draft the person is no longer drafting a comment. They are conducting a private negotiation between their actual position, their performed position, and their estimate of what the thread will do with either one. The negotiation has no resolution procedure.
The Unread Archive
The deleted drafts exist only in the browser's memory until the window closes. They do not persist. Nobody reads them. They are, in the technical sense, nothing.
They are not nothing to the person who wrote them. They constitute, in aggregate, a substantial amount of considered writing that was produced in response to another person's thinking and then deliberately suppressed.
Governing Absurdity
The drafting and deletion process is more effortful than posting. It takes longer. It produces more text. It changes nothing about the thread. The person who completes it has worked harder to have no effect than they would have worked to have some effect.
Contradiction
The original post that prompted forty minutes of drafting and deleting was composed in four minutes and posted without revision.
The author of the original post did not consider this unusual. They were already looking at something else.