Questioning the deletion of an answer

Question

I refer to my answer in this question.

The deletion undermines the right to freedom of expression. The answer was in no way against the rules. (If anyone thinks it was, please teach me which rule).
For me, it seems to be a personal decision of the moderator who deleted this answer.
Also, it is an aberration that answers will be deleted without a notification.

I'm asking to restore my answer.

It feels like the mod thought something like "oh, a new user, he must be lame. I'll just delete his answer without giving him a chance for improvement." It feels very unfair for me.

Answer 1

I am the moderator who protected the question from answers being posted by new users, just prior to the answer being deleted. I then asked other mods to review the questions

My reasoning was:

I protected the cat abuse question is collecting answers wishing bad things to the abuser. We probably need to go through and clean up some of the answers. I don't have time at the moment, or I would.

If I had the time when I saw your answer, I would have either edited (as you have) or deleted it.

Realistically, your edited answer does not provide anything not present in one of the other answers. As such, it does not really add value as is, so deleting it is probably the most appropriate choice.

As you expect other to be kind to animals, we expect answers to be kind to question posters.

Expected behavior:

Be nice.

Whether you've come to ask questions, or to generously share what you know, remember that we’re all here to learn, together. Be welcoming and patient, especially with those who may not know everything you do.

I don't condone the behavior in the question nor the answer posted. As a community, we do have control over what is posted, even when we don't have control over physical interactions. That is just the nature of the Internet.

Due to human nature, bad things do happen, and people do those bad things.

While we can't directly influence those behaviors by physical intervention, we can provide an avenue for those who recognize a need to alter their behavior to have access to questions and answers about making change.

If you look, you will find many questions here where, people have made poor choices, and answers attempting to help them make better choices in the future. Some choices are more blatantly abusive then others, sad as they are, there are no isolated incidents. There needs to be a place for those seeking help to find it. We need to provide helpful content to them to make that change, striking out (verbally) in response is not helpful.

Answer 2

Not an active member of this community. Not a moderator. Not the moderator who deleted your post, so take this with a grain (or frontloader) full of salt.

The deletion undermines the right to freedom of expression.

This is a complete red herring. Stack Exchange owns and operates these sites, they're private property and your usage and perusal of them is granted as an revokable privilege. The content is community owned and available under a specific license, yes, but it is the prerogative of Stack Exchange (or those whom it chooses to delegate this authority to) to disallow usage of their platform selectively.

I think your answer was deleted because it doesn't actually answer the question and doesn't do the "justified frame challenge" alternative to direct answer route well either, on top of tonal issues that violate some parts of the Code of Conduct.

The answer was in no way against the rules. (if one think it was, please teach me which rule)

It's normal to have a strong negative emotional response to the question, but the Stack Exchange network explicitly prohibits displays of aggression, insults or otherwise unconstructive mud-flinging in its Code of Conduct. We're supposed to assume good faith, and yes, it's really really mentally exhausting to try that in this case, but the rule of

If you can't say something nice (or at least not overtly hostile), then don't say anything at all

still applies to all answers, even if you find what OP did morally despicable (as every other answerer seems to).

Answer 3

The deletion undermines the right to freedom of expression.

While I understand your feelings (and frankly share them) deletion of a post on a privately owned and operated website in no way undermines any "right to freedom of expression" and moderators are specifically empowered to use their discretion in deleting posts whether or not a specific rule has been broken.

Answer 4

I am looking into this in retrospect; I was not involved in these events.

I actually have to agree that the deletion of your answer right away was excessive. The problematic part of your answer was not aligned with Code of Conduct, specifically with:

"no unfriendly language"

and:

"no harassment: this includes, but isn’t limited to: [...] direct or indirect threats."

However, according to my observation of how it happens nowadays, if the answer is salvageable, like yours was, then we seem to just edit out the parts which have the potential of causing inflammation and leave the rest.

Unless a post is an obvious case of trolling or otherwise not being posted in good faith, moderators generally should leave a comment in which they explain the reason for the post deletion; the lack of any moderator comment was probably due to the fact that there already was the comment of regular user, Trond Hansen, which explained the reason why your answer could had been seen as problematic. Nonetheless, lack of an "official" comment of moderator in the context of your answer's deletion was definitely not helping with your confusion about this.

In my opinion, the correct action in case of your answer should had been editing out the problematic part by a moderator or regular user, and deletion should only had been warranted if you were to rollback the edit and reintroduce the problematic part (and you did the opposite -- you removed this problematic part yourself).

What is more, the fact that your flag requesting the undeletion of the answer was marked as "declined" despite of your answer being undeleted shortly after was also unfair. Undeletion of your answer proved via action that your flag had merit and should had been marked as "helpful"; mixed signals like that should had not been sent to you.

In general, I do not think any harm had been done except some confusion, but deleting your post and undeleting it shortly after was unnecessary and confusing.