Hmm, so the big thing I am worried about is the Streisand effect, with deleted content ending up getting more attention than normal content (which I expect is the primary reason why Lobse.rs does not show the original content).
This view seems to imply some deeply worrying things about what comments you expect to see deleted—and that you endorse being deleted! Consider again my taxonomy of comments that someone might want gone. What you say applies, it seems to me, either to comments of type C1 (comments whose chief vice is that they provoke responses, but have little or no intrinsic value), or to comments of type C2b (criticism of the OP, disagreement, relevant but embarrassing-to-the-author observations, etc.).
The former sort of comment is unlikely to provoke a response if they are in the moderation log and not in the thread. No one will go and dig a piece of pedantry or nitpickery out of the mod-log just to response to it. Clearly, such comments will not be problematic.
But the latter sort of comment… the latter sort of comment is exactly the type of comment which it should be shameful to delete; the deletion of which reflects poorly on an author; and to whose deletion, attention absolutely should be paid! It is right and proper that such comments, if removed, should attract even more attention than if they remain unmolested. Indeed, if the Streisand effect occurs in such a case, then the moderation log is doing precisely that which it is meant to do.
Sometimes you also delete things because they reveal information that should not be public (such as doxing and similar things) and in those situations we obviously still want the option of deleting it without showing the original content.
This category of comment ought not meaningfully inform your overall design of the moderation log feature, as there is a simple way to deal with such cases that doesn’t affect anything else:
Treat it like any other deleted comment, but instead of showing the text of the comment in the mod-log, instead display a message (styled and labeled so as to clearly indicate its nature—perhaps in bold red, etc.) to the effect of “The text of this comment has been removed, as it contained non-public information / doxxing / etc.”. (If you were inclined to go above and beyond in your dedication to transparency, you might even censor only part of the offending comment—after all, this approach is good enough for our government’s intelligence organizations… surely it’s good enough for a public discussion forum? ;)
The world where everyone can see the moderation log, but only people above a certain karma threshold can see the content seems most reasonable to me, though I still need to think about it. If the karma threshold is something like 100, then this would drastically increase the number of people who could provide information about the type of content that was deleted, while avoiding the problem of deleted contents getting tons of attention.
This is certainly not the worst solution in the world. If this is the price to be paid for having the text of comments be visible, then I endorse this approach (though of course it is still an unfortunate barrier, for the reasons I outline above).
This view seems to imply some deeply worrying things about what comments you expect to see deleted—and that you endorse being deleted! Consider again my taxonomy of comments that someone might want gone. What you say applies, it seems to me, either to comments of type C1 (comments whose chief vice is that they provoke responses, but have little or no intrinsic value), or to comments of type C2b (criticism of the OP, disagreement, relevant but embarrassing-to-the-author observations, etc.).
The former sort of comment is unlikely to provoke a response if they are in the moderation log and not in the thread. No one will go and dig a piece of pedantry or nitpickery out of the mod-log just to response to it. Clearly, such comments will not be problematic.
But the latter sort of comment… the latter sort of comment is exactly the type of comment which it should be shameful to delete; the deletion of which reflects poorly on an author; and to whose deletion, attention absolutely should be paid! It is right and proper that such comments, if removed, should attract even more attention than if they remain unmolested. Indeed, if the Streisand effect occurs in such a case, then the moderation log is doing precisely that which it is meant to do.
This category of comment ought not meaningfully inform your overall design of the moderation log feature, as there is a simple way to deal with such cases that doesn’t affect anything else:
Treat it like any other deleted comment, but instead of showing the text of the comment in the mod-log, instead display a message (styled and labeled so as to clearly indicate its nature—perhaps in bold red, etc.) to the effect of “The text of this comment has been removed, as it contained non-public information / doxxing / etc.”. (If you were inclined to go above and beyond in your dedication to transparency, you might even censor only part of the offending comment—after all, this approach is good enough for our government’s intelligence organizations… surely it’s good enough for a public discussion forum? ;)
This is certainly not the worst solution in the world. If this is the price to be paid for having the text of comments be visible, then I endorse this approach (though of course it is still an unfortunate barrier, for the reasons I outline above).