Some might feel it's off-topic here, but I think this is the right place, so here goes.
After Tim's controversial announcement there was some silence, which led a user to ask a new question: Will concerns regarding the move to CC BY-SA 4.0 elicit any further dialogue from Stack Exchange, Inc.?
There was no answer until a couple of days ago, but this is not what worries me. What worries me is hidden in the comments: starting here, some users discussed that there was a bounty on that question, whose text read:
Looking for an answer drawing from credible and/or official sources.
Will you please just reply already? We need answers. This being ignored will not improve relations between users and the company, nor will it increase your already low trust.
It was deleted. Well, admittedly, it wasn't the most polite message ever (though I think editing it would have been much better than deleting it). But here comes the problem: the offending message also disappeared from Archive.org's Wayback Machine. The snapshots containing that message were removed, and instead they pointed to others which didn't contain the bounty. It seems they were restored after a while, but only after those users reported it. If it was just a coincidence, it strikes me as a very odd one.
So, the point is: did SE's staff reach out to Archive.org asking to remove those snapshots? That would be an orwellian alteration of the past, absolutely intolerable.
What happened? Did you ask for it? Why?
