I think in the case of regular comments there’s a desire not to let people edit the record too much; if you say something you no longer endorse the intended action is that you retract it (which applies strikethrough but leaves the comment standing).
Of course, there are some issues with this setup:
One can edit one’s comments freely, so it’s easy enough to remove unwanted content anyway (as we see here, and in the occasional comment consisting entirely of a struckthrough ”.”).
If the original comment is yours and no-one has responded to it, there’s no conversation to protect, so I’m not sure blocking deletion makes much sense.
Since shortform is implemented as one big comment thread, it’s impossible to delete shortform posts except by asking a mod to do it (I’ve run into this one myself). So one has less power over one’s own shortform feed than one’s major posts, which seems backwards to me given the intended purpose of shortform.
We actually just deployed the ability for users to delete their own comments if they have no children (i.e. no replies) for lesswrong. So I expect that will also be up on the EA Forum within the next few weeks.
I think in the case of regular comments there’s a desire not to let people edit the record too much; if you say something you no longer endorse the intended action is that you retract it (which applies strikethrough but leaves the comment standing).
Of course, there are some issues with this setup:
One can edit one’s comments freely, so it’s easy enough to remove unwanted content anyway (as we see here, and in the occasional comment consisting entirely of a struckthrough ”.”).
If the original comment is yours and no-one has responded to it, there’s no conversation to protect, so I’m not sure blocking deletion makes much sense.
Since shortform is implemented as one big comment thread, it’s impossible to delete shortform posts except by asking a mod to do it (I’ve run into this one myself). So one has less power over one’s own shortform feed than one’s major posts, which seems backwards to me given the intended purpose of shortform.
Yeah, I really dislike that I can’t delete comments.
We actually just deployed the ability for users to delete their own comments if they have no children (i.e. no replies) for lesswrong. So I expect that will also be up on the EA Forum within the next few weeks.