As I said in another conversation about deleting stuff on HN:
Let's say you make a comment or a post. Let's say I reply. Then you want to delete your comment/post. What happens to my reply? There are no good options.
You could delete it, but I didn't ask for my comment to be deleted, so that seems kind of unfair.
You could remove the parent and leave the child. But that doesn't work if the parent is a post, because HN doesn't have a place for comments that are not under some top-level post. You could make the orphaned comment its own top-level post, but if the post had several top-level comments in reply, that would be kind of an avalanche of new posts-that-had-been-top-level-comments.
Even in the case of removing a comment, though, it still damages replies in another way - they lose context. I'm replying to something, but nobody can see what, so my reply is just floating out there, disconnected from what prompted it. It doesn't make sense any more.
So I think HN is right in not allowing deletes, at least of things that have been replied to.
Person A writes a comment. Person B responds. A's desire to remove their comment does not give them the right to delete or damage B's comment. "Difficult" has nothing to do with it. The problem is that you have to consider B's rights here, not just A's.
This is sad. I don't want to delete my account but my I want to delete some of my comments or posts. Sometimes we write things very contextual to the time we are being, sometimes for humorous purpose, or sometimes just for thinking out loud. Most of the time they don't make sense after awhile and buggens to live with them; so it's better to have a privilege to delete.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 19.8 ms ] threadLet's say you make a comment or a post. Let's say I reply. Then you want to delete your comment/post. What happens to my reply? There are no good options.
You could delete it, but I didn't ask for my comment to be deleted, so that seems kind of unfair.
You could remove the parent and leave the child. But that doesn't work if the parent is a post, because HN doesn't have a place for comments that are not under some top-level post. You could make the orphaned comment its own top-level post, but if the post had several top-level comments in reply, that would be kind of an avalanche of new posts-that-had-been-top-level-comments.
Even in the case of removing a comment, though, it still damages replies in another way - they lose context. I'm replying to something, but nobody can see what, so my reply is just floating out there, disconnected from what prompted it. It doesn't make sense any more.
So I think HN is right in not allowing deletes, at least of things that have been replied to.
Person A writes a comment. Person B responds. A's desire to remove their comment does not give them the right to delete or damage B's comment. "Difficult" has nothing to do with it. The problem is that you have to consider B's rights here, not just A's.