How does the allowance of comment/submission deletion affect HN being perceived as a "permanent record"? I've always found this aspect of HN to be important to me.
If comments can be deleted selectively, what effect does that have on the permanent record? How many users would be tempted to write something they don't want recorded permanently simply to judge responses before they delete the comment later? (As opposed to requiring that all comments for a user be deleted together, which would likely discourage deletion to remove specific comments.)
Would this give rise to third-party "comment recovery" services that scrape something like archive.org (assuming it is less affected by the GDPR) or maintain their own records to piece together comment threads with deleted comments? Similar to services that archive tweets that might get deleted.