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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

You should be allowed to delete your own comments for alot of reasons.

In particular, if you decide that a comment you made was overly negative, or offensive or has some other issue, then it is good for the quality of discussion that you be able to take the action and remove it. You are allowed to do this for a short time period after creating it, I think you should permanently be allowed to delete it.

I know HN does not like comments to be deleted because it breaks the historical value, but I think people, privacy, quality of discussion and individual personal right to curate your own online presence are more important than HN's right to maintain historical integrity. HN doesn't see it that way as far as I understand but hey, it's their site. Don't like it, don't comment.

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Maybe I'm weird, but "curating your own online presence" gives me the creeps, like I'm in a room full of people all wearing rubber Richard Nixon facemasks or something.

>>> like I'm in a room full of people all wearing rubber Richard Nixon facemasks or something

errr, this is an incredibly good description of the actual Internet and how people present themselves. Do you see otherwise?

I was thinking Jesus in a tuxedo T-shirt, but, sure, Nixon - why not?

You can delete comments within a time limit.

This is helpful, but sometimes inadequate. E.g. Making a comment before going to bed, you won't be able to edit in the morning.

If you're willing to email us, we can help. There's one user who has emailed us dozens of times requesting the most meticulous tiny edits that you wouldn't believe. But we're meticulous editors ourselves, so we humor him. If I woke up to a hundred such requests every day, we'd have to change something, but a handful is no problem.

That's a pretty good alternative to providing delete.

I still think you should provide delete though - Reddit and Twitter - the biggest discussion sites of all time - live with the nature of people deleting elements from conversations and they don't suffer too much for it. I do encounter threads sometimes with deleted elements but it's doesn't hurt the user experience.

I'd prefer the choice be in the hands of the user as to whether they wish to delete something - or everything. Quality of discussion would go up and negative, low value comments might be reduced if people can delete things without needing to email hn to ask for the deletion

I do wonder why HN holds on so tightly to preventing people from deleting their comments and accounts.

Anyhow your comment points to reasonable and good natured moderation, which is next best.

> I do encounter threads sometimes with deleted elements but it's doesn't hurt the user experience.

There are comments elsewhere in this thread that complain that they do harm the user experience.

For example:

"I [...] generally very much appreciate the lack of [deleted] a la reddit." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623158

I also agree; I read old Reddit threads reasonably often, and it's intensely frustrating to read exactly half of a conversation.

HN's randomized usernames compromise is really nice and I'm very happy with it.

>Reddit and Twitter - the biggest discussion sites of all time - live with the nature of people deleting elements from conversations.

Reddit and Twitter and many other sites do it the way you advocate, and yet you have accumulated 9192 "participation points" on one of the minority of sites that don't do it the way you advocate.

I would ask you to please consider the possibility that you like HN as much as you do partly because of qualities that wouldn't exist or would exist only in a weaker form were it not for the policy you are criticizing.

In particular, the policy under discussion makes it possible for a user to save the url of a comment, then return reliably to the comment years later. And the policy makes it such that when a user searches the site with hn.algolia.com, none of the search-engine results is a broken link.

Maybe those qualities differentially attract users to HN with a stronger than average commitment to the truth because those users have noticed that those qualities help with find the truth. And maybe the higher proportion of users with a stronger than average commitment to the truth that I just hypothesized is one of the reason you participate here as much as you do.

2 hours, I think -- which is essentially nothing.

I wrote about this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623839. If there's something that remains unaddressed, let me know.

It is good for fixing typos and adding updates

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