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David_Gerard comments on Less Wrong: Open Thread, September 2010 - Less Wrong
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Okay granted. I also think this would be a good idea. Actually, I'd be against having an easy way to delete all contributions in general, it's too easy to wreck things that way.
Are you saying that the only person who should be conveniently able to remove other people's contributions is you?
People's comments are their own. It is unreasonable to leave them up if they choose not to. Fortunately, things that have been posted on the internet tend to be hard to destroy. Archives can be created and references made to material that has been removed (for example, see RationalWiki). This means that a blogger can not expect to be able to remove their words from the public record even though they can certainly stop publishing it themselves, removing their ongoing implied support of those words.
I actually do support keeping an archive of contributions and it would be convenient if LW had a way to easily restore lost content. It would have to be in a way that was either anonymized ("deleted user"?) or gave some clear indication that the post is by "past-Roko", or "archived-Roko" rather than pretending that it is by the author himself, in the present tense. That is, it would acknowledge the futility of deleting information on the internet but maintain common courtesy to the author. There is no need to disempower the author ourselves by removing control over their own account when the very nature of the internet makes the deleting efforts futile anyway.
And not just the example you cite. RationalWiki has written an entire MediaWiki extension specifically for the purpose of saving snapshots of Web pages, as people trying to cover their tracks happens a lot on some sites we run regular news pages on (Conservapedia, Citizendium).
Memory holing gets people really annoyed, because it's socially extremely rude. It's the same problem as editing a post to make a commentator look foolish. There may be general good reasons for memory holing, but it must be done transparently - there is too much precedent for presuming bad faith unless otherwise proven.
Seems like a heavy-weight solution. I'd just use http://webcitation.org/ (probably combined with my little program, archiver).
A simple mechanism to put the saved evidence in the same place as the assertions concerning it, rather than out in the cloud, is not onerous in practice. Mind you, most of the disk load for RW is the images ...