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matt comments on So, I guess the site redesign is live? - Less Wrong
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Comments (215)
This is a test to determine my ability to ban my own comments as a stopgap measure for the inability to delete, until this horrible, horrible oversight is corrected.
You can retract, and you can edit. We thought we'd left the important powers intact.
Easy deletion breaks the old conversation. Retraction shows that you've changed your mind. If you really want to hide your previous comment, edit it.
Am I missing an important power?
Retraction-with-the-strikethrough is like divorce to deletion's annulment. When I delete comments, here are some motives not addressed by retraction:
I got simuposted by someone whose comment was similar and as good or better, and want to quietly remove the excess without leaving any clutter. (Or, I double-posted myself.)
I realize that I said something really, really stupid and don't want to admit to having said anything in the first place.
The only reply to my comment is from a source I don't want to interact and I wish to remove myself from the thread, rather than being tempted to abuse mod powers for the purpose of not interacting with the source.
I haven't actually changed my mind, but I decided that I didn't want to air the contents of the comment in a public forum, or someone else complained of a privacy violation; I don't want to draw attention to there ever having been a comment in the relevant location.
It's possible that comments with children, especially with several children, should exhibit more limited behaviors than those without; but the retraction/editing options are not sufficient.
The second one there is why I'd like deletion back, or at least the ability to make a post anonymous. My sanity and intelligence has a lot of time variance.
That sounds like a fairly strong argument for restoring deletion of comments without children.
I hear you on the rest. If we restore delete for childless comments but leave it out for comments with children, I think we're balancing the cost to others of the broken conversation vs the ability to pretend you never spoke - your remaining edit ability means you can remove everything but the trace showing that you once spoke.
I'm not sure how to make that decision, but am inclined to bow to public opinion. Can you see if you can raise some evidence for me that the community prefers one over the other?
Sounds good, except there's that nasty race condition.
Was a poll feature added somewhere that I haven't run into yet, or shall I do it the old-fashioned way?
A poll feature is still planned but not scheduled. The old-fashioned way still works.
Thanks.
If you retract, can your comment still be voted on? If so, then there's definitely an important power missing.
We understood one of the reasons for comment deletion was to prevent karma drain - you say something unpopular and watch your karma drain away, then delete the comment to prevent further drain. The current functionality is that by retracting the comment you leave the conversation intact but stop the karma loss.
If we add the planned agree/disagree voting readers will still be able to express disagreement with your original position.
Am I missing an important power?
I know. That is retarded FUCKING piss poor shit gay like your momma is. it also duzent use gramer or spellun and bypasses the primary role of karma. That is, you can now write comments that are immune to voting at the expense of being somewhat obscured. This is a new, undesirable power.
If people go around swearing and insulting others or spamming, or trolling, they should get downvoted to oblivion and not just rely on moderators finding them.
(Insults provided purely for illustrative purposes.)
In addition, retracted comments now have the undesirable property of being MORE visible on the page than normal comments -- the strikethrough draws the eye. It'd be better to have a link to view the original comment, e.g. something like:
[retracted by author -- click to view original]
I like this suggestion.
You could "retract" things anyway by editing them (adding a statement of retraction with actual reasons). Striking through all the text is a bad default for how to do that, makes the original text unnecessarily inconvenient to read (it's a better default than removing, but the use case is different).
You're right that the original power to edit and retract in plain english existed. In practice, deletion was fairly common, which meant that broken conversations were fairly common. I hope that the new delete button will make retraction more common than edit-to-delete-content.