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.
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?
I saw some discussion posts earlier talking about a LessWrong redesign, and now that things look different, I guess that it's been implemented. I'm always slightly annoyed for a while when a site I use gets redesigned because I have to relearn where everything is, but it eventually wears off once I'm used to the changes.
My initial impressions:
"Hmmm... it seems like the category menus have been replaced by dropdown menus. It's not like I used many of them anyway."
"Okay, I've clicked my name to see my recently posted comments. Now, where's the link to see it in context? Oh, I guess I have to click that icon in the lower right corner. For some reason I was looking for something at the upper right of the comment box."
"Well, that worked. Now how do I click to the parent comment? Oh, wait, it's probably one of those new icons in the lower right corner. I'll just mouseover them to see what they do..."
::realization sets in::
"AAUGH! LESSWRONG IS USING MYSTERY MEAT NAVIGATION!!!"
So, what does everyone else think of the new redesign?