Currently on Lemmy, when a comment is deleted by its creator, all of the replies to that comment become “hidden”. If I know who replied, and I go to their profile, I can still see the replies. The count of the number of comments indicated next to the post also includes the “hidden” replies. However, the replies to the deleted comment do not appear in the post. On Reddit, if a comment is deleted by its creator, it remains in the post with comment deleted by creator or something like that, and all of the replies to thatcomment remain visible in the post. Is there a way to do this on Lemmy?
I think if a comment is deleted, replies should remain hidden. I’d say the current behavior is more beneficial, despite the obvious tradeoff.
While sometimes there can be some helpful information in replies to deleted posts or comments, the vast, vast majority of those kinds of threads are just flamewars and arguing, then new people joining the battle later on and more arguing and flamewars happen. Lemmy doesn’t need more of that. If there was some question answered in one of those deleted replies, someone else can just ask that question again as a post, its not the end of the world.
Besides, a thread with a lot of deleted comments is an awful reading experience. If you ever went to Reddit and their main “science” subreddit, you better have all the discussion you can in the first 15 minutes of the post, because after that they just became a [removed] graveyard, regardless of what was said.
While sometimes there can be some helpful information in replies to deleted posts or comments, the vast, vast majority of those kinds of threads are just flamewars and arguing
This really depends on the subreddit/community
Some people like to delete their comments for privacy, because they want to move instances, etc. It doesn’t make sense to have that remove entire chains of comments with it. I also don’t think people intend for that to happen when deleting comments.
Mods should have a “nuke thread” button to autoremove all child comments when there’s a mess like you said. Users shouldn’t have that ability, even if they intended for that in the first place
This was the reason for this post. It has happened to me quite a few times already. When I take a bunch of time to make a well-thought-out reply and link a bunch of references in a discussion, I don’t want all that effort to effectively disappear when the original commentor just decides they are embarrassed or don’t want to continue and just nukes the thread.
Edit: typos
While I agree that mods should get a sort of mass moderation function, I still believe a user deleted comment hiding replies as beneficial.
If a person deleted their comments for privacy, they obviously are not nefariously trying to destroy a comment thread. Usually. However, if a person chooses to delete their comment for privacy reasons, what about comments that quote your deleted comment? The quote text doesn’t get deleted. That’s a privacy issue, is it not? Should all replies to a comment be string searched to delete quoted text? That would be a rather expensive API request. But, hiding the replies would help. A person would have to know who replied and go to their profile searching specifically for that quoted text to find it if the replies get hidden upon delete.
I guess if it was a privacy issue, it might be a different conversation. If that is the reason though, I think it’s a weird way of solving the issue. Hiding it in the UI doesn’t get rid of the content, and might make it harder for the user to find where that content is. If a user had private information in a comment and someone quoted that portion, they could then message the other user or ask the mods to delete it properly.
If a person deleted their comments for privacy, they obviously are not nefariously trying to destroy a comment thread.
That’s the problem though isn’t it. They don’t intend to destroy it but it happens anyways. So now even if someone wants to delete their own comment, there’s an incentive to not do that since it would delete everything below it.
There are lots of reasons for for wanting to delete comments without wanting to delete any replies.
For example in this comment, I bring up the use of macros as a solution to fix a mouse issue. If someone brought up a point that this software was against the games TOS, I would want my comment removed as fast as possible because I view my comment as potentially harmful (and from context, it would have been obvious what the deleted comment would have contained). If there were other replies giving advice on how to solder (one of the other solutions I give), I would want those replies to remain visible to anyone else viewing the post. Some people, like me, might not have been aware that deleting a comment would remove all other replies, I’ve never seen a warning message that this would happen when deleting something.
Deleting the comment on mobile instead of editing out bad information is also a lot more likely because it’s a “one button fix”, and a lot more convenient than trying to edit the post (some apps don’t render markdown correctly, and may not display strikethrough text). With the above example, quicky deleting my comment would have been an appropriate way to remove harmful advice, and a reply warning about the use of macros and advice on how to solder would still be helpful without the context of the original comment they were replying to.
