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.
The downside of the idea of removing all child comments.
One person can remove an entire chain of comments just be deleting theirs.
While true, I don’t think this would happen as often as you might think.
For example, lets say some nefarious actor starts some comment thread and later decides to delete their comment “to own the Libs” or whatever they say now. That entire threads responses were meaningless. They were argumentation and flamefighting. If the comment information was incorrect, removing it as a deleted comment is more beneficial than leaving it up for others to read and ignore the context.
Lets say someone decides to delete their entire account and comment history. Reading responses are going to be difficult to understand the context. Most of the time these responses are to specific issues or comments, not typically a general answer, as general answers are usually top level comments. In this case, if someone later has the same question, it can be answered again later when that person asks. There may be more updated information between then and the hidden reply that changes the information, and there is no need to retain outdated answers to a question.
Personal view.
If I make a comment, only the mod and myself should be able to remove it.
It should not be up to a user I reply to if my comment should be visible.
This is what I want. How can I get this?
You want to delete others comments?
Mod your own community or create your own instance.
No, I don’t want to delete others comments. I want others’ comments to not be deleted when the original commentor deletes the original comment that starts a comment thread.
Ah. Then you are in luck. That’s what happens now for me on KBIN and I think it is the case with Lemmy as well.
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.
