Post Authors not able to delete comments on their posts

[vaniver]

This was the most requested feature by users who left Less Wrong, and it seems useful to both encourage politer discussion and spread out some of the moderation duties.

The main concern I see is "censorship!", which I'm not too worried about because this is mostly a location and style thing instead of a content thing. We may be better off with an 'exile' function, where it moves a comment (and any descendants) to the most recent Open Thread, perhaps with a 'original context' link edited in to the top. However this is implemented, we'll want to do a review after a month or two to see if it's having the intended effect.

[harshhpareek]

Why is this feature requested? Why is downvoting not enough?

[vaniver]

@harshhpareek Because people respond to downvoted comments; they do not respond to deleted comments. As I understand it, people want this feature in order to reduce the amount of unfun clutter they have to deal with.

This basically would bring LW closer to the Facebook style of moderation.

[harshhpareek]

Well, we can give them this feature, but I would rather prefer the moderation action of locking the subthread. This has the added (theoretical -- not sure this would ever happen in practice) benefit of letting people know the kinds of talk that are not tolerated

It also seems less censorship-y

[matthewfallshaw]

There's a "don't feed the trolls" perspective that says it's important to at least move trollish comments away from easy public view, and probably to prevent troll-child comments. I share @harshhpareek 's ick response to censorship (my ick reaction is not a strong argument for anything).

Perhaps we could move "deleted" comments out of view by a few clicks such that we were clearly not enabling censorship, but we were massively reducing the trollbait value of trollish comments?
What do y'all think of a feature that allows Post Authors to delete comments, prompts them for a reason code for the delete (and whether they're deleting just the comment or the comment and its children), then leaves a marker for the deleted comment in thread? If a viewer clicks for info about the deleted comment they see a brief essay about the reason code. If they click through that they see the original comment.

[vaniver]

I think a lock+hide would work, if it only requires two clicks on the part of the post author. Is it worth the extra effort to build that system?

[trike-support]

Hi all,

There doesn't appear to be any decided outcome on this thread. Is further
discussion required?

Dan

On 5 April 2016 at 11:01, vaniver notifications@github.com wrote:

I think a lock+hide would work, if it only requires two clicks on the part
of the post author. Is it worth the extra effort to build that system?

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#562 (comment)

[vaniver]

Dan,

My preference ordering goes like so:

1. Post authors and admins can hide a comment for one of a set of reasons, and actually getting to that comment requires several clicks, and then it can't be responded to.
2. Post authors and admins can delete a comment
3. Only admins can delete comments.

It seems to me that the second option is a single line of code to change, whereas the first is a potentially complicated feature. If we can build the first, then let's do it, but at least in the meantime it makes sense to do the second.

(There's an argument that the first will encourage more meta discussion, not less, and thus is troublesome; I think that the internet's censorship allergy is strong enough to outweigh that argument.)