When I “delete” a comment, all it does is replace the text with “deleted by creator”. It doesn’t even hide my username. This is different from previous behaviour where the comment was entirely removed from the public view.
I should be in control of my comment. If I want to delete it then it should be entirely removed - at least from the public view. I don’t want to make comments knowing that I’m permenantly etching my username into the stone of the thread forever with no ability to delete it. I’m highly put off from engaging now that I can’t reliably delete what I write.
Being able to undo the deletion is fine but the undo really should only last 1h or maybe 24h before the comment is properly deleted.
This is the pull request that changed the behaviour, for the curious. They changed it because deleting the comment entirely broke a lot of stuff, like viewing replies to deleted comments.
Thanks. From the linked discussion, it does solve a legitimate problem - I had noticed that entire comment branches could be lost if a parent comment was deleted or removed. That was also pretty bad, so I’m glad there’s been progress there.
Honestly I think reddit’s approach is correct: when I delete my comment, other see that a comment existed here once, but not what it said or who wrote it, and it’s no longer interactive. And, deleting it doesn’t affect child comments.