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?

  • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    The downside of the idea of removing all child comments.

    One person can remove an entire chain of comments just be deleting theirs.

    • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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more updated information between then and the hidden reply that changes the information, and there is no need to retain outdated answers to a question.

      • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • Otter@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        But why force that deletion instead of letting people choose if something is outdated/irrelevant/confusing? It doesn’t cause any harm to leave up the information in case it helps.

        If a user doesn’t like it, they can just skip threads with deleted comments, or enable that setting themselves (depending on the frontend)