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Questions I've had about this: How does the allowance of comment/submission deletion affect HN being perceived as a "permanent record"? I've always found this

Questions I've had about this: How does the allowance of comment/submission deletion affect HN being perceived as a "permanent record"? I've always found this aspect of HN to be important to me. If comments can be deleted selectively, what effect does that have on the permanent record? How many users would be tempted to write something they don't want recorded permanently simply to judge responses before they delete the comment later? (As opposed to requiring that all comments for a user be deleted together, which would likely discourage deletion to remove specific comments.) Would this give rise to third-party "comment recovery" services that scrape something like archive.org (assuming it is less affected by the GDPR) or maintain their own records to piece together comment threads with deleted comments? Similar to services that archive tweets that might get deleted.

krapp 9y ago
>How does the allowance of comment/submission deletion affect HN being perceived as a "permanent record"? Has Hacker News ever presented itself as a service that maintains permanent records for archival sake, or merely one that chooses not to delete comments? I don't think they have an obligation to serve a purpose they never intended to serve. >How many users would be tempted to write something they don't want recorded permanently simply to judge responses before they delete the comment later? Users do that now - there is an edit and delete window for comments, it just has a limit. >Would this give rise to third-party "comment recovery" services that scrape something like archive.org (assuming it is less affected by the GDPR) or maintain their own records to piece together comment threads with deleted comments? Probably, such services exist for imageboards.