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 guess if it was a privacy issue, it might be a different conversation. If that is the reason though, I think it’s a weird way of solving the issue. Hiding it in the UI doesn’t get rid of the content, and might make it harder for the user to find where that content is. If a user had private information in a comment and someone quoted that portion, they could then message the other user or ask the mods to delete it properly.
That’s the problem though isn’t it. They don’t intend to destroy it but it happens anyways. So now even if someone wants to delete their own comment, there’s an incentive to not do that since it would delete everything below it.