[antiterra]

This reads as passive-aggressive and incredibly self-centered. People don’t owe you their content, and it should be understandable that someone might want to remove their posts from a site that they no longer support. If it’s the rewritten text that bothers you, that’s just the unfortunate consequence of sites that scrape reddit live.

[rospaya]

> This reads as passive-aggressive

To be fair it is, it was written in the heat of the moment.

> and incredibly self-centered

I don't agree. The commenter or anyone else who participated in the comments isn't an island. Threads now have holes and they read like puzzles with every 10th piece thrown out because the user decided to be self-centered.

You are completely correct, they don't owe me or reddit anything, but that doesn't mean that their act of disobedience, protest or grudge didn't leave collateral victims.

Imagine people re-writing or deleting their comments or answers on Stack Exchange. Sure, we aren't owed anything but it hurts thousands of people who click on it, and the website owner very little.

[asdff]

It is pretty annoying when you find that thread with the exact knowledge to solve that exact question you've been struggling with only to find that everything has been wiped from the record. It harkens back to "BANDWIDTH EXCEEDED" messages that crippled the usefulness of old forum threads. It doesn't even benefit whoever deleted the comment, it isn't all that difficult to find a cached version of the site with the comment. If we value internet discussion as something beyond just spouting into the void, and as something useful to other people, then we wouldn't be erasing public facing comments after the fact like an anti-intellectual despot.