[ranger207]

>our comments are ours and we should have the ability to delete them

I strongly disagree with this. When you're part of a conversation your comments are critical to understanding the conversation. By having a conversation in a public space, you're allowing anyone who wants to listen in, and your comments are necessary for that. I can't tell you how frustrated I've been searching through old reddit threads in particular where the user has completely nuked their account, and the only trace of what they said is in replies. (Worst is when it's a technical issue and their comments are the only relevant search results: xkcd.com/979 where the answer has been actively removed.)

If you want to have a private conversation, please use a private medium. Otherwise you're gaining the benefit of public spaces (you can view anyone's conversation, their ideas and wisdom, and watch the development of discussions and understanding) while preventing others from gaining those same benefits.

[stordoff]

Not only do I find it somewhat rude[1], I also think the ability to delete comments is offering a false promise to the user - if you've publicly posted something on a notable site for any length of time, there's a good chance there's a copy of it somewhere else (as has happened with this post).

[1] subject to obvious exceptions like accidentally revealing personal/private information, it being spam/off-topic, or a misunderstanding (editing with a correction is my preference though)

[cgriswald]

There’s an uncanny sameness to the point you’re making and the cartoon even without the deletion modification. Ultimately your point is about missing context (albeit through deletion). Here the missing context is when the cartoon was published. (Google tells me 2011, but there isn’t anything on the page that I can see that says so and certainly nothing in the cartoon itself.) Although the joke still works, I feel there is a subtle difference reading it in 2021 compared to if I had read it in 2011 (which I probably did).