zlacker

Please provide more tools to help users moderate their own comments. In particular, I think the following features are sorely needed:

1. The ability to delete your own comments indefinitely, instead of having a window of only a few hours within which to delete your own comments.

2. The ability to flag your own comments for moderation.

I suppose one possible reason for not allowing comment deletion after a certain amount of time is that it forces people to really only make high-quality comments, otherwise they'll be downvoted and they won't be able to do anything about it after a few hours.

But if you're trying to improve the quality of Hacker News threads with high-quality comments, then I argue that it's counter-productive to force low-quality comments to remain by not allowing users to self-delete them after `X` hours.

Both Reddit and Stack Overflow allow users to delete their own comments indefinitely. Heck, Stack Overflow even encourages you to delete your own comments, if they don't contribute useful information to a post.

>>ColdHa+(OP)
I think a nice comprimise would be to allow each user a certain number of deletions relative to the karma they've earned. i.e. for every 100 upvotes, you're allowed to delete any post of yours indefinitely/permanently.

The reason for the ratio of votes to how many you can delete, is because its likely that HN karma per user correlates with the quantity of posts per user. With that in mind, someone who has made many more posts may have a need to delete more posts in the future.

This would balance the needs of the community to not have holes in its conversations, but also allow individuals to strike a particular comment from the record.