[openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website] Suggestion: People should be able to delete comments from their own diary entry, and turn off commenting (#1989)

[Frederik Ramm]

I like the idea of distributing the moderation chores, but I see many ways of abusing this. Like $COMPANY posting about their great machine learning data imports, then someone posts a thoroughly researched rebuttal publicly outlining all the flaws, and $COMPANY decides to remove the comment because "it is not in line with our communications strategy" or some such rubbish. If $COMPANY boasts on their corporate blog then everyone knows they're reading a PR statement but if they post on the OSM blog then it's a community medium and the community should not be subjected to $COMPANY's corporate communications strategy. The same could happen with individuals floating grand ideas and tacitly removing any comments that deflate the plan (always on the grounds of perceived impoliteness - "this comment pointing out that my calculations were off by an order of magnitude was derogatory" etc.).

At the very least, if blog authors were allowed to hide comments, I would expect there to be one line where the deleted comment was: "rory has hidden one comment from woodpeck" or so. That would at least allow third parties who stumble on the blog entry to see that there's some degree of controversy, and they could seek out the blog of whoever was silenced. Or maybe the comment would still be visible on user/X/diary/comments?

But on the whole I'd lean towards not doing this at all, and rather communicate that this is a community forum like others too, and just as you can't hide a changeset comment when someone finds issues with your mapping, you also have to accept that people might want to talk back when you write a blog entry.

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