You could “retract” things anyway by editing them (adding a statement of retraction with actual reasons). Striking through all the text is a bad default for how to do that, makes the original text unnecessarily inconvenient to read (it’s a better default than removing, but the use case is different).
You’re right that the original power to edit and retract in plain english existed. In practice, deletion was fairly common, which meant that broken conversations were fairly common. I hope that the new delete button will make retraction more common than edit-to-delete-content.
You could “retract” things anyway by editing them (adding a statement of retraction with actual reasons). Striking through all the text is a bad default for how to do that, makes the original text unnecessarily inconvenient to read (it’s a better default than removing, but the use case is different).
You’re right that the original power to edit and retract in plain english existed. In practice, deletion was fairly common, which meant that broken conversations were fairly common. I hope that the new delete button will make retraction more common than edit-to-delete-content.