This seems quite right for the new feature of “private blogs” here on LW2, and for “drafts”, which IIRC behaved as you describe, even on LW1. But ordinary posts on LW1 were unambiguously public (both in the Main and in the later-added Discussion section)--roughly equivalent in visibility to “Featured” posts here on LW2; and once you choose to make a post potentially eligible for such status, it would be quite unfair if you could wipe both its text and its attached comments with the click of a button. (Note that a ‘deleted’ post did become anonymous, in addition to having its text wiped out; people might have been able to figure out the original author if she happened to be mentioned in the comments but this only occurred rarely, so there was quite a bit of reputational protection. And really, much of the value in large comment threads is actually in side-discussions that are only tangentially related to the ‘OP’, if at all.)
This seems quite right for the new feature of “private blogs” here on LW2, and for “drafts”, which IIRC behaved as you describe, even on LW1. But ordinary posts on LW1 were unambiguously public (both in the Main and in the later-added Discussion section)--roughly equivalent in visibility to “Featured” posts here on LW2; and once you choose to make a post potentially eligible for such status, it would be quite unfair if you could wipe both its text and its attached comments with the click of a button. (Note that a ‘deleted’ post did become anonymous, in addition to having its text wiped out; people might have been able to figure out the original author if she happened to be mentioned in the comments but this only occurred rarely, so there was quite a bit of reputational protection. And really, much of the value in large comment threads is actually in side-discussions that are only tangentially related to the ‘OP’, if at all.)