Why can't we have a way to delete dumb answers?

Who’s to decide what’s stupid? Even if it’s the author of the answer, s/he might have contributed something to spark a really great answer in someone else.

No, I kind of like the idea that something remains of the lost answer, even if it is only a lame self-edit.

@hawaii_jake but a lame self-edit is as bad as the famous “CIA thread” after it had been modded into farcical nonsense. It does not enlighten.
Wikipedia keeps everybody’s edits on file, and never deletes the account of an editor, so as never lose record of the source of an edit, but . . . they do not make any of this visible. Why leave trash about. Often I leave the carcase of an answer behind a previous answer because I realize I still have time to include the second thought into the previous answer. I guess I will just use up 2 answer blocks rather than leave a lame excuse in the second box.

JEEZUS what a diatribe. My apologies.

BTW non sequitur
those jellies Neptune is eating look like crinkly french fries. I didn’t realize they were jellies at first.

I suppose I worry that people will start to feel more self-conscious about what they’ve written and delete it for the wrong reasons. Sometimes, we bare our souls on sites like Fluther. It can be embarrassing and liberating at the same time.

Why haven’t we got a way to delete dumb questions?

Exactly as @hawaii_jake said, but you can always ask the mods.

@hawaii_jake @XOIIO not talking about a license to rewrite history here and go back and erase all your old answers that may have been more revealing than you might have wished. Just the chance to delete redundancy, and, yes, within the 10-minute limit, anything one is profoundly embarrassed to have written.

Nothing stops one from doing that now, but an awkward unnecessary answer with a “lame self-edit” is left.

You can flag yourself, and if it’s for a decent reason, we’ll mod it out for you.

@anartist What you’re seeing are the remains of the jelly’s tentacles sticking out of his mouth.

@augustlan thanks for the info.
@marinelife I know—I figgered it out from the 3-legged jelly behind.
But he isn’t so crinkly even if he is french-fry colored.

I like the way YouTube does it. People can leave comments to videos, and comments in reply to other comments. If a comment gets modded for any reason, there’s a link that lets you see it anyway. The only way a comment can be truly deleted is if the person had his account banned for, say, excessive copyright violations or for uploading porn after receiving a warning.

I also like the self-moderation there. A comment can be voted up (like a GA here) or down. It remembers your vote, so that you can change your vote, and also one person can’t vote more than once (except to change their vote). Many down votes causes the comment to be modded automatically. Many up votes restores the comment, overriding the moderator.

I like that! Very democratic!