have a "delete" button in the "..." dropdown. Visible only to the author.
author clicks on the button
if there are no sats on the post, then it maybe just shows up confirmation "Are you sure?" dialog, but otherwise deletes the post
if there are some sats on the post (e.g. 1000), then it would show a dialog with table like
Post earned: +1000 sats
Deletion fee/donation: -1000 sats
(will be donated into daily rewards)
===
TOTAL: 0 sats
And the sats would be donated to the daily rewards. (effectively reducing the authors balance by 1000 sats)
The reason for donating the sats to rewards is that the person that paid the sats already received their value (because presumably they already read the post). So there's no need to return the money to them. On the other hand removing post with sats is undesirable (we want to keep valuable posts ;)), so the person removing it should lose some sats.
If the author of the post already withdrew their sats from SN, then fair enough - I don't see that as a huge problem. If we would be really strict, the dialog could ask them to deposit 1000 sats to be able to delete the post... but that sounds like a bit too much.
I think the model of reddit is quite good: just delete it and don't care about the Karma. Would be a huge pita to roll back all tips for a single post. Tipped is tipped 🤷
FWIW, I don't post much on Stacker News, cuz I know I can't edit or delete if it is later revealed to need an edit or delete because it's unfactual "news".
I for one don't care strongly if someone deletes a post I tipped and get to keep the sats. I already read the post and 99% of the post I read I only read once. So I got my values worth even if it's deleted later. 99% of posts probably won't be deleted as well. Let's have basic delete feature and see how we go?
ya feel the same about some of the things I said here also. uhm. yee. I really should delete one comment I made here cuz it uhm, it's not that I said anything that I regret or anything. Sometime I spill too much outta mi heart. I could get into trouble if somebody start searching me. uhm. not that I paranoid or anything. when u got the time @k00b when u got the time. No hurry no worry.