Over the years, the forum mods here have deleted *thousands* of posts that were harmful, flaming, insulting, pointless, spam, or what-have-you. Overall, I don\'t think people miss them, and in general I believe that people are pleasantly surprised when they come to our forums of how nice everyone seems and how helpful they are. :-) This is partly because all the hatefulness and spite is deleted.
Thread locking is also a useful tool but is used in a totally different way. I lock threads if I feel that the discussion is valuable or informative (not useless or harmful), but if I feel that everything has been said and it is getting repetitive. I often delete posts in threads I am going to lock, as well, to lessen repetition and mano-a-mano arguments at their ends, then lock them so they are clean forever.
- Vengeance