Q:

Holding one's own answer hostage

Recently, this paragraph appeared in an answer:

Now, the author of this edit thankfully removed this portion from their answer, but it prompted the question: is this sort of behavior OK?  I personally don't like the idea of a poster of a good, well-received answer using their power to delete said answer to obstruct the voting mechanism, which is integral to the site's ability to filter the best answers to the top.  However, I want to know what the moderators and community think.  In this sort of situation, is it allowed for people to do this?

A:

To back up Care Bear's comment: the fact that the user contributions to the site are licensed under a Creative Commons license implies that creators have the right to ask to be disassociated from the work. (Side note, the current incarnation of the ToS links to version 2.5 of the CC BY-SA license.) As such, StackExchange has published guidelines on how to invoke this right. Basically, if a user no longer wishes to be associated with a post he or she made, the user can either flag the moderators or use the contact us form to request disassociation. 
I should add that this has been used already several times on this site. For example, the creators of our sandbox posts, if you check the edit history, are "anonymous users". This has the additional benefit of preventing the users who originally created those posts from being bombarded with edit notifications every time the sandboxes are used. 

A:

In my opinion, a user can delete one of their own answers at any time, as long as the site's software allows them to do so.  Only if a user begins to delete many of their own answers would this be a cause for concern. There is no way to police the contents of a user's mind to determine why they deleted a specific answer, or to judge whether that reason is "acceptable".
Moreover, if a user no longer wants to be associated with a particular answer they wrote, who am I to tell them that they cannot remove it from the site? Answers are not written by robots, after all - they are written by living, breathing people. 

