"My girlfriends and I are certainly driven to be successful; we want to be high achievers in our fields, and we stress over everything we haven’t yet accomplished, but no one’s especially concerned with getting rich. We hardly ever talk about money."
How is that better than adding to the comment or replying to let people know of your change of heart? Deleting comments that have replies is in no way a good thing.
The comment I wrote was a pithy, uninformative comment that was misleading about the content of the article (I suggested that the author just didn't understand ambition very well, but she's clearly not talking about general ambition; she explicitly distinguishes people who are in it only for riches.) Worse, it had 7 upvotes almost immediately, meaning that people were reading it and getting a wrong and unfair impression. The reply added nothing except to correct me. I don't feel like anything was lost.
You could say that I should leave it in case someone else makes the same misinterpretation. Perhaps I should, but I would not anyway. I don't care to represent myself with incorrect or useless comments documenting my stupidity; I would prefer to remove them from the record and let people who know what they're talking about go ahead.
"My girlfriends and I are certainly driven to be successful; we want to be high achievers in our fields, and we stress over everything we haven’t yet accomplished, but no one’s especially concerned with getting rich. We hardly ever talk about money."