I understand that people might need to delete a lengthy quote to save space (so they don't have to do fiddly mobile editing or whatever) - though as I was saying, in my original post, I would find it much easier to follow if you replaced it with a very short summary of what the person was talking about, rather than the word "snip". Eg. if I replaced your quote with "re. snipping for length".
I agree that KisaiTenshi may be overstating it by saying that replacing a quote with "snip" is equivalent to "what you said means nothing" - at least I *think* that's the specific quote you're responding to, but I can't actually tell because you didn't leave the quoted text there.
However, I don't consider completely removing the text to give any "reading convenience" - instead it just makes me uncertain exactly what part of the conversation a quoter is responding to, and I may have to stop and read back to work out the context.
Having to move up and down the discussion to follow the context of quotes doesn't seem like the best solution to me. It's a backup option if the responder has deleted the quote text, or in a long thread where the context may be a long way back - but it makes for a much easier 'flow' of reading down the page if you've got the text (or a summary of it) there to keep track of the conversation, or which of several conversations your post is adding to.
Oh goodness, I've noticed people do that a few times and I find it so confusing. Post efficiency is one thing, but editing a post to add a quote-and-response to something that is further down the page puts it all out-of-order.
