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For example you can't even delete your comments/account on hacker news

Luckily not. I've seen what happens on Reddit when people do that, and it's awful.

Come back to an old thread and it's full of [deleted] and "This comment has been deleted by a script blablabla by the way fuck you"

This is also why most online community/forum owners don't let users delete their own posts (or in a lot of cases, delete their account). Because it makes the content real hard to read/make sense of if some of it randomly goes missing for whatever reason.

That's why I prefer ephemeral threads like imageboards have.

There's almost nothing about most threads that will be of any long term interest to anyone - so you might as well allow them to auto-delete after a certain time.

Is that so bad? Granted maybe it's annoying looking at old threads, but as a user, the ability to go through and remove old and potentially regrettable posts is quite welcome.

Maybe a good compromise would be to remove the user information after a certain time period (~2 years). Hashing the username salted with the post title would be a decent way of systematically respecting user privacy while also keeping old threads readable. I wouldn't mind if HN did this.

You'd be surprised how much you could piece together with obfuscated (but still unique) usernames. I'd be in favor of your system if the hash was salted with the article's id, so that the hash of my username in one article was different than the hash of my username in a different article.

One day I'm going to run for office and I'm going to have to get lawyers to scrub HN of all my comments because they have no way for users to manage their content :-)

Really, usernames only have to be unique within a single thread, don't they?

You could get away with something as simple as incremental ids in that case - user1, user2, etc.

Yeah that was my reasoning. The salted hash would be an easy way to implement single-thread username consistency.

Edit: for better readability it could be further mapped into a table of human readable handles, similar to how Google does the "Anonymous Lemur" thing in gDocs.

Yep, it's awful. I find a thread in Google and all the useful comments are gone.

Why do your think your right to read a "useful" comment overrules the rights of the original writer of that comment? Not snark, a genuine question.

I'm not sure if rights is the correct term to use here. Those are choices made by the host, the experience they want to provide; and the members who have chosen to participate, accepting the terms of the host, aren't they? Well, I guess rights of some sort are involved, the commenter ceding copyright or some such to the host.

I'm not a lawyer, and admittedly haven't taken the time to look up the appropriate legal terms and other minutiae involved, rather relying on the kindness of my fellow commenters to extend to me the benefit of the doubt with respect to what I'm getting at, and helpfully clarify anything that needs to be. Thanks :)

I don't have any right to that when I'm a user. However I run various sites, and know that it is a terrible experience for people coming from Google, so I do not allow it on my own site. Once users submit their content they lose all rights to having it be modified or removed.

Why is that awful? The script obviously worked....

Change your name to a random hash. Should work fine.

For domains that you do control, the best way to deal with that is to:

1. Pay the domain registration for as long in advance as possible (I think it's 10 years). Also, pay for hosting of any web sites for as long as possible because:

2. Not only delete all the content, but set up the server to serve up a "410 Gone" response to every URL except for robots.txt. For that, you want:

    User-agent: *
    Disallow /

The reason for the previous two steps is to inform Google (and other search engines) to remove cached copies of your sites. The robots.txt is not for search engines but for the WayBack machine. It has cached copies of your site (most likely) but if the robots.txt file disallows indexing, then it won't return any results from searches there. Sure, after your domains lapse and the new owner replaces robots.txt the stuff from your domains will be available again, but ten years might be a decent amount of time. If not, make sure you repeat as often as you can.

That LinkedIn thing scares me too. But it might be rather simple. Person XYZ has your email and phone number in his address book, and then shares all of his contacts with LinkedIn (which they pester everyone about).

Yeah probably that. Linkedin are notorious for kind of tricking you into letting them download your contact list. I wonder what percentage of the worlds population they now have names emails and phone numbers for. Probably a good chunk.

> Also note that when a service deletes your account and data, it is more often a soft delete so your data is still with them. Good luck getting a hard deletion of your account/data.

There are reasons for that. If the customer 'accidentally' deletes their data, and they have paid you money, restoring that account would be important for keeping their business. Also, if you have an abusive user, and they have paid for things in the past, they delete their account and file a chargeback, you can provide evidence against that user.

Even if it's not an accident - customers change their mind next year and they don't want to start over again!

You also don't want a user who gets around the moderation system by posting abusive content then deleting it when it gets reported but before moderators see it, stupid stuff like that.

It's still a soft delete, but the best way is to fill the account with boilerplate/useless info before removing any account.

Except when they version that crap.

Use the "Account Killer" website to find out how to get accounts deleted from various services.

accountkiller.com

-dougl