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Comment by vidyesh | Hacker News Reader

I understand your sentiment but I don't think deleting comments would make sites like these (community driven) appealing. Missing comments creates a big hole to a comment train, look at reddit. Missing/Deleted comments make the whole comment tree below it quite meaningless.

HN would invite a lot of trolls with this an would make it really difficult to create a submission archive that makes sense.

Now I don't know how it handles account deletion but reddit handles that well, a deleted account will retain its comments without a name if the user hasn't deleted all their comments. That makes sense and works well.

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Deleted accounts could retain the comments but anonymise the accounts.

Also I don't think having the ability to delete your profile invites trolls. Usually one deletes their account because they post something wrong but which they genuinely believe is true then get downvoted and / or trolled into oblivion. These people we should probably be working to retain because while they might have been wrong, their contribution did improve the content on the site due to the corrections that followed. However sometimes the negative rep and / or harshness of the replies can make the corrections a bitter pill to swallow. So I think there should be a downvote cap for incorrect posts (or even disallowing downvoting for all but rudeness and spam) and working harder on improving forum etiquette.

I left after being hounded by trolls and sock puppets and, a year later, far from being deleted (as requested twice by email) my account was instead shadow banned.

Of course, likely as not this post itself is invisible. Likely as not the GDPR is as uninteresting as user's needs. Likely as not, Hanlon's razor applies. Although I would not brag about the last possibility.

There's nothing sacred about HN discussions. Privacy is way more important, even a matter of life and death for some.

I don't understand how anonymous discussions hinder a user's privacy.

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