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A particularly ugly thing happens if the HN mods for some good or bad reason decide to ban an account: their contributions will be there forever, with no ability to append explanations to previous posts.

This will after May 25 be illegal for services offered in the EU, but I kind of think that the same courtesy should apply to non-europeans.

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> no ability to append explanations to previous posts

Nobody can reply to posts that are more than a month old anyway. And the edit window is only a few hours.

I feel like Hacker News should auto-delete threads that old, anyway. Chances are there's nothing there people will care about, and if they do, they can make their own archive.

Not to devalue privacy (at all), but if the GDPR is so far reaching that anonymous posts are expected to comply with this, that destroys much discussion. Don't see why that's a reasonable expectation. That's no longer private but public data.

If you contribute to public knowledge/discussion, then taking your ball and going home leaves huge gaps in history, the same way you see [deleted] throughout many Reddit threads.

Is the GDPR that far reaching?

The GDPR only cares about privacy, not quality of internet threads.

> Is the GDPR that far reaching?

No.

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