Does Hacker News really delete your comment if you delete it?
If anyone has more knowledge, or understands the source better, or has newer code, I'd be interested to know.
Not a good idea if halfway through writing an entire manifesto or some neo nazi rant you decide to not post it.
I call these “shadow posts”.
But no, HN doesn't do this, only companies like Facebook or Twitter would stand to gain from that information (e.g. a shooter almost tweets his plan to attack but doesn't post it).
Hmm, I think I’ll write a library to do something like this, I just need a cool clever name for it.
Unfortunately we don't have government organizations that help with moderating discussion (like a therapist would), such as a parent would help children learn how to communicate with others in difficult situations, to deal with emotions, etc; and if bad behaviour, giving someone time-out until they can "play nice" again.
We have to of course make an environment good enough, rewarding enough to be part of, that it's an incentive for everyone to want to play nice.
Perhaps we need to come up with a new system (separate from legal system, or part of justice-education system) for dealing with situations that teach compassion when compassion/understanding is missing, e.g. should bullying a crime, or who should we leave that up to - is it even required to bring all participants related to bullying together, parents of the perpetrator and the victim, and create a healing circle to uncover the deeper underlying issues?
The whole point would be to rally support, so we can build stronger, deep community - and society could, like with criminal law, have fines or other limitations created if people decide to opt-out of this system.
We really need to become more comfortable with accountability, that our actions have consequences - though we also must support a practice of learning, mistakes happen during learning, etc; there's pretending to have learned, and genuine change/evolution in a person's thinking and behaviour, difficult to perhaps tell in some cases online.
There are things I've said in discussions I've had here that were not always well informed or motivated by my better self (yeah, you're free to peruse my comment history and see). Or I may have just grown up a bit since I said them. Either way, I've always felt it a bit unfair that they could be dug up years later.
I think there is some merit to the idea of Right to be Forgotten[1] but at the same time, I feel like that would just help evil people hide their true nature. The other half of me wants to just have the NSA dump everything one day and let everyone know what everyone else has really been saying for the last 15 years. The first couple days would be tough for everyone to acclimate knowing who everyone really is. But in theory that is a net good. Deception is rarely for good.
I doubt there's anyone who decides "Imma be evil" or realizes it of themselves to such an extent. If you believed you were evil, wouldn't you want to change it? Even terrorists don't think they're evil.
Maybe another approach to all this could be that, once you post, you can delete for a while shortly thereafter. But then your post goes into a period of extended residence on a site. Perhaps a year or something. After that residency period has expired, you're free to delete the post.
About a decade ago I was involved in building what became for a short span one of the best cinephile discussion boards on the Internet. Aside from HN, or maybe MeFi I can't think of any forum that sustained a signal-to-noise ratio of that quality for that long. It was night-and-day better than IMDB boards.
Naive and idealistic as we were, we have users full control to edit/delete posts. Over time we tightened that to have time limits, etc. But there was one big loophole which was you could delete your entire account and it would purge all your posts. Eventually one of our most prominent members with thousands of posts decided to (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻. The result? Utter incomprehensibility of half the threads, effectively rendering the history useless if not downright misleading.
I get that the pendulum has swung too far and users deserve more control of their data, but a public forum is fundamentally a different thing from a social network—a forum thread is different from a post in that the value of the thread is communal, it should not be owned by the individual in the same way that it makes sense for a social media post to be. And even in that case, I think most of the problem comes from the giant many-tentacled nature of Facebooks and Googles where the data doesn't even come from directly entering it in and it's incredibly difficult to even visualize what they have. For a simple forum I think it's perfectly reasonable (and clear!) to have ToS that state: you post it, it's here forever, barring special requests due to extreme circumstances or legal reasons.