Just send an email to the moderator. It has been discussed many times here before.
Hats off to them.
and how do they verify that the email requesting an account be deleted, is coming from the actual owner of that account?
Anywhere else, having to contact a moderator to ask permission to have one's account deleted would be considered a user hostile dark pattern, nefarious motives assumed by default. But when Hacker News does it, well obviously it's just another sign of the elegance behind its design.
A simple forum also has reply notifications, that HN has not. It is difficult to accept that HN is different from other forum software, with different priorities?
I don't know what being writing in Lisp implies that HN have to have some specific feature that you think it needs.
> Anywhere else, having to contact a moderator to ask permission to have one's account deleted would be considered a user hostile dark pattern, nefarious motives assumed by default. But when Hacker News does it, well obviously it's just another sign of the elegance behind its design.
It would be considered a dark pattern if the moderators were against deleting accounts, giving excuses or making the process unnecessary difficult. Since it seems that the moderators delete your account without bothering you, I don't think this is a dark pattern at all.
I don't object to the fact that this forum lacks particular features, I can accept that, although I would disagree that they would add unnecessary complexity or would somehow damage the "signal to noise" ratio of the community. I object to the tendency of people here to assume that any features this forum lacks are a priori without value because it lacks them.
If they don't want to add these particular features, fine, but people need to stop cargo culting the simplicity of this forum. Some of the features here are intentionally, actively user hostile and we should admit that Hacker News gets a pass for no other reason than it's Hacker News.
>I don't know what being writing in Lisp implies that HN have to have some specific feature that you think it needs.
I was snarking on the way people sometimes describe how elegant and powerful Lisp is, almost as if it were magic. Sometimes I forget this place is where humor goes to die. Mea culpa.
I mean, if the number of users deleting account is low why bother implementing a feature in first place? If the mods were overwhelmed with requests and would start giving excuses to delete your account thanks to this, now I think the lack of account deletion in HN would be user hostile.
pg may have stated that at some point but I am not sure.
The point that started this all off is that HN has different priorities and those priorities disallow you from deleting accounts.
There's nothing to defend here, deleting your account is a 100% reasonable request.
Like I said below, it is really reasonable to not have a feature if the number of users asking to delete their accounts is manageable by mods. If it wasn’t, and thanks to this the mods would avoid deleting accounts, giving lame excuses or taking a long time, now I think the lack of this feature is user hostile.
HN isn't harvesting your email addresses and associated old comments for money or trying to pump up some user account growth number. Plus technically they could still easily keep your email/comments if you deleted your account in some archive.
I'm not sure what other value they could possibly draw from this where it could be some sort of tactic.
Let's just be happy YC is hosting this stuff for free and doing an excellent job.