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I think you are fighting an uphill battle there. HN is a community, yes, but one with a heavy pro-privacy slant. There's always been a disconnect between that and the admins' values who have always opposed adding the ability to delete anything, not even usernames on comments. Rotating usernames is a predictable consequence of not being able to delete anything, even superficially (and much more effective).

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We delete comments and rename accounts for people every day. We just don't offer it wholesale. No one asks for help with that gets turned away, nor, I believe, has anyone gone away unsatisfied. Maybe I'm forgetting one or two.

We care a lot about individuals' need for privacy. We just need to balance it with the community's need to preserve its archive, and the right of repliers not to have the context of their comments pulled out from under them. We bend over backwards to get that right. For example, I have written custom code to help individual users with complex requests on several occasions.

I should probably add this to the FAQ.

It's okay to have an alt account, you just shouldn't create a new alt account for every new comment. This allows for their moderation systems to be effective.

My account is a great example. This account is separate from my real identity, and I use it to post about things I don't want associated with my real identity. I went through a period of poor-quality commenting that led to well-justified moderator action against it(I'm not exactly sure what, but I'm consistently brought to the bottom of threads). This is important for the site because it helps maintain a good signal-to-noise ratio and keep the site interesting and productive. If I were to always create a new account, it would bypass this important moderation tool. Reputation is important in any community, including this one.

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