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Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

Could HN consider allowing users to delete their own old posts?

We live in a very different world than the one that existed when HN first launched. Self-censorship and careful pruning of old posts is now a necessity for participating in public online discussions. Society is growing less tolerant of diverse opinions every year and comments that are within the Overton window today could get you fired from your job a few years from now.

I don't think we can even predict what opinions will inspire a Twitter mob in 2022. But inevitably one will come here and try to get someone fired for something, which will have a chilling effect on HN unless we can prune our own posts/comments as future situations require.

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There needs to be a balance between individual needs for protection, fairness to the other commenters in a thread, and community interest in having an archive. Threads are a co-creation, which means their ownership is shared (pg wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226).

That doesn't mean we don't care about users' needs for protection—on the contrary, we care a lot and help people with these requests every day. We just use more precise tools than wholesale deletion. These include renaming accounts, retroactively assigning comments to throwaway accounts, deleting specific posts (if they don't have replies), redacting specific info from posts, and more.

Thanks for the response, I had not seen that post from pg and I didn't realize that comments can be manually deleted upon request.

I definitely appreciate the idea of there being a community interest in both the creation and archive of the work. The salient question in these times I think is whether it will continue to be possible to safely create public works of this type. This is a social issue beyond the scope of HN, but the drift of users away from public social networks and toward private messaging apps is evidence of a change that's already underway.

you could have option to anonymize posts just by removing the name of the poster, pretty sure that would be enough for some maybe even majority and off-load lot of work from you to pay attention only to those who want remove posts completely

We do that by randomizing the account name on request.

my point was this should be automated without human intervention, since there is no value lost for other readers, if it's just name randomized

Is there a disclaimer upon account creation that your account, once created, cannot be deleted?

It would be nice to be able to at least retroactively anonymize your username. When we were living in a kinder world, I didn't think twice about using my real name as my username, but I echo GP's fear: Norms change through time, and I guarantee that something I posted years ago that was benign and uncontroversial then would get me fired today.

EDIT: Reading the other responses, it looks like HN will actually do this if you ask. Nice to know! +1 to the request to automate this and provide UI for it for users to self-serve.

While I like the moderation on HN that's a joke answer. Have you ever had a discussion internally on this? Lots of comments don't fall under 'co-creation' whatever that means. Some comments reveal personal information and should be deletable by the poster.

In all fairness, if you're so concerned with posting sensitive content, then why not create a throwaway account? It's easy on HN. You don't even need an e-mail address.

Why risk the magnificent foundation of HN (its comments) for something that can be mitigated so easily. I simply don't understand this. There have been so many comments that I've learned so much things from, I would be devastated if that were to go away or start to degrade.

The point is, you don't know today what will be sensitive tomorrow. I've posted content in the past that were benign at the time, but totally unacceptable in today's environment of heightened sensitivity. The online mob doesn't care how old your quote is. Look at all the people still drudging up Zuckerberg's "dumb fucks" comment.

To be fair, his comments were unacceptable at that time as well.

Strictly speaking, I'm interested in comments which cover technology. That's the content I learn from and I consider that to be more on the side of documentation rather than opinion. Why not just have one account for such content and other for political / opinionated content? I'm pretty sure those can be very clearly divided, don't you think?

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