HN Meta: A YC founder's comment was edited to remove their username | Hacker News Reader

HN Meta: A YC founder's comment was edited to remove their username

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6 pointsAaronFriel6 comments

I posted about this earlier today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26959559

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26959675

That's one of several standard things that we do to help users who email us with privacy-related requests. As I've explained at those links, it has nothing to do with being a YC founder.

Please don't stir up meta drama on HN.

Per a comment I saw the other day by sugarwater:

> It's worth mentioning the the CEO Austen had a post on here (now deleted) proclaiming to have creating a bot army via stealing people's pictures on Instagram.

But it was not actually deleted, as pointed out by wheelie_boy, it was edited to be a different username.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26949343

C'mon dude, 2017 was a totally different age where commanding your own bot army was as American as apple pie.

Nice job, dang and friends.

I've personally helped over a thousand HN users with these sorts of requests. If you know how we can do a better job of that, I'd love to hear about it.

What do you mean, these sorts of requests? If you mean deleting ownership data as is the case here - that's incredibly problematic and erodes trust in the site and you as a moderator.

Privacy-related requests. Because we don't delete entire account histories [1, 2], we do other things to help. That might include randomizing a username or otherwise renaming the account, deleting or redacting sensitive information, reassigning particular posts to random usernames, and more. We try to find a fair balance between the different interests involved; individuals' need for protection, other commenters' interest in having the context of their comments preserved, the community interest in preserving its archive, and so on.

I don't know what you mean by "incredibly problematic" etc., but if you think we should send such users away without recourse, that's an extreme position which a large proportion of the community would disagree with you about, especially as the pendulum of opinion has been swinging in the pro-privacy direction for years now. People frequently flame us for not doing more to delete history.

Just to repeat what I've already said a couple times today, we don't make any distinction between users who make these sorts of requests. We try our best to be as consistent as possible, and whether they're a YC founder or not doesn't enter into it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226

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