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Comment by kgraves | Hacker News Reader

This is great on Apple’s part for enforcing this for every account based app, now if only HN offered account deletion…

Or indeed, deletion of your comments. The way dang explained it to me was that each comment thread is a shared work created by multiple people rather than a collection of individual comments. Since you don’t own your comments, you can’t delete them. He is very accommodating about requests to disavow comments from your account.

But I don’t expect people on HN to complain about this. They hold every other website to absurd standards on data ownership and content moderation, while happily being users of a site where they own none of the data and are subject to strict rules about what can be discussed and how.

> Since you don’t own your comments

where on HN did I waive or assign copyright or ownership to YC?

The FAQ ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ) says you just need to email them to get stuff deleted:

> we care about protecting individual users and take care of privacy requests every day, so if we can help, please email hn@ycombinator.com

You didn’t waive or assign copyright but you did “grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.”

So, with a license like that, they can legally choose to keep showing your comment if they want to.

That said, I think dang will help delete things if you email to ask and have a good reason. I’ve done it with a couple of my comments.

I did that once and got this reply:

Hi <real name>,

I’m sorry to disappoint, but Hacker News doesn’t delete entire accounts because that would gut the threads it participated in. We do sometimes remove specific comments if users are worried they’ll get in trouble, and we’re also working on the ability to rename accounts. Would either of those help?

Regards,

   <name> (a moderator)

I don’t quite agree with it but have to recognise I have no leverage here.

I agree with the idea that once you say or do something in public, you no longer have any rights or control over it, other than about credit or slander.

You have a right to complain if someone lies about something you said, either by putting words in your mouth or taking credit for your words.

You have zero rights over anyone else's memory of the fact that you said something or what you said.

That's not some new thing HN is doing, that's just life.

This is exactly the response I expected. Would you feel the same way of Facebook used your exact words to respond to a GDPR request?

Of course anything I've published on FB, is public.

Yeah, HN privacy standards are really low. I was horrified to read of moderators using the email addresses that they say are for account recovery to contact commenters. (Thankfully I never put an email in my account; I'd definitely have felt the need to send a GDPR notice if that happened to me). I assume that sooner or later an EU resident will decide they actually want to quit and force the site to buck up.

GDPR notice? Do you mean a Right of Access/Subject Access Request? What for?

What is the issue around moderators of a service you signed up for, contacting you via the email you provided to use this service?

> What is the issue around moderators of a service you signed up for, contacting you via the email you provided to use this service?

My email address is personal data and as such it's legally required to be

    collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further 
    processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes

Using it to contact me about my comments as a moderator is not compatible with using it to reset my password, which is the only specified, explicit purpose that I (could have had) supplied it for.

What was the reason to contact you about your comments? What did the email say?

I wasn't contacted myself (I didn't supply an email in the first place), I read about it in https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... .

Some old reddit discussions are plagued with deleted comments (deleting all your comments is an option when deletinc an account)

Threads of [deleted content] answering to [deleted content] are hard to follow.

Also on ux of everything but the HN website must be perfect.

HN offers account deletion, it's just not up to you to decide when your account is deleted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com