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Comment by system16 | Hacker News Reader

> edits them and saves a blank string, or whatever string you choose), then deletes it

My account is 15 years old and I've been manually doing this for some time now.

A few years ago, I had a comment get upvoted to the top of a popular thread in a major sub, but it had some mildly identifiable information about myself, so I deleted it.

A few months later, Reddit had this personal "year in review" page you could click through, shamelessly similar to Spotify's year in review (I have't seen it in recent years so I think they stopped doing it).

For "most popular comment" surprise, surprise, it was the comment I deleted, there in full text.

After this I started using the method described above: editing every comment I make, saving a blank string, and then deleting. I usually do this once a week. It's tedious, but at least I can reasonably assume my comments are actually deleted.

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If you're going to this much trouble, why are you even bothering to participate on that site at all?

I think there is a huge difference between participating in an ephemeral conversation about some topic and having your comments permanently and irrevocably archived and searchable.

I would much prefer comments here to automatically delete after some reasonable time period (a week?), or provide an API I can use to go in and scrub every so often. But HN decided that it doesn't work that way so I live with it. I don't really see how the site benefits from keeping comments alive forever. Do a significant number of people really go back and read comments on articles from 10 years ago?

In the year 2023, I'm kind of flabbergasted that anyone would believe that something that takes place on the internet is considered ephemeral.

>I would much prefer comments here to automatically delete after some reasonable time period (a week?)

you're more than welcome to build that and release it to see how much traction it would get. but it's also weird to think that the responses to questions that are valid to post now would not still be relevant in the future for people to come back to (or find for the first time via search). if your response is truly not worthy for future reading, i would have to ask if it is really worth now. if you're that concerned about having that response associated to you, then i'd again say maybe it is best not being made at all.

I enjoy participating in the discussion and contributing to it. I just don’t want my comments there forever.

You can automate this with some JS in the browser console pretty easily. Here's an example for deleting comments, and it wouldn't take long to add a step to edit then delete: https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/3mibid/how_do_you_...

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