HN could milk the whales by monetizing deleting your account and individual posts. The higher your karma, the more it costs.
Apparently the YC lawyers are convinced that the current mechanism is GDPR compliant, I'm not so sure about that.
If this forum had any kind of paid offerings this might differ, but what do you want, them to block the whole EU a la Threads/Bard?
As I understand it, this is due to the limitations of current (mod) tools, and justification just means you have to provide a human for some good reason to do -free work- for you. Like fearing being doxxed or whatever.
I dunno, I'm a happy member of this forum and I appreciate dang and how the moderation works here, it could be better and automated but this is a small niche tech forum after all and not some giant social media network
That's not how the GDPR works. The GDPR does not kick in when there is a commercial transaction, it kicks in when you're talking about data, specifically data provided by EU subjects.
YMMV
No countries are forced, just corporate entities in those countries that aim to transact with EU citizens. And that's perfectly fine, lots of countries have laws like that on their books and ways to enforce them. The only people that tend to object are those that are part of the group that wishes to trample on the rights of the people whose data they collect.
They will go even to great lengths to make European founders register as LLC's in Murica too, Investors security yadda yadda
I don't see how that translates to doing business in europe tbh
And so for you to want to utilise a finite resource (moderation time) for something that should benefit you, you better have a good reason for it?
Why should companies go above and beyond to comply with laws that don't affect their country or business doings?
The only reason a US company might comply with EU directives, is if they plan to do business in the EU, not if they're storing data or not from an European citizen