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Comment by thousand_nights | Hacker News Reader

the only thing that bothers me about hn is that it doesn't let you delete posts so it gets annoying having to rotate accounts as you slowly dox yourself by revealing more and more info

for a social website where so many users are privacy advocates this is surprising to me

yes you can email dang or whatever but that is like having to phone up to cancel an online subscription, dark pattern friction bs

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I’ve actually been doxxed from Hn comments and it wasn’t pleasant (although I don’t make a huge effort to hide my identity).

Having said that I think it would be a much different site if comments could be freely removed. So I’m okay with the friction of having to email a human to get your stuff removed.

HN is a forum, but also a valuable information resource. If it were easy to delete your historical comments, a lot of that information would be lost. If you make a contribution to a Wikipedia page, do you expect to be able to delete it?

I know HN is not Wikipedia, but it is also not like Facebook, in the sense that one can actually learn useful things on HN.

You also can't block people.

I consider that a pretty important feature for mental health reasons.

On the other hand, I don't think i've found much need to block people on HN due to the usually excellent community.

I've seen it here and there and have extensions for that. It's no Reddit, but far from perfect. Especially once you start poking at a few specific topics (some expected and practically universally controversial, others more "tailored" towards a technical community).

You can collapse threads, and the setting will hold until the post is about 2 weeks old (at which point it's locked from further comments).

I am doing this with ... somewhat increasing frequency.

It's probably possible to use Greasemonkey or similar to provide client-side JS for blocking users, though that would be cumbersome. Some of the alternate HN front-ends may also offer this.

You can't reliably email to request it. Their policy is that if you request your comments to be deleted, they will only delete some minority of them if there is a reason to that they like

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