You've posted over 150 of these comments in the last 24 hours. That's abusive, and I've banned the account.
Their account was made in 2011... Did they just create it back then, and come back to it now to spam?
No, I say that when the account appears to have been created for that purpose, or if there's reason to believe that the same user is creating multiple accounts to abuse HN. I might have just gotten this wrong in this case. Thanks!
You can't go on contributing in that setting.
We try not to delete entire account histories because that would gut the threads the account had participated in. However, we care about protecting individual users and take care of privacy requests every day, so if we can help, please email hn@ycombinator.com. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. More here <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799>.
completely fair game to shortcut an outdated hostile process with your own hostility, not really an unexpected result (e.g.: web scraping VS using an inaccessible API). it's an unacceptable approach in a modern context.
All of this took a single email every time.
I don't know what "Hacker News does not allow users to delete comments"-person wants or what they did or didn't ask at hn@, but it's completely valid to NOT nuke entire threads just because one person has a hissy fit. Reading old Reddit threads (and sometimes even recent Reddit threads) can be a real pain because of this. If they want their content anonymized or their account disabled they can do that easily, if they want some specific post altered or removed then I'm sure Dan will be accommodating.
The process is not, by any reasonable interpretation, "drawn out".
The posts were almost all flagkilled by users, which is a strong community reaction.