Hacker News Reader

Comment by add-sub-mul-div | Hacker News Reader

It's a very privacy-hostile site, it's the only site I've ever used where I can't delete my comments. Since I don't have control over my content here I'd never associate it with my real name. I don't remember everything I posted ten years ago. None of it was blatantly terrible, but I have evolved and don't know if I stand behind everything I've ever said. I could only consider an account here to be for throwaway content.

View on HN

I have likely posted some terrible things online on various sites that could easily get me fired or cause me trouble. Sometimes these are illustrations in debate to demonstrate a repugnant conclusion. Sometimes they have been roleplaying the opposite of my actual position, to better understand it. Sometimes I have just had bad takes.

I think all of these are natural and healthy parts of the human growth, and legitimate uses of online conversation. Not everyone else feels this way, or care about the context of speech they find objectionable.

I do kind of agree with this, and I definitely resonate with not wanting to have to worry about what I said ten years ago.

But to the degree that HN is "privacy hostile" as you put it, with regards to not being able to delete comments, I'd say that it's also "privacy friendly" to an almost equal degree, given there is absolutely no personal information required in order to create an account.

And there is none of the usual invasive social network crap which drives me away from literally every online platform apart from HN.

It's true that we don't delete entire histories wholesale, but we have a big bag of other tricks to help with privacy requests, and we take care of such requests every day. We just try to do it with more precise tools than wholesale deletion. I realize it's not everything, but it's also not nothing.

If anyone has an issue like this, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll see what we can do.

> ... it's the only site I've ever used where I can't delete ...

Between "how deleted are my comments, really?" issues, and the number of sites that get hacked in a given week - I would not trust anybody's supposed "delete" feature for anything important.

(And for critical stuff...you might be able to talk @dang into performing a Sword, +Admin deletion here.)

I wish I had been this smart.

You can always create a new account.

The old comments are associated forever. I'm choosing to be more careful of my comments at the moment, but I may need to create a new account at some point to discuss things anonymously.

If the comment history is considered sacrosanct, it could be nice to be able to go back and retroactively change the username for an account, at least.

Comment history shouldn't be considered sacrosanct. This is just a web forum, nothing happening here needs to preserved for the ages. If Reddit and literally every other forum in existence can manage to allow users to delete comments, Hacker News should be able to manage as well.

Yea, I imagine this is hacker news idolizing themselves a bit, i.e. "we are very smart and this is useful discussion." Unfortunately we don't have the GDPR here in the US, with a right to deletion like in the EU, and I don't expect we'll get those features without some privacy laws.

"Right to deletion" doesn't apply to "anything I want deleted", but only to PII within the context of the GDPR. In my reading "everything I ever posted to HN" doesn't really fall under that. If you have some specific comment for a specific reason then that would be different.

On reddit this is a right pain, and really fragments discussions. Ending up in a 7 year old discussion with half the comments [deleted] or "I've overwritten all my comments with this bot" is not brilliant. Doubly so when you're trying to find a solution for a technical problem.

I'm pretty sure right to deletion does include account deletion, which I did not see anywhere as an option, but I could be wrong. As you mention, some of this might be possible by messaging the staff members directly. Last I read, there were like 2 moderators for this site who work their ass off.

As to your second point, reddit is not a public archive, or a court room, or any sort of entity that I would trust or expect to retain, much less make accessible, "public" discussions, technical or not. They have no obligation to give you anything, and the moment it's profitable for them to switch to pay-to-play, you can bet they will. Steve Huffman, the CEO of reddit, killed all the 3rd party apps accessing reddit, no? Not someone I will place my trust in.

[edit- added the below]

I would also add the court of public opinion is a place no one should be tried, and peoples' privacy trumps your desire for information, so it makes perfect sense that comments would be removed or stripped of a byline. Adding a byline redaction feature would be cool imo.

IIRC it only specifies deletion of private data, not "account deletion". Those are somewhat different things.

It's been a few years since I read the GDPR, and I'd have to re-read it again with HN's use case in mind, but I'm reasonably (though not completely) sure that "delete every comment you ever made" isn't covered.

That would be nice!

You can do that. Just send an email to hn@ycombinator.com

Ooo thank you!

There have been stylometry tools built on HN content that will attempt to link accounts to other accounts based on your writing style.

Some people reported it found their old/alt accounts.

I definitely believe it. I'm more worried about the scenario like that Marvel/Disney director who got fired because people found some off color tweet he made 10 years prior. Determined people can accomplish a lot, but removing some of the low hanging fruit would be nice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com