HN is a public forum, if you don’t want your statements here being public, don’t post.
If there's one law of the universe it's that nothing is permanent.
You don’t need the right to be forgotten outside of specific tech because human brain forgets by default, paper rots, and all of the above is restricted geographically and does not scale.
What's the functional difference to writing a bunch of hate speech with your username and wanting it scrubbed from the "public record" (which I would argue a popular forum such as HN would be classified) using RTBF?
Same thing if you wrote a "Letter to the Editor" to the New York Times expressing something distasteful. I don't see how anyone should be allowed to wield RTBF as a tool for suppressing information.
Maybe you got drunk and climbed on stage naked 10 years ago. Should you be that guy forever?
> Re GDPR: our understanding based on the analysis done by YC's legal team is that HN does not fall under the GDPR, so for the time being we're sticking with the approach of not deleting account histories wholesale but helping with privacy concerns in more precise ways.
> Re "aren’t these comments owned by the person who wrote them"? That's a complicated legal question, no doubt, and also philosophically. From my perspective, two other factors are that (1) the threads are co-creations (see pg on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226) and (2) posting to an internet forum is publishing something, not dissimilar to sending a letter to the editor of a newspaper.
> Obviously there are many reasonable takes on this. Ours is that we're trying to balance the community interests of a public forum (mainly the interest of commenters not to have their comments deprived of context, and the interest of the community in preserving its archive) with the need to protect individuals. That's a lot of work—we end up taking care of requests manually for people every day—but we're committed to both sides of it because it seems like the only way to do justice to both sides.