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The tension between owning your own words and building a discussion collaboratively has been debated a long time. The first time I saw this was in 1997 about events on The WELL in 1992:

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.05/ff_well_pr.html

Search for "mass scribble".

reddit doesn't do this You can delete your account and all your associated comments if you want to.

Works with Google+ too.

Yeah... And it makes a lot of older threads nearly unreadable...

I believe users should always be in control of their data (and since it's been produced by them, it their data). Also, if their software breaks after deleting an account the problem is entirely on their part.

This becomes difficult when you are dealing with distributed systems.

Let's use email as an example - I can close my Gmail account, and Google can delete all of my data off of their systems. There is nothing that either Google or I can do, however, to ensure that everyone I ever sent an email to will delete those messages as well. The messages are now on their computers, out of my reach.

This becomes more evident when it's not a 1:1 message, but a 1:many message, such as Usenet (or Tavern)

Like Gmail, you can delete your account locally, but there's nothing anyone can do that would force other servers to delete the messages they received. Once it's gone, it's gone.

Another example where you might see this is XMPP->XMPP. My AIM client can keep a log of your messages, and even if you delete your AIM account, my logs will remain.

I can entirely understand where you are coming from, but with some classes of systems, I don't know that it's possible to ensure that your data can be entirely erased.

It's not an all-or-nothing scenario, you should let users delete everything they can and let the rest be.

> I believe users should always be in control of their data

Total control?

Does the person who made this submission have the right to delete it even though by doing so they delete your data?

Do other users have the right to delete your data?

Total control for you means denying someone else the right to delete this conversation.

Do other users have the right to redefine your data by changing the context surrounding it?

If you posted "I vote for this too" to some very sound proposal to allow changing of usernames, and then the original author changed the proposal to "Bestiality should be legal", thus suggesting to the world you support such a thing... did the other user have right through the control of their data to substantial modify the context of your data? To the point that the other person could create a personal liability for you?

Where do the lines start and end, if your content can stand alone then the issues are not there. Almost everything in a forum is a discussion, conversation, argument, debate, an interaction depending on the context of other people's content. The minutes of those things are a record of fact, that someone said something and someone else replied and said something else. Content on a forum is never detached from the content of others.

I agree you have the right to your data, but disagree someone has the right to modify those minutes, those records of fact, to impact the data of other people in any way.

A forum is a collective work, and the rules for a collective work are different to the rules of a personal work.

I agree that posts shouldn't be deleted. But should the user be able to anonymize his posts when he deletes his account? Such that the username 'JohnDoe' is replaced with 'DeletedUser20140405.42'. IMO that doesn't destroy the readability of the conversation.

That's where we're going with Microcosm.

Deleting a user will nuke the account itself, and assign all content owned by that account to an anonymous/deleted account.

The context is preserved and no-one else's data is affected, but we've removed all Googleable trace of the original account (the username and profile).

The only remaining issue is whether a person made posts containing personal information (defined as being the same as personal data according to EU Data Protection laws... name, phone number, email, etc). But for that we'll always honour take-down requests even when the information is orphaned from an ownership record.

PS: To the downvoters, I'd love to understand what part is objectionable.

> PS: To the downvoters, I'd love to understand what part is objectionable.

I didn't downvote you before, but just did it now.I automatically downvote all comments complaining about downvotes unless the discussion topic is about downvoting and upvoting. I just think that it dilutes discussion.

I see that sometimes in reddit, the pseudo says [deleted] but the text is still there. Sometimes the text is shown as [deleted] as well. I don't understand when and how the first occurrence happens.

Account marked deleted but not the post means the user account has been deleted.

Both marked deleted means that specific post has been deleted (but not the user account).

I don't see the point of that since other people often respond to posters with their name/username.

Replacing the name with a unique id is not enough to anonymize the data. For example, the "anonymized" AOL search data release:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak#Notable_us...

Since when has "readability" been a fatal flaw in any discussion medium? It simply doesn't matter, and there's no reason to apply distinct IDs over a collector or a simple piece of text like Reddit does.

Deleting a post doesn't mean the whole conversation should be deleted (reddit works this way), and the meaning of following posts can be extrapolated from the context.

Reddit gives users near total control over their comments and submissions. Comments can be manually edited or deleted months or years after submission. Self-posts can also be edited at any time. Posted submissions can be deleted, which replaces the submitter's name with [deleted] and prevents the submission from showing up in any public list of posts (it will still show up at the submission permalink). The only concession is that posts edited at any time beyond a few minutes from their posting appear with an asterisk.

Deleting an account on Reddit doesn't delete every comment and submission, but it does replace the username on every comment and submission with [deleted]. This isn't perfect from the user's perspective, but it's a lot better than most forums. It anonymizes any post or submission that doesn't directly leak personally identifying information by itself, which for most users will a large majority or even 100% of submissions.

I think allowing users to delete accounts and have their usernames replaced with [deleted] on every comment and submission is a decent compromise between respecting privacy for the user and maintaining the integrity of discussion for the community. I would feel much more comfortable using HN if it had such a system, although my revealed preference is that I care more about posting to HN than I do about the ability to retroactive delete my data.

> Reddit gives users near total control over their comments and submissions. Comments can be manually edited or deleted months or years after submission. Self-posts can also be edited at any time. Posted submissions can be deleted, which replaces the submitter's name with [deleted] and prevents the submission from showing up in any public list of posts (it will still show up at the submission permalink). The only concession is that posts edited at any time beyond a few minutes from their posting appear with an asterisk.

Has reddit not had users who flounced and programmatically nuked every submission they've ever made?

Whilst this wouldn't affect Reddit as a whole, it could lay waste to a subreddit if the person was one of the top posters within a very small area.

This is largely why most forums operate a "edit within a reasonable time" policy. Though obviously there are benefits to being able to cache long-term too.

Can you imagine the impact on HN if patio11 went through a bout of depression and decided to nuke every comment he'd ever made? The impact to the collective work would be substantial.

a) You have copyright on your work. That means you own and retain the right to distribute it or not, and importantly this includes a notion of moral rights.

b) A forum is not a collective work; it is a privately owned publishing vehicle which may be selectively edited or change hands at any point.

c) You sign terms of service granting rights to the publishing vehicle.

good point, though I believe publishing contracts need limited terms to be enforceable and that you don't grant reproduction/distribution rights in perpetuity

Hmm. If someone says something embarrassing in a newspaper interview, should they be allowed to recall and censor all printed issues of that newspaper? Once you knowingly and deliberately enter something in the public record, I'm not so sure you should have the right to unilaterally delete it.

> and since it's been produced by them, it their data

I've never understood this definition of property, especially since it necessitates so much giving-away of property in order to make society function.

Even so, my guess is Microsoft is keeping the connection between your previous name and the new one, so it's completely pointless to do it like this from the user's perspective.

That's a good point, I wouldn't want that.

I'll look at our own systems and will consider scrubbing all IP addresses/logs and anything that could identify a deleted user after the user has been deleted.

> The reason for this is that a forum is a collaborative effort, a collective work, and the contributions of other people's content might only make sense in the context of yours.

Sure, but what about posts that have no replies? And what about a cascade, that is, poster B replies to poster A, poster A deletes their account, the post remains, poster B deletes their account, both posts disappear?

I don't care about HN or Skype as much, but when I get my commenting system done I will look into doing something like that. I do believe in letting people and their content go. It's like making a party: yes, if people start leaving the party will be less fun, but it's more fun that way for the people leaving, and the rest ought to cope; considering one day they might want to leave as well. And while link rot sucks, so does everything just growing and only growing all the time. Let the web be a jungle, a living thing, and let things die, too? In the tiny part of this garden I attend to, that's how it's going to be. If in doubt, it's a zen thing ^^

At any rate, I don't really see the "liability nightmare", since it's already a fact that if you post something on a forum for 5 seconds, someone could take a screenshot and reproduce it until the end of time -- liability remains with the people posting stuff in the first place. It's just a matter of politeness to reduce this as much as you can on your end for anyone who wants to take something back, to do your part, without that implying any promises -- the way I see it, you loose some content, but you gain other content, because people know it's not necessarily etched in stone, and can try themselves out.

Again, I'm not complaining about how any site handles this, and I'm happy to post on HN. But Plutarch said the mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled, right? Likewise, I believe in the process of the web much more than any heap of "content" it might produce. And at least for what little own content I have on my site, I intend to curate it every now and then, check for broken or obsolete things. I'm not even above editing year old blog posts, the whole point is that should I die, I will leave the best of what I made and thought, not just an endless "log" like toilet paper. If in 10 years some of what you wrote today doesn't strike you as silly and outright false, what did you do in those 10 years?

Public spaces like HN and reddit and slashdot I feel are different from that -- you get a lot out of them, and for that you give up "exclusive ownership" for what you said. This is fine, but I could see that a private or small community might feel similarly like I feel about private things; they don't exist for the sake of historians or lurkers, but for what they have with each other. When that ends, there is no need to keep it around. What does it profit a person if they gain all the content of the world, but lose their ability to reinvent themselves, right? Not everything is a wiki, not everything has to be revision controlled, not every conversation is about timeless facts, or facts at all.