I've been trying to do this and as of this week, HN and stackexchage are the last social accounts I have but only because I can't find a way to delete them. I could just log out and walk away but it feels like there's no closure that way. Anyone know of a way to close an HN account?
Change the email address to a random uuid-like hash @example.com, then change your password to a random hash. Do not allow your browser or password manager to save these values.
Now you’ve locked yourself out with no way back in.
It's not really about keeping myself from commenting here or anything like that. There's something about the account being out there, the karma associated with it and such that nags at me a little, probably only because it's my real name and the volume of content associated with it. If I could change the username it'd bug me a lot less. I'm sure I'll come to terms with it somehow and still feel like I've successfully jacked out. Still, it seems like it'd be easy to add functionality like reddits: delete the account, keep the content, replace the username with [deleted]. [deleted123] would keep the content grouped under a single name if that's important. Maybe I'll write a letter to HN suggesting it.
Solid, but somehow very creepy, answer. I'm imagining someone discovering that they're a clone, and that their original was just sort of shut into a closet and forgotten about.
Email hn@ycombinator.com, that said I did try that once and nothing happened. But that was long before dang stepped up and took a more active role in moderating threads. Kinda glad it didn't happen because the site's improved a fair bit since then.
I'm kinda a bit like you, I'm really only active online on StackOverflow and here. I have a twitter account but to be honest it's mostly full of re-tweets. I binned Facebook to no great loss, and I broke my mobile phone in January and have never bothered to replace it. I feel I have one foot "off the grid"...baby steps :)
I've tried getting in touch with HN a few times to delete my account. Well, I actually understand the value of keeping the content I've contributed so I really just wanted a name change so my presence was anonymous. Never heard back though.
Does HN count as "social"? It feels more like an Internet forum to me. I guess you're using your real name here, but you don't have to. I don't know anyone socially who I would expect to find on here.
I'll tell you how I did it for Wikipedia. First, I removed my email address for password recovery. Then, I opened notepad and mashed my keyboard. Then I copied the rather long string of random characters to the clipboard, went to the password reset screen and then pasted it into the password and confirm password editbox. Then I hit update, and then I closed notepad without saving, and then I rebooted my computer.
