Thats misinformation. If you want a comment removed you can email the HN mods (I always forget the email). I feel like they could similarly delete your account upon request.
I think it's unfair to label it as misinformation. We're talking about the ability to delete an account which HN's only option is to email and ask nicely. It would be fair to say then the feature doesn't exist. Whether that's a good or bad thing is a different matter.
Was any specific reason provided? I don't understand why just marking the user as [deleted] would be something that HN mods would have an issue with. Or is deletion meaning to delete all comments/posts made by the user too?
2016-04-20: initial request to rename or delete "Account renaming is something we plan to implement but haven't yet. You're welcome to email back in the future and check if it's done yet."
2016-07-26: check up "Not yet, sorry. There are some technical difficulties because YC uses HN IDs in its internal systems, which are separate, so we need to be extra careful not to make a breaking change. But we'll get there."
2017-02-20: me (falsely) claiming it's a matter of national security "That does sound urgent, so I'm sorry to have to reply this way, but we don't actually have the ability to do this. At some point we will have the ability to rename accounts to something anonymous, but unfortunately we don't have that yet either."
2018-02-22: another check up "Not yet, sorry, but it is coming. Do you want to be on an email list to get notified when it's ready?"
2018-09-06: no email. another check up after a small stalker scenario, and also a business associate mentioning they saw my HN profile while doing a Windows search for my contact info (thanks Cortana /s) "Yes—we can do account renaming now. Haven't announced it yet, but that's coming." rejoice
2019-04-18: check up on deleting "Hacker News doesn’t delete entire posting histories, and we don’t plan to because that would gut the threads others participated in. The intention is to address privacy concerns with account renaming or redacting personal information. "
But why don't they automate it? 1. It's standard practice to have a delete my account option. 2. It's easier for users. 3. It's easier for admins. 4. The presence of the option makes clear that one can delete their account without much trouble. 5. With the option they don't get frowned upon, such as in this case.
In regards to posts you get an hour to edit / delete. Otherwise it stays once it gets replies just to keep history of conversations.
In regards to deleting accounts that is a good question above my responsibilities as a fellow user to answer. I would love to hear from mods about it. It certainly would suck if we see old convos lose context / content over the years.
I had a post yesterday that I wanted to delete. It was less than 30 minutes since the post, and there was no deleted button, but an older comment slightly more than 30 minutes old still had the delete button.
HN moderation is very secretive and manual, and that introduces a lot of opportunity for bias.
Edit: it's interesting that you cannot delete a comment with a reply, but you can edit it into nothing. I never noticed that. Seems like a useless distinction. So you can also force a comment to exist by just replying quickly so they cannot delete it. Neat trick.
Sometimes it depends on how the backend data is stored. I'm going to assume that HN uses linked data for your account name against posts and comments...
How do they deal with your delete account request? Do they just remove your account resulting in 'NULL' appearing against all your previous comments and posts? Do they remove all your previous posts and comments as well? This could result in broken comment threads - a workaround would be to replace your comments and posts with '[Deleted]' which could then make child comments lose their context.
If the whole thing was automated, what stops people abusing the system by creating, posting abuse, and then deleting the account? So many questions, and no easy/simple answers.
Deleting an active account on a busy site is rarely just a case of removing the user record from the users table.
No, they will not delete the account. They can change your username to something random but answers / questions will stay. As much as I like being able to remove accounts on websites when I quit them, I side with HN here: there are some really interesting discussions here sometimes and removing all data would break the thought flow.
