I would like to have this for Hacker News! Then again as far as I know there’s no way to delete old posts other than to email a mod, so I suppose I could just schedule a regular automatic email.
HN is willing to go into the database and nuke an account, but the general premise of the site is that it's a durable record. It's understandable that individual accounts might have a change of heart about that, for any number of reasons, and it's good of the HN mods to allow it as an exception.
But regularly emailing them to do that work for you is pretty presumptuous. You should either use the site as intended, or not use it.
I find old HN pages useful or interesting on almost a weekly basis. A big part of that is that there aren't holes punched in the old threads by people who went back and deleted everything.
An alternative which is more in keeping with the spirit is to just make a new account every now and then.
> An alternative which is more in keeping with the spirit is to just make a new account every now and then.
This is what I do. I wish HN allowed you to have your username redacted automatically from all messages older than 6 months, so I wouldn't need to.
The idea is that the text of all your comments remains, but the username changes to [redacted] once the comment is six months old. All six-month-old comments by all users who have enabled this feature all appear to have come from one huge account called "[redacted]". This would preserve the discussions, while removing attribution and linkability between comments. There's really no need for abuse/spam management on six-month-old posts (if it wasn't flagged in six months it doesn't need to be flagged).
Probably the only downside is that up/downvotes to ancient posts couldn't affect the post-owner's super-important InternetPoints(tm) count, since if they did it would be possible to wiggle the upvote on a comment and then scan to see which account got a point-bump. So [redacted]'s comments wouldn't have up/down-vote arrows.
I think HN has enough 'karma traffic' that a timing attack against someone's Internet Points wouldn't be very feasible. But the easy implementation is to literally have a [redacted] account in the database, and point all the posts at it. I'm not sure it matters; leaving behind royalty checks for old posts is a fair trade for anonymizing the data.
I really don’t see what’s different about HN in this respect vs any other social media. As far as I understand I have the legal right to delete my data if and when I want to. What seems pretty presumptuous is the idea that your personal convenience when going through old threads would somehow be more important.
You do have that right, yes. I have the legal right to call you slurs and insult your mother; that doesn't make it right.
If I were the person who had to go through the database and delete your comments the second time, I'd delete the row corresponding to your account while I was in there.
No idea how HN would handle it. You can find out if you want to.
I actually spoke with one of the people at HN and suggested they implement a feature which lets you disassociate a post or comment from the author. I think this is very similar to how reddit handles it when you delete an account. All the posts/comments stay in place, but the author name of each item changes from "Bobsmith33" to "deleted user" - Seems like a great compromise for HN. Good (and bad) content remains, but the association factor is removed.
