Ask HN: You cannot delete comments posts or your account on HN. Concerned?
This seems strange and ironic considering a lot of our online comments revolve around data privacy, individual rights and the right to be forgotten.
I have deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and reddit accounts my life has dramatically improved. However I am unable to delete my hacker news account... leaving me wondering what is the status of my online data and status on this network. Clearly it is meant to be permanent. I wonder if you knew nothing is deletable here, and if knowing at some point you might want to, you’d regret existing on and supporting a network that will profit or benefit from your content in perpetuity without input from you.
Meanwhile they reserve extravagant rights to flag censor and ban any content you post at their discretion indicating they’re fully willing to remove content that they disapprove of.
My opinion: you should be upset that this platform/network is benefiting off you and not allowing you the rights and benefits to delete and control your own content... Much less paying you for the content you provide.
I have emailed HN@ycombinator.com and they don’t respond.
156 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadI didn't request a blanket delete however. I do understand the desire for posterity, and generally very much appreciate the lack of [deleted] a la reddit.
It's not hard to notice the lack of delete: it's somewhat well known edit windows close; then the delete window soon after. Maybe upfront documentation would be welcome. I imagine many people like us didn't think of it until after wanting to delete something.
I'd be very open to removing usernames from posts (they bear little in >99% of cases anyway). I'm wary of having entire posts be easily deleted, especially considering replies. My country does have a right to be forgotten (Canada), so I assume I could easily email or snail mail to have my profiles wiped. I wouldn't exercise this, though perhaps I'd consider a disassociation in the future.
I've long wished for such laws to pass in the US, but there are far too many hands in too many cookie pots paying too many Senators for that to happen, I fear.
Just found out the edit option disappear after a few minutes/hours on HN
Now I'm really bothered too, about the lack of a delete button.
It's important for the coherence of HN threads that discussions proceed in a mostly-append-only way, and that the history be sort of 'committed' or 'trusted' after a while. That doesn't mean that nothing can change, just that at a certain point, changes need to go through a manual process, as I've explained in other comments in this thread.
If someone emails "I was younger and wrote some stuff I'd love to get rid of", the obvious response is: "Happy to help! What are the links? We may not be able to delete the posts altogether (it depends on whether they got replies, and how many) but there's nearly always something we can do, and we don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN." I've written that kind of thing so many times I'll probably start mumbling it in my sleep soon.
I would have to go back to my inbox to find your response but I remember being pretty disappointed. I don't think you wrote anything that was specifically unkind but I remember being struck by the response. I thought "wow, these guys really don't care if someone wants to delete or hide their account." It is completely possible I caught you on a bad day.
I'll try again.
HN should allow this for a small fee as a compromise between the conflicting interests of comment authors and readers. The fee would limit the number of [deleted] comments but when someone really wants to have their comments removed, they would be able to.
But HN's ethos is to inspire discussion and readability of it. Lack of a delete seems to be by design so that conversations are always readable.
You can see the spirit of that in their guidelines[0] such as "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive".
You can further see that in the design in how they handle deletes [1], where once "archived" things are permanent
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#editde...
We wouldn't reassign every anonymized account the same username, though, because that would make discussions hard to follow when there is more than one such account in the thread. That's especially important because the number of these requests builds up over time, and users never ask for their accounts to be renamed back (though one did!), so such an approach would act as a slow erosion in the threads.
More than once I have stumbled on deleted Reddit comments that looked to have something I was looking for. Maybe it's good that the right type of content is posted in places with the right kind of deletion rules, but this should definitely be advertised clearly (so people don't start Q/A type subreddits, and conversely don't post personal info on HN).
In particular, if you decide that a comment you made was overly negative, or offensive or has some other issue, then it is good for the quality of discussion that you be able to take the action and remove it. You are allowed to do this for a short time period after creating it, I think you should permanently be allowed to delete it.
I know HN does not like comments to be deleted because it breaks the historical value, but I think people, privacy, quality of discussion and individual personal right to curate your own online presence are more important than HN's right to maintain historical integrity. HN doesn't see it that way as far as I understand but hey, it's their site. Don't like it, don't comment.
I still think you should provide delete though - Reddit and Twitter - the biggest discussion sites of all time - live with the nature of people deleting elements from conversations and they don't suffer too much for it. I do encounter threads sometimes with deleted elements but it's doesn't hurt the user experience.
I'd prefer the choice be in the hands of the user as to whether they wish to delete something - or everything. Quality of discussion would go up and negative, low value comments might be reduced if people can delete things without needing to email hn to ask for the deletion
I do wonder why HN holds on so tightly to preventing people from deleting their comments and accounts.
Anyhow your comment points to reasonable and good natured moderation, which is next best.
There are comments elsewhere in this thread that complain that they do harm the user experience.
For example:
"I [...] generally very much appreciate the lack of [deleted] a la reddit." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623158
I also agree; I read old Reddit threads reasonably often, and it's intensely frustrating to read exactly half of a conversation.
HN's randomized usernames compromise is really nice and I'm very happy with it.
Reddit and Twitter and many other sites do it the way you advocate, and yet you have accumulated 9192 "participation points" on one of the minority of sites that don't do it the way you advocate.
I would ask you to please consider the possibility that you like HN as much as you do partly because of qualities that wouldn't exist or would exist only in a weaker form were it not for the policy you are criticizing.
In particular, the policy under discussion makes it possible for a user to save the url of a comment, then return reliably to the comment years later. And the policy makes it such that when a user searches the site with hn.algolia.com, none of the search-engine results is a broken link.
Maybe those qualities differentially attract users to HN with a stronger than average commitment to the truth because those users have noticed that those qualities help with find the truth. And maybe the higher proportion of users with a stronger than average commitment to the truth that I just hypothesized is one of the reason you participate here as much as you do.
errr, this is an incredibly good description of the actual Internet and how people present themselves. Do you see otherwise?
> This seems strange and ironic considering a lot of our online comments revolve around data privacy
I agree it seems strange this just now occurred to you after 11 years.
> I have deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and reddit accounts my life has dramatically improved
Why is that, exactly? Because you waste less of your time on them, or because nobody has your data from those services? If it's the later, how do you calculate value from something you can't observe?
> Meanwhile they reserve extravagant rights to flag censor and ban any content you post
Yeah, using a site that someone else wrote and pays for running the servers doesn't give you magical rights on the service. A fun fact is that free speech is frequently misinterpreted as the ability to say anything anywhere, but it's not that at all.
> My opinion: you should be upset that this platform/network is benefiting off you
That's not an opinion, it's telling people what to think which seems somewhat in vogue recently.
It's a front company. They have something like 30 names, only 7 employees who can be inferred every really worked at the company + are real humans.
Also, try finding the verified account on Twitter for Hacker News. You can't :)
The idea that this platform, full of comments and small stories from some of the best sysadmins in the world, it not a high value target...is somewhat naive.
That being said, if you didn't see my earlier reply to your earlier comment, no worries as I definitely made that oversight previously myself.
Look I think in technology today, we should take suspicion as a positive trait (which it most certainly isn't always). Asking questions of who controls what, who is in charge, what is that person like/what can we assume their motivations are, is to be applauded. That being said, I know this must stress you out only more on top of all the work you do. That is extremely fair and tbh I would be resentful.
I could be wrong about all this. But even if I am, I ask that you imagine the positive consequences. Perhaps others elsewhere will question suspicious things they have seen. Hopefully they will be respectful and seek a path of investigation that while willing to "blame and shame", which does sometimes happen, use those powers sparingly, and only with some level of consensus.
EDIT: Also just upvoted you as show of good faith :)
If you no longer wish to access your account set up a new autogenerated password then forget it.
> We delete comments for people nearly every day. It's true that we don't allow wholesale deletion of account histories, because that would gut the threads the account had participated in. But we also don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19459744
It's difficult because even if someone wrote something they regret, they probably also have things they wrote which prompted really good discussion.
That doesn't mean we don't care about individual users' needs for protection—we care a lot about it, and help people with these requests every day. We just have to do so with sharper tools, and we have a big bag of tricks for taking care of these things. They include renaming accounts, retroactively assigning comments to throwaway accounts, deleting specific posts (especially if they don't have replies), redacting specific info from posts, and more.
pg wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226. I wrote more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623717 and elsewhere in this thread.
I still suspect that HN is not compliant with CCPA (the Californian GDPR) though, specifically that you can "request a business to delete any personal information about a consumer collected from that consumer".
HN is also not a platform that changes much over long periods of time (in UI, UX or policies). So don’t keep your hopes up on this one being dealt with as you’d like it to be. HN the platform does not keep up with the times as much as you’d expect it to be for a platform with deep pockets behind it (don’t bring up Facebook in comparison; that’s a downright malicious platform). “The right to be forgotten” is a stranger here.
I’ve seen in past discussions that HN wants to preserve conversations and doesn’t want to delete content, especially if it means making threads meaningless. Imagine deleting a reply to a comment based on a request that in turn has replies from others beneath it. The people who posted those replies may not want their content to be deleted. I’ve seen platforms deal with this in different ways. Facebook deals with it by removing the entire comment thread or subthread when the top comment is deleted. Reddit deals with it by removing only that specific comment (marking it as deleted) and leaving replies dangling without any context.
The other side of the coin is that HN is not a platform you or I own. So the platform is well within its rights (up to legal limits) to do anything with your content.
People must really understand that anything they put on the web is susceptible to stay forever in corners they may not even be aware of. The content you post may also be mirrored on the Internet Archive with time based snapshots without your knowledge. The Internet Archive doesn’t have an easy way to request for deletion (or even exclusion from being archived). If you send emails, sometimes you get asked to provide more proof (like invoices for domain registrations) even after you’ve provided evidence of ownership through other means (without exposing personal information). Is the Internet Archive wrong to copy content and make it difficult (or impossible) to remove it from its databases? The answer depends on who you ask. You’d also find people who have different views on how it ought to be on HN vs. Internet Archive.
What people and platforms cannot seem to agree on is what content truly belongs to you in a way you can edit, delete and modify it as you please and have that be the only version that everyone else sees.
I imagine many people who posted under their real identity, or revealed it, are now regretting it for this reason.
So no, I don't have a problem with it here either.
If I feel badly enough about something I've said in the past, I can always follow up that I've changed my mind / disagree with my past argument and the reasons why.
Yes, that's the rational way. However, with today's SJW and Twitter mobs, you don't know what someone might dig up in order to make your life hard going forward.
Just cuz you're in lock-step with the zietgiest now doesn't mean you will be in the future.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
If you are concerned about Mega Nazis, hoping you can convince them to be tolerant Mega Nazis by the example of tolerant anti-Nazis is...not likely to be an effective approach.
These kind of discussions remind me of a quote I read somewhere back in the 90's: When someone gets in a computer, their IQ drops 50%: That's the only explanation why the same person that falls for a stupid "nigerian prince" scam, would tell a person knocking at their door asking them to give them money to get more money to fuck off.
Same with sharing stuff... people go on the internet sharing photos, videos and text that they would not share on a normal interaction in "real life" (you can see a high rated post here, being quite aggressive about some old email interaction while being impersonal, but when dang replied the user changed their tone... WHY?). Just behave like the real you when you are on the internet, it is a public place by definition.
I've got plenty of old comments in Usenet, slashdot, old forums and plenty of other websites from more than 25 years ago. Sure, some of them are stupid because I was younger, or they are charged, flamebaits, trolls, or just plain stupid (specially ones in comp.os.linux.advocacy ).
But yeah, that was me, and if someone finds those posts and confronts me to them, I have to own them, and as you say, I would be able to follow up on why I wrote "hahaha you use window$z you suck donkey ballz" 25 years ago when I was 13 years old...