Ask HN: Why does Facebook respect my data more than HN?

There's a line that needs to be drawn, and no matter where you draw it, you will find some people on one side and some on the other.

HN gives you more choice and freedom than Facebook (or G+), by allowing pseudonymity -- you just can't change your mind later.

Some people get a lot of professional and personal mileage by having their real name (or well-known pseudo) attached to HN content. Others actively avoid that. And a lot of people do both -- some simple analysis on HN comments can demonstrate multifurcation of single legal identities.

Presumably for the same reason that Eric Lippert gives for why certain nice and intuitive language features aren't implemented in C#: someone has to implement them.

For HN to have Facebook-grade privacy controls and account management, someone would have to write that code.

Pretty hard to believe considering a title like, "how do I delete my HN data?" would have been more informative as to the post's content and would have made far fewer assumptions, not to mention it would avoid the inherent negative bias you have toward Facebook.

We need to stop promoting passive aggressive content like this. The author easily could have e-mailed site staff before taking up the pitchfork, and we developers know that a feature like account deletion doesn't just appear out of the blue -- it takes time to code. There's no need to paint HN as intentionally disrespectful of our privacy.

Imagine one of those collaborative drawing programs in which multiple users can make marks and the resulting drawing is the sum of all their marks. Should one of the users be able to come back later and claim that he wanted all the marks he'd made deleted, on the grounds that they were "his content?" I'd argue that someone doing that would be violating an implicit social contract with the other users.

Similarly, if someone wanted all their HN comments deleted, they'd ruin other people's comments by making them incomprehensible. And how far would deletion be expected to go? If user y quotes part of a comment by user x, is that also supposed to be deleted if x wants his comments deleted? It should be if it's "his personal data," right?

We do delete individual comments and submissions when people do something they worry will get them in trouble. That combined with the fact that accounts are anonymous and that users can wipe their profiles seems to me to strike the right balance.

judging from the general tone around here most people take a much more naive approach.

just learn to know better and get on with it...

If you remember 1984, one of the first things that tells us we are in a dystopia is that Winston's job is to alter and delete from the historical record to suit his employer's purposes. Once you've voluntarily made something public, editing or deleting it is, in a sense, depriving the public of its right to know.

As far as accounts, deleting an account is largely symbolic. You are not entitled to be humored - if you don't want an account anymore, stop using it.

The only personal data HN has is your email address, which is optional - you are free to remove it from your account at any time.

Sure, you might want to delete something after x months. But you can't delete it from the internet. Think about Google Cache, Archive.org etc...

The individuals are usually told via user agreements that the content is theirs, and that they own their comments and data and are personally liable for the content of them. That is... if you libel someone, this is your problem.

And the group expects that once a collaborative work has been created (a conversation), that the work will stand in it's original form. And that implies that when others post a comment within the context of some greater conversation, that the context for their comment is preserved.

Therein is the conflict. If an individual deletes (physically removes) their data (we did tell them it was theirs), the collaborative work is affected and the context of everyone else's contributions is changed.

To resolve this nearly all fora work on the basis that you can nuke your account but not your comments. And if you do nuke comments, that you can only nuke a subset of them and that a marker will be left to indicate that a comment once existed.

This works about as well as you imagine, it pleases no-one fully and everyone just a little.

The alternative that is also taken by some fora is to have your contributions licensed in such a way that the operator of the site has a perpetual right to reproduce the content. Great... the group gets their value, but you've lost control of your content whilst still being liable for it.

And who is liable for a comment that now shows up with a [deleted] author? Likely as not, it's the site operator.

Everything on comments is just a shade of grey in this conflict zone.

When it comes to accounts. I fully agree with you. The account isn't a collaborative work, and it is solely your work.

The vast majority of fora allow account deletion by policy, but the software tends to not have caught up with the policy. Meaning you have to email the site owner and ask for deletion. On the sites I run (mostly vBulletin, some XenForo, a few Vanilla) I do deletions within a week or two of being notified. As the software doesn't support undeletion I tend to warn people and give a cooling-off period until a confirmation from the person is received to acknowledge it's an irreversible action.

I'm rambling... gist is: deletion of comments would affect the collaborative work that is the essence of a forum and should be managed with extreme caution by the site owner and attempt to leave things in context. Deletion of user profiles has no such impact and should be honoured, but unfortunately the buttons to achieve this tend not to be built into the underlying software.

And on a final note, I think systems that support aliases should be allow people to rename themselves too. But that's an even less-supported thing than profile deletion.

Forum software sucks, but it's not all the fault of software most of it comes from the social stuff surrounding a collaborative work.

You have no personal data stored in your account settings.

Some stuff you post on FB is supposed to be private, HN post are all public. Because they are public, they probably have been replicated quite a few times on internet archives.

Unlike FB, HN has no tracking tools (well not on the client side anyway), unlike FB which tries to track you everywhere on the internet.

Deleting your account is cumbersome to implement: how to deal with your comments, and would these need to be deleted too ?

Follow that, and you'll find that the inability to delete an entire account is not a problem you need ever face.