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> Hacker News > Impossible Not sure how I feel about this one. I think it's a nice gesture to respect someones wishes to delete their contributions regardless
by have_faith 7y ago
> Hacker News
> Impossible
Not sure how I feel about this one. I think it's a nice gesture to respect someones wishes to delete their contributions regardless of the technical fact of external archives etc.
- giancarlostoro 7y agoThats 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.
- amelius 7y agoBut 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.
- giancarlostoro 7y agoIn 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.
- jnordwick 7y agoI 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.
- Hitton 7y agoI think that after a comment has a reply, it can no longer be deleted.
- jolmg 7y agoYou also can't delete a comment that has replies, so maybe that's what happened.
- jnordwick 7y agoTesting, can I delete this after I post a response that I then immediately delete? Edit: apparently you can delete a comment if the child comment is deleted.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tilolebo 7y agoYou wouldn't need to fully delete all comments: updating the author's name to "deleted user" would already be an improvement.
- GrumpyNl 7y agoAutomate it can bring bugs. Automating it can make it hack-able. If you can mail, its enough, gives you some thinking time to.
- Jaruzel 7y agoSometimes 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.
- have_faith 7y agoI 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.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago> We're talking about the ability to delete an account which HN's only option is to email and ask nicely. This means it's not impossible as the claim states. Impossible means you can't even email anybody to delete your account.
- journalctl 7y agoBut they can still say “no”. Then what?
- kgwxd 7y agoI've asked nicely, many times. They keep saying no. My only victory was to get a name change, but it took a few years of asking.
- input_sh 7y agoI lost all hope and ended up just abandoning my old profile and starting fresh. It's not like karma has any meaning here.
- erklik 7y ago> They keep saying no 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?
- kgwxd 7y ago2016-04-20: 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. "
- rad_gruchalski 7y agoNo, 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. StackOverflow does the same.
- jnordwick 7y agoThere is double standard favoring HN. If Reddit or Facebook didn't allow you to delete your account or comments and said it wanted to maintain a permanent record of you, they would get eviscerated. There are many questions going back on HN itself and the answer had always been no, but from what I understand they have renamed a few accounts. But it isn't something that they will apparently do for everybody.
- awild 7y agoThere's a major difference between sharing very personal information with close people, and stating your opinions in a public forum. Additionally, hn does not openly collect much metadata etc from your usage. You are right, that this is a double standard, but the sensitivity of the data is very different.
- 0xfffafaCrash 7y agoThat may be true, but I believe the information hackernews collects is still enough to be potentially personally identifiable. This makes we wonder if the inability to delete here might be at odds with GDPR compliance in the EU.
- widforss 7y agoBut YC probably have no ties to the EU, so they can't be held accountable.
- nathankleyn 7y agoGDPR applies to any company that handles the data of EU citizens, regardless of whether that company is located in the EU or not.
- hdkrgr 7y agoEU citizens OR residents
- peruvian 7y agoIt's not a solution, but you can change your username to something random by contacting dang.
- dmix 7y agoReddit lets you make the choice on the spot and leaves the content with the user name marked as [deleted]. Although I'm sure this community is small and the great team here is responsive enough.
- novok 7y agoI've contacted in the past for another account to delete a singular comment and was ignored :/
- dredmorbius 7y agoThe mail may have been overlooked. I typically see a response within a day, often in minutes. Though not always. AFAIU dang and sctb alone manage all email requests from all HN accounts, which is a fairly sizeable community.
- abootstrapper 7y agoIt’s especially annoying because the fact that you can’t delete an account is not disclosed up front.
- crankylinuxuser 7y agoIt's actually quite easy. Go get all your comments, and submit them to the copyright office. Remember, you have innate copyright even if it's not registered. But registering ALL your comments on HN can be done for $50. Then file a DMCA against your content. If they don't remove, then you can sue up to $135k/violation. You can also register as much content as one shot. So if you have the time, cover all your content, everywhere. And if some org gives you the run-around, DMCA'em. Also technically, you can DMCA them without a copyright filing. But having that legal backing has real teeth.
- F147H34D 7y agoWould this create a record of the comments at the copyright office?
- jefftk 7y agoThe HN terms (https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/) have the very typical: > By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed. When you send someone a DMCA takedown you need to include "A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law" and "a statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury". [1] So you probably don't want to send someone a DMCA request after giving them a license to use your comments! [1] https://www.aclu.org/other/text-digital-millennium-copyright-act-dmca https://www.aclu.org/other/text-digital-millennium-copyright...
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 7y agoUnfortunate, given the recent reports of social media accounts being inspected by customs agents. Something you said years ago (and, hypothetically, no longer believe in) might get you in trouble and you have no way of purging that record. It ultimately will have a chilling effect on what you can say on the site.
- reaperducer 7y agoUnfortunate, given the recent reports of social media accounts being inspected by customs agents. And bosses. And landlords. And insurance companies. And credit reporting agencies. And police departments. And schools. And...
- journalctl 7y agoIt’s fine. You just have to make sure you never say anything that could ever possibly be misinterpreted or used against you by anyone ever for the rest of your or your children’s lives. How hard could that be?
- reaperducer 7y agoor your children’s lives That's the even scarier part. There was a NASCAR driver a couple of years ago who lost his sponsorship because of something his father said before the driver was even born.
- gregknicholson 7y agoThe sponsors are a business out to make money, not to make sound ethical decisions. The way capitalism is supposed to work is that consumers (the capitalist synonym for “people”) avoid companies they don't like for whatever reason. The problem is this assumes consumers are reasonable. The sponsor has little to gain by doing the ethically correct but publicly outrageous thing and standing by the innocent person, because there are more people in the angry mob than there are who would reward the sponsor for their sound ethics.
- numakerg 7y agoDang's response to a similar (but slightly more confrontational) comment from me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19459658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19459658 While I mostly agree with what he said, I think there are some things they could do to give users more control without "gutting" threads. 1. Allow accounts to be deleted, with all of all their comments and submissions reverting to a [deleted] author. 2. If conversations require author continuity, anonymize the author per-thread to something like the Google docs anonymous usernames 3. Include a deletion request with clear guidelines for reasons why something can be deleted. Of course they won't do these things because 1) it's only two people and these features will require development and maintenance 2) an opaque and uncertain process ensures that they'll only receive requests in the most necessary cases 3) people might think more about what they write if they can't easily take it back What they could really do is add a warning to the account creation, submission and comment forms telling users that their submissions are not retractable past the grace period.
- efitz 7y agoGDPR: https://gdpr.eu/article-17-right-to-be-forgotten/ https://gdpr.eu/article-17-right-to-be-forgotten/ It’s often the easiest way to comply with GDPR just to allow any of your users to rage quit and delete all their stuff. That way you don’t run afoul of the EC if you accidentally mis-identify an EU citizen as not being from the EU. EC doesn’t care about conversation continuity.
- atoav 7y agoStep 1: become CEO of Facebook and get oversight where your account data is Step 2: find out data is not actually meant to be deleted Step 3: shrug, because now you are the CEO
- gaogao 7y agozuck actually deleting his account would cause a small headache with the number of old tests hard coded to his id. (4 is easy to remember.)