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I swear many years ago you could delete old posts but not any longer. About all you can do now is do something so egregious that they delete your account.
by comrade1234 8mo ago
I swear many years ago you could delete old posts but not any longer. About all you can do now is do something so egregious that they delete your account.
- bink 8mo agoEven if you could delete comments, in this day and age it's not a real deletion. They'd just put a "deleted" flag on the comment in the DB.
- Macha 8mo agoAnd there's a bunch of full scrapes of HN around anyway.
- nozzlegear 8mo agoThere's likely many iterations of HN comment datasets out there from "show hn: I scraped everyone's comments for my comp sci/big data class" over the years.
- asdff 8mo agoYou can do it just you have to email dang directly about it. Pretty stupid system.
- nozzlegear 8mo agoPretty sure they only change the username to something anonymous though, and remove any PII in comments you've written, right? They won't delete the comments themselves AFAIK.
- helterskelter 8mo agoArchive.org probably already has it anyway.
- 46493168 8mo agoThat’s actually how I got my Facebook deleted in 2015, and it appears I am still banned. I posted a picture, from behind, of a cowboy wearing only chaps. I tried to join again around 2022 to sell some stuff and they rejected me. Probably the best move I made for my mental health tbh.
- nostrademons 8mo agoYou've always been able to delete for 2 hours and then the post becomes effectively permanent, modulo emailing dang to get it deleted by an admin.
- pesus 8mo agoHave they stated the justification for this anywhere? You'd think a site that brands itself as being for hackers would value its users having control over their comments/privacy.
- JoshTriplett 8mo agoThere's value in editing for clarity within a window of a live discussion. After the live discussion is less active, it's important to be able to reference things or see a coherent view of the discussion and what people were responding to.
- nostrademons 8mo agoYes, it's because the comments create a discussion thread that then becomes impossible to follow (or worse, misleading) if certain comments within it are either deleted or edited to say something different. The idea is that what you write becomes communal property once it's been responded to, because it's part of a community discussion that loses meaning if people start deleting individual comments.
- AnimalMuppet 8mo agoI believe that, even within that two hour window, you cannot delete if anyone has replied to it. You can still edit it to say "[deleted]" or something, though.
- layer8 8mo agoThe HN email address takes personal requests for comment deletion.