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There are potential downsides, like unexpected social consequences. One of the reasons HN users restrain themselves from getting into flamewars is because they
by sillysaurus2 13y ago
There are potential downsides, like unexpected social consequences. One of the reasons HN users restrain themselves from getting into flamewars is because they're expected to. When people are expected to behave, they usually do.
Each HN user is, literally, their comments + their submissions. This may be an anonymous forum, but people feel a strong connection with their HN identity. When they make comments that cause them to look silly, they feel silly. Why is that?
If you let people change their identity, people may subconsciously stop trying so hard to live up to their current one.
Maybe allow each user to change their username only once.
- ProblemFactory 13y agoThere are also practical downsides: information on the internet is often scraped, archived and cached. For example at https://www.hnsearch.com/ https://www.hnsearch.com/ and http://hackerslide.com/ http://hackerslide.com/ If deletion is allowed, it would be easy to add "undelete" from a previously scraped copy, or even a page for all deleted comments with previous user details. Both of these already exist for Reddit. In a way, deleting a post would highlight and bring it to the attention of people looking for controversy or accidentally leaked information.