5 ms·

As far as I know this is about the same process for HN? http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-hacker-news-account http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-hacke

As far as I know this is about the same process for HN? http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-hacker-news-account http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-hacker-news-account

woof 13y ago
Skype makes it hard to leave/unsubscribe just to inflate their user base (aka "value"). It's pretty common when there's a economical incentive to do so. On HN it's hard/impossible to delete a user without breaking and/or destroying core functionality (ie submissions and discussion). So what's you point?
- X4 13y ago
  This makes all the other pro data contention arguments moot, I agree with woof. Whatever company, ideology or other room anomaly disturbs the views of people who think that that data (aka content) should be undeletable "because", is hereby just devalued in the argumentative value.
k-mcgrady 13y ago
I would be happy if they just added a feature to change your username. It's not too difficult to decipher my real identity from my HN username and I'd like to use something more anonymous. And fwiw a couple of years back I tried emailing the addresses mentioned in that link with no luck.
- buro9 13y ago
  That should be possible, but again... technology. If it wasn't thought about when the software was designed then it can cause very nasty issues and be hard to rectify. One of the forums I run on vBulletin has over 4m posts, 2m private messages, 45k users. vBulletin is MySQL and tries to reduce database load through denormalisation of the data. The posts table has the username repeated every time a post was made, and the private message table has a horrible PHP serialized array containing the username in the "To:" column for a private message. Changing a username on vBulletin involves an UPDATE statement on the post table, which is fine... but it involves iterating through every private message, de-serialising the To information, modifying and putting back. And vBulletin is MySQL, and the search is full_text, which means MyISAM tables, and the update of the private message table locks for the duration, and for a large number of private messages the table is locked for 15 minutes on that particular server... which is enough time to cause a domino effect of query waits that PHP runs out of memory and one by one my frontend servers fail and the site goes offline. Yup, vBulletin will crash and take the site offline if you have a large number of private messages and want to change a username. You can see the fun of explaining this to the users of one forum over here: https://www.lfgss.com/thread95475.html https://www.lfgss.com/thread95475.html This is one of the very many annoyances that has led me to create http://microco.sm/ http://microco.sm/ to fix this (and many other) pain points for admins and users. The software design is stopping users doing things they want to do (change their username). HN isn't running vBulletin. But the logic is much the same. If it wasn't thought about on day one the data structures likely do not permit an efficient changing of username. HN is under substantially more load than the forums I run, and dang likely deals with far more performance related issues. I'm sure he can reveal HNs specific design flaw that prevents username changes. Or perhaps it's just the idea that it's a social problem and that if patio11 changed to patm that it would break the context for all previous mentions of him. Again... software should have solved this, but only if it was thought about early enough. The lack of avatars does mean that the username on HN is a far more critical identifier.
  - eik3_de 13y ago
    > vBulletin is MySQL and tries to reduce database load through denormalisation of the data. The posts table has the username repeated every time a post was made Just in case an unexperienced developer reads that. Don't do it. If you expect high read loads, better invest your time in learning/thinking about caching, fragment caching, russian doll caching and invalidating these caches. Memcached or Redis come to my mind.
buro9 13y ago
Nearly all forums do this or some form of this. Your account and personal information may be deleted, but all of your comments, submissions, conversations, threads or whatever you call the collected bulk of user generated content will remain. The reason for this is that a forum is a collaborative effort, a collective work, and the contributions of other people's content might only make sense in the context of yours. The general stance is that a conversation is an audited history, and to change the historical record affects other people's content too by redefining the context. Taking this very conversation as an example if you deleted your account and your comment, mine now makes far less sense. Most forum admins agree that you have the right to edit your content, but not to modify/affect someone else's. Changing the historical record affects the content of others. Thus, most forums will ask for the right to reproduce your user content even after your account has been deleted. This preserves the context of other people's content. Beyond that... account deletion. The internals of most forum software is based on foreign keys or data structures that presume integrity of the data. To delete a user account whilst retaining the content created by the account breaks their software. So for a lot of forums deleting a user actually means keeping the user record but scrubbing it of identifiable information. The problem then comes that whilst the account may no longer exist in a meaningful sense, the content might still have personal identifiable information and will now be orphaned and detached from any meaningful record of ownership. Liability just became a nightmare for the forum admin. The question of how to handle work contributed to a collective work that is a forum is a sticky one. But ultimately the value of the forum to the people who will continue to use it is based on the collective work remaining intact. The content will always survive, and then it's just implementation that dictates what deletion of an account really means for the given piece of software.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  > The reason for this is that a forum is a collaborative effort, a collective work, and the contributions of other people's content might only make sense in the context of yours. Sure, but what about posts that have no replies? And what about a cascade, that is, poster B replies to poster A, poster A deletes their account, the post remains, poster B deletes their account, both posts disappear? I don't care about HN or Skype as much, but when I get my commenting system done I will look into doing something like that. I do believe in letting people and their content go. It's like making a party: yes, if people start leaving the party will be less fun, but it's more fun that way for the people leaving, and the rest ought to cope; considering one day they might want to leave as well. And while link rot sucks, so does everything just growing and only growing all the time. Let the web be a jungle, a living thing, and let things die, too? In the tiny part of this garden I attend to, that's how it's going to be. If in doubt, it's a zen thing ^^ At any rate, I don't really see the "liability nightmare", since it's already a fact that if you post something on a forum for 5 seconds, someone could take a screenshot and reproduce it until the end of time -- liability remains with the people posting stuff in the first place. It's just a matter of politeness to reduce this as much as you can on your end for anyone who wants to take something back, to do your part, without that implying any promises -- the way I see it, you loose some content, but you gain other content, because people know it's not necessarily etched in stone, and can try themselves out. Again, I'm not complaining about how any site handles this, and I'm happy to post on HN. But Plutarch said the mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled, right? Likewise, I believe in the process of the web much more than any heap of "content" it might produce. And at least for what little own content I have on my site, I intend to curate it every now and then, check for broken or obsolete things. I'm not even above editing year old blog posts, the whole point is that should I die, I will leave the best of what I made and thought, not just an endless "log" like toilet paper. If in 10 years some of what you wrote today doesn't strike you as silly and outright false, what did you do in those 10 years? Public spaces like HN and reddit and slashdot I feel are different from that -- you get a lot out of them, and for that you give up "exclusive ownership" for what you said. This is fine, but I could see that a private or small community might feel similarly like I feel about private things; they don't exist for the sake of historians or lurkers, but for what they have with each other. When that ends, there is no need to keep it around. What does it profit a person if they gain all the content of the world, but lose their ability to reinvent themselves, right? Not everything is a wiki, not everything has to be revision controlled, not every conversation is about timeless facts, or facts at all.

As far as I know this is about the same process for HN? http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-hacker-news-account http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-hacker-news-account

woof 13y ago

Skype makes it hard to leave/unsubscribe just to inflate their user base (aka "value"). It's pretty common when there's a economical incentive to do so. On HN it's hard/impossible to delete a user without breaking and/or destroying core functionality (ie submissions and discussion). So what's you point?

X4 13y ago
This makes all the other pro data contention arguments moot, I agree with woof. Whatever company, ideology or other room anomaly disturbs the views of people who think that that data (aka content) should be undeletable "because", is hereby just devalued in the argumentative value.

k-mcgrady 13y ago

I would be happy if they just added a feature to change your username. It's not too difficult to decipher my real identity from my HN username and I'd like to use something more anonymous. And fwiw a couple of years back I tried emailing the addresses mentioned in that link with no luck.

buro9 13y ago
That should be possible, but again... technology. If it wasn't thought about when the software was designed then it can cause very nasty issues and be hard to rectify. One of the forums I run on vBulletin has over 4m posts, 2m private messages, 45k users. vBulletin is MySQL and tries to reduce database load through denormalisation of the data. The posts table has the username repeated every time a post was made, and the private message table has a horrible PHP serialized array containing the username in the "To:" column for a private message. Changing a username on vBulletin involves an UPDATE statement on the post table, which is fine... but it involves iterating through every private message, de-serialising the To information, modifying and putting back. And vBulletin is MySQL, and the search is full_text, which means MyISAM tables, and the update of the private message table locks for the duration, and for a large number of private messages the table is locked for 15 minutes on that particular server... which is enough time to cause a domino effect of query waits that PHP runs out of memory and one by one my frontend servers fail and the site goes offline. Yup, vBulletin will crash and take the site offline if you have a large number of private messages and want to change a username. You can see the fun of explaining this to the users of one forum over here: https://www.lfgss.com/thread95475.html https://www.lfgss.com/thread95475.html This is one of the very many annoyances that has led me to create http://microco.sm/ http://microco.sm/ to fix this (and many other) pain points for admins and users. The software design is stopping users doing things they want to do (change their username). HN isn't running vBulletin. But the logic is much the same. If it wasn't thought about on day one the data structures likely do not permit an efficient changing of username. HN is under substantially more load than the forums I run, and dang likely deals with far more performance related issues. I'm sure he can reveal HNs specific design flaw that prevents username changes. Or perhaps it's just the idea that it's a social problem and that if patio11 changed to patm that it would break the context for all previous mentions of him. Again... software should have solved this, but only if it was thought about early enough. The lack of avatars does mean that the username on HN is a far more critical identifier.
- eik3_de 13y ago
  > vBulletin is MySQL and tries to reduce database load through denormalisation of the data. The posts table has the username repeated every time a post was made Just in case an unexperienced developer reads that. Don't do it. If you expect high read loads, better invest your time in learning/thinking about caching, fragment caching, russian doll caching and invalidating these caches. Memcached or Redis come to my mind.

buro9 13y ago

Nearly all forums do this or some form of this. Your account and personal information may be deleted, but all of your comments, submissions, conversations, threads or whatever you call the collected bulk of user generated content will remain. The reason for this is that a forum is a collaborative effort, a collective work, and the contributions of other people's content might only make sense in the context of yours. The general stance is that a conversation is an audited history, and to change the historical record affects other people's content too by redefining the context. Taking this very conversation as an example if you deleted your account and your comment, mine now makes far less sense. Most forum admins agree that you have the right to edit your content, but not to modify/affect someone else's. Changing the historical record affects the content of others. Thus, most forums will ask for the right to reproduce your user content even after your account has been deleted. This preserves the context of other people's content. Beyond that... account deletion. The internals of most forum software is based on foreign keys or data structures that presume integrity of the data. To delete a user account whilst retaining the content created by the account breaks their software. So for a lot of forums deleting a user actually means keeping the user record but scrubbing it of identifiable information. The problem then comes that whilst the account may no longer exist in a meaningful sense, the content might still have personal identifiable information and will now be orphaned and detached from any meaningful record of ownership. Liability just became a nightmare for the forum admin. The question of how to handle work contributed to a collective work that is a forum is a sticky one. But ultimately the value of the forum to the people who will continue to use it is based on the collective work remaining intact. The content will always survive, and then it's just implementation that dictates what deletion of an account really means for the given piece of software.

PavlovsCat 13y ago
> The reason for this is that a forum is a collaborative effort, a collective work, and the contributions of other people's content might only make sense in the context of yours. Sure, but what about posts that have no replies? And what about a cascade, that is, poster B replies to poster A, poster A deletes their account, the post remains, poster B deletes their account, both posts disappear? I don't care about HN or Skype as much, but when I get my commenting system done I will look into doing something like that. I do believe in letting people and their content go. It's like making a party: yes, if people start leaving the party will be less fun, but it's more fun that way for the people leaving, and the rest ought to cope; considering one day they might want to leave as well. And while link rot sucks, so does everything just growing and only growing all the time. Let the web be a jungle, a living thing, and let things die, too? In the tiny part of this garden I attend to, that's how it's going to be. If in doubt, it's a zen thing ^^ At any rate, I don't really see the "liability nightmare", since it's already a fact that if you post something on a forum for 5 seconds, someone could take a screenshot and reproduce it until the end of time -- liability remains with the people posting stuff in the first place. It's just a matter of politeness to reduce this as much as you can on your end for anyone who wants to take something back, to do your part, without that implying any promises -- the way I see it, you loose some content, but you gain other content, because people know it's not necessarily etched in stone, and can try themselves out. Again, I'm not complaining about how any site handles this, and I'm happy to post on HN. But Plutarch said the mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled, right? Likewise, I believe in the process of the web much more than any heap of "content" it might produce. And at least for what little own content I have on my site, I intend to curate it every now and then, check for broken or obsolete things. I'm not even above editing year old blog posts, the whole point is that should I die, I will leave the best of what I made and thought, not just an endless "log" like toilet paper. If in 10 years some of what you wrote today doesn't strike you as silly and outright false, what did you do in those 10 years? Public spaces like HN and reddit and slashdot I feel are different from that -- you get a lot out of them, and for that you give up "exclusive ownership" for what you said. This is fine, but I could see that a private or small community might feel similarly like I feel about private things; they don't exist for the sake of historians or lurkers, but for what they have with each other. When that ends, there is no need to keep it around. What does it profit a person if they gain all the content of the world, but lose their ability to reinvent themselves, right? Not everything is a wiki, not everything has to be revision controlled, not every conversation is about timeless facts, or facts at all.