Could HN consider allowing users to delete their own old posts?

We live in a very different world than the one that existed when HN first launched. Self-censorship and careful pruning of old posts is now a necessity for participating in public online discussions. Society is growing less tolerant of diverse opinions every year and comments that are within the Overton window today could get you fired from your job a few years from now.

I don't think we can even predict what opinions will inspire a Twitter mob in 2022. But inevitably one will come here and try to get someone fired for something, which will have a chilling effect on HN unless we can prune our own posts/comments as future situations require.

There needs to be a balance between individual needs for protection, fairness to the other commenters in a thread, and community interest in having an archive. Threads are a co-creation, which means their ownership is shared (pg wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226).

That doesn't mean we don't care about users' needs for protection—on the contrary, we care a lot and help people with these requests every day. No one goes away empty-handed. We just have to use more precise tools than wholesale deletion. These include renaming accounts, retroactively assigning comments to throwaway accounts, deleting specific posts (if they don't have replies), redacting specific info from posts, and more.

you could have option to anonymize posts just by removing the name of the poster, pretty sure that would be enough for some maybe even majority and off-load lot of work from you to pay attention only to those who want remove posts completely

We do that by randomizing the account name on request.

my point was this should be automated without human intervention, since there is no value lost for other readers, if it's just name randomized

Is there a disclaimer upon account creation that your account, once created, cannot be deleted?

It would be nice to be able to at least retroactively anonymize your username. When we were living in a kinder world, I didn't think twice about using my real name as my username, but I echo GP's fear: Norms change through time, and I guarantee that something I posted years ago that was benign and uncontroversial then would get me fired today.

EDIT: Reading the other responses, it looks like HN will actually do this if you ask. Nice to know! +1 to the request to automate this and provide UI for it for users to self-serve.

While I like the moderation on HN that's a joke answer. Have you ever had a discussion internally on this? Lots of comments don't fall under 'co-creation' whatever that means. Some comments reveal personal information and should be deletable by the poster.

Thanks for the response, I had not seen that post from pg and I didn't realize that comments can be manually deleted upon request.

I definitely appreciate the idea of there being a community interest in both the creation and archive of the work. The salient question in these times I think is whether it will continue to be possible to safely create public works of this type. This is a social issue beyond the scope of HN, but the drift of users away from public social networks and toward private messaging apps is evidence of a change that's already underway.

In all fairness, if you're so concerned with posting sensitive content, then why not create a throwaway account? It's easy on HN. You don't even need an e-mail address.

Why risk the magnificent foundation of HN (its comments) for something that can be mitigated so easily. I simply don't understand this. There have been so many comments that I've learned so much things from, I would be devastated if that were to go away or start to degrade.

The point is, you don't know today what will be sensitive tomorrow. I've posted content in the past that were benign at the time, but totally unacceptable in today's environment of heightened sensitivity. The online mob doesn't care how old your quote is. Look at all the people still drudging up Zuckerberg's "dumb fucks" comment.

To be fair, his comments were unacceptable at that time as well.

Strictly speaking, I'm interested in comments which cover technology. That's the content I learn from and I consider that to be more on the side of documentation rather than opinion. Why not just have one account for such content and other for political / opinionated content? I'm pretty sure those can be very clearly divided, don't you think?

Dang, I’m not here to pile-on. The mod team here is spectacular. Over the years you and team have done a wonderful job. I do love HN. I just want to digitally die. I think we all get that. Keep doing what you do. To the community, support dang! He’s good. Finally, HN should have have some option to wipe out the account, user name, comments, posts, something... It should be automated.

Contrarian opinion that I'm not sure I hold: think carefully about what you say, and if it's controversial, be brave/make a throwaway.

It's very valuable that HN allows throwaway accounts for these circumstances (unlike some other platforms where they allow only one account per person). However this doesn't help if the significance of a comment only becomes clear after it has been posted.

You cannot think of anything that was not controversial, say, 40 years ago that is highly controversial now?

That makes me wonder what HN's archive will look like in 30 years.

Maybe people in the future will make fun of anything besides that Dropbox comment.

Pedantic, hahaha...also infomative.

Not that I would say, no.

I don't see what this has to do with the parent, unless you're trying to say throwaways shouldn't be allowed.

Why does this require human intervention at all? If I want to delete my comment or account, why do I have to give you my email address in exchange?

Allowing wholesale deletion of account histories would gut the threads an account had participated in, which would be unfair both to any commenters who replied, and also to the community, which has an interest in maintaining its archive. We need to balance individual protections against these other concerns. To do that requires an approach with a bit more nuance than clicking a button to wipe everything. Threads are co-creations, after all. pg wrote about this in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226.

This has been the approach for a long time. Here's me saying the same thing 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11543284. The main thing that has changed since then is that we now have the ability to rename accounts. When people want to delete their accounts, a combination of randomizing the username and/or deleting some posts and/or redacting sensitive information has proved able to satisfy nearly everybody.

Points of view are changing. People are being more concerned about their data. I suspect many people here are feeling different about not being able to delete data. Other companies have given users the ability to delete their data. You might want to define a Hacker News policy that addresses it.

I suspect that you'll be addressing the same question over and over as time passes. It won't go away.

Things are changing in that we get more of these requests than we used to, but they're not changing in the sense that the current approach shows signs of not working. On the contrary, it works very well. The main problem is that it's not universally known, and so occasionally complaints like the current thread show up, or people tell each other things that aren't actually true. It's on my list to add to the FAQ, which would help, if anyone actually read the FAQ.

Addressing the same questions over and over is much, if not most, of my job. In recent months I've started to link more systematically to past explanations, since the sequences of questions on many topics have started to converge. I intend to compile these into either a v2 FAQ or a series of short essays about moderation topics, or something, which in the future can simply be linked to. The question of account deletion will certainly be in there.

Adding it the FAQ would be awesome.

Would it be possible to let users delete their account and when users delete their accounts you could override all PII with a "default" value? It's meeting users midway where their comments are still visible and threads are not gutted but they are not associated with their PII anymore?

I'm afraid I don't understand. Can you explain in a different way?

When users delete their account, instead of deleting the content/comments they submitted, you could replace the deleted user's username with the value [deleted], replace the IP address, email address and any other PII collected about the user with the value [deleted]. That way the threads remain intact and the content is not associated with the users anymore.

Ok, I think I understand. We wouldn't replace all such usernames with [deleted], for reasons I explain here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624019. But we randomize them, and if that's not enough, there are sometimes other things we can do.

I didn't know this. Thank you for pointing it out.

It took over ten years to get the unvote feature.