
Ask PG: Why don't you allow users to delete HN accounts? - balladeer
At least allow people to replace it with something like [deleted] or [deleted-account] text instead of the user-name after a user has decided to delete the account, if you would want some kind of indication to remain, or sth random, whatever pleases or suits you.<p>Or at least give an option to disable&#x2F;lock the account. I mean it should be like a basic right on the Net to have your account deleted.
======
jacquesm
(1) I don't think PG is the right person to ask, he passed the mantle a while
ago.

(2) It may seem like it should be a basic right to have your account deleted,
but in practice that only works as long as you don't interact with others, if
you interact with others and then your portion of the conversation gets
removed you effectively ruin the record. Unless everybody starts quoting
everybody else to make sure that deletions don't leave the comment threads
unintelligible.

(3) having your account replaced with 'deleted' is a useful suggestion

(4) in the meantime, say stuff that you're prepared to stand by and pretend
that 'online' is just like 'offline', you don't get to make up the terms
unless you go through the trouble of making your own website.

(5) You're volunteering all this stuff, nobody forces you to.

The rules of HN and other internet fora are pretty clear, what you write gets
associated with your username and it will likely never go away entirely
(google cache, wayback machine, users caching, search engines and replications
of the db elsewhere). Choose your username and comment accordingly.

If you regret something specific that you wrote you can ask hn@ycombinator.com
to remove it for you (they'll likely oblige if the request is reasonable), but
if you can avoid tasking the moderators with more work than they already have
I'm sure that would be appreciated.

~~~
Red_Tarsius
> (4) in the meantime, say stuff that you're prepared to stand by and pretend
> that 'online' is just like 'offline'.

Online is _not_ just like offline. At all. Simply put, human beings are not
made to have their beliefs set in stone. Also, anything you write can (and if
you're famous, _will_ ) be used against you. It's an extremely stressful
environment.

I've been harassed by a troll in a forum where I had my personal information
spelled out. In 50 years, people will still have access to me trying to put
some sense into a crazy user. I will never treat online like offline again and
I suggest everyone not to be so naive.

Instead, I fully agree with point 3.

~~~
gaius
Dejanews took a lot of people by surprise, things that were said on Usenet, no
one ever expected to become part of their permanent record. That is why it is
so important that the EU is able to enforce the "right to be forgotten" on
Google et al.

~~~
RexRollman
"The right to be forgotten" is one of the most asinine things I have ever of.
It really should be called "The right to supress history".

~~~
krapp
I find it a bit odd that this view is as prevalent as it seems on HN.

"The right to be forgotten" is nothing more or less than the right to have
some control over your identity, and over the ability of third parties to
leverage that identity for their own ends. To argue that governments and
companies should be forced or obligated to maintain long-term, fine grained
surveillance for the sake of "history" is kind of absurd.

In any other context, HN would be up in arms over the same, with many going
out of their way to exercise exactly that "right" through the use of
anonymizing tools or proxies.

~~~
tedunangst
The people objecting to "right to be forgotten" are not saying that companies
should be forced or obligated to maintain long term surveillance. That's quite
the non sequitar.

~~~
krapp
Many do seem to be insisting that search results and online information be
preserved as a record of 'truthfulness' in case they need to be used against
someone legally or in the court of public opinion (like a politician or a
celebrity who wants a scandal 'erased' or who wants to redact some statement
or opinion of theirs.)

By definition, this assumes the ability to correlate this data with real life
identities (otherwise the whole argument is pointless) for as long as it's
relevant.

That seems to me like an implied obligation to maintain a surveillance system
(or state) in all but name.

~~~
tedunangst
Imagine that there's a middle ground between "forced to delete" and "forced to
preserve". Let's call it "not forced to do anything".

------
hellodevnull
I read an argument that if you know you'll never be able to delete your
account and posts, you'll be more careful about what you say. I don't think
this is something I'd be considering when writing posts. We change as we get
older and recognize that things we may have said in the past were stupid, but
now we're stuck with them for life because they're on an interet forum with
our name next to them.

This is why I now only post anonymously.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "if you know you'll never be able to delete your account and posts, you'll
be more careful about what you say."

Most people probably don't know they can't delete their account until they
attempt to delete their account.

~~~
Red_Tarsius
The sad truth is, the users who want to act nasty won't care.

------
WA
_I mean it should be like a basic right on the Net to have your account
deleted._

No, it shouldn't. Most forums don't allow account deletion _including_ post
deletion, because it would destroy many threads and make it extremely hard for
later visitors to follow the conversation.

Since HN doesn't require you to put any personal details, you can just throw
out your email address and your account will remain as an empty hull holding
the strings of your past conversations.

~~~
ANTSANTS
Seconding this. I have browsed forums where important users threw temper
tantrums and deleted all of their posts, making it downright impossible to
follow _years_ worth of valuable dialogs.

I am a staunch proponent of anonymity and privacy (hence why I post here under
a pseudonym), but you need to make the decision about the level of privacy you
want _before_ you post. Changing your mind 1. screws over the community and 2.
won't save you from the determined taking a trip through the wayback machine
anyway.

~~~
windsurfer
Ever played Genesis Shadowrun?

~~~
ANTSANTS
A little bit, chummer. Not enough to catch your drift, though.

~~~
windsurfer
You are perhaps not as anonymous as you might think.

~~~
ANTSANTS
I _am_ pseudonymous, though. I don't really care if you can e-stalk ANTSANTS
to find that they posted in X forum or played Y game, as long as it stays
separate from my real identity.

However, if you're gonna be creepy about it, maybe I should be more proactive.

------
jqueryin
I'd rather be able to change my username personally. This one is tied to a
domain I used to run in the late 2000's and it's not the least bit relevant.

~~~
krapp
Trivially changing your username? What do you think HN is, a forum that uses a
database to decouple data from code? It's doubtless far too clever for that.

~~~
striking
Well, it _does_ use a database, actually. One of the first to ever exist. It
uses the file system.

More seriously, though, I wish someone would build a database-based file
system already. It would be so much easier to build an application that
focused on data if it were in the OS.

------
w8rbt
There's another side to this issue. Someone could create an account with your
name (claiming to be you) and write horrible/offensive/illegal things from
that account.

Anyone can write anything on Internet forums and can claim to be whoever they
like. Sites will store this data forever. Something needs to be done to limit
or prevent that sort of abuse.

Attribution can be difficult. [https://keybase.io/](https://keybase.io/) is a
nice way to establish identity on social sites.

------
gus_massa
Juts suppose that HN let you delete your account and comments.

Google and Bing have a copy of them. You still need to convince them to delete
them. Perhaps you can convince them to hide them, but I'm not sure if they
really delete them ever. And I forgot Archive, they also have a copy. (Do
Facebook scrap the web and has an internal copy for some future project?
Yahoo?)

There are a few HN-with-another-UI that also have copies of everything. Some
of them add tags, filters, another sort order, more search capabilities, a
nice UI with gradients of a flatter UI if that is possible. Algolia has the
official search engine, but I'm not sure what happened to the copy of the data
of the Octopart engine. Recently there was one submission of one that allows
you explicitly to see deleted comments. (I don't like this, I consider this
bad manner, but I don't see any way to prevent it.) You must convince all of
them to delete their copy. (And some people have private copies to run
statistics for curiosity sake.)

Yesterday, there was another submission of a company that scraps the web and
classifies the information to identify account. They sell that information to
police officers in case of children kidnapping or sex slavery or something
similar, I don't remember the details. That looks like a noble goal, but the
same technology could be used for evil purpose by another company. And the
shadiest companies are probably more difficult to locate.

And you still have to contact the 29 agencies of this list
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Signals_intelligence_a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Signals_intelligence_agencies)
(or perhaps
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies)
).

~~~
conductor
I operate a small forum and somewhat solved the issue of being scanned by the
bots by letting the users to decide whether their posts/threads are visible to
unauthenticated users, or users with less karma than some threshold. They can
either be completely hidden to them or hide their names and let just the post
be visible.

------
59nadir
> I mean it should be like a basic right on the Net to have your account
> deleted.

For sites like these, I would agree. You should know, however, that some
regulated markets like Internet gambling sites and the like have a requirement
_NOT_ to delete information about your account or your transactions, so this
"basic right" is actually legislated against in some areas.

------
buro9
I allow profile deletion on Microco.sm forums.

The way this works, is that we have a profile called 'deleted' and everything
a person has contributed is reassigned to that profile. Then we really do
delete the profile of the user in question.

We do warn, in advance, that once done the author loses all right to their
content forever. As we could never know who the author is. But then... this
shouldn't affect HN as you already lose the ability to edit your content after
some short amount of time... the effect is much the same as permanently losing
ownership of your content.

The 'deleted' account is the accumulation of all content created by profiles
now deleted. Here's the deleted account on one of my larger forums:
[https://www.lfgss.com/profiles/47687/](https://www.lfgss.com/profiles/47687/)

This method of profile deletion means that none of the conversations that have
occurred lose their meaning, or are otherwise broken up or left 'gappy'.

BTW, I've always found it a bit strange that HN doesn't seem to have legal
documents, user agreement or privacy policy.

~~~
pascalo
Are you guys still going? Thought you had wound up the ops?

~~~
buro9
Everything is open-sourced, Matt and I have positions elsewhere (GDS and
CloudFlare respectively), but the platform is open-sourced and being used.

To my knowledge, there are 3 major instances of the platform, on the instance
I run there are nearly 300 forums and just over 50k users. Another instance is
presently being setup as I'm helping advise them on it.

------
striking
I emailed hn@ycombinator.com and they replied that they "don't technically
have the ability to change usernames." They also "feel that it would be
against the spirit of the site" because "threads really belong to the
community."

I don't think it's a basic right, but it would be really nice if your past
didn't always follow you. People change their opinions and generally grow up.
Also, it may be a basic right if you're below the age of 13 due to COPPA:

    
    
      "the parent can review the child's personal information, ask to have it deleted and refuse to allow any further collection or use of the child's information. The notice also must state the procedures for the parent to follow."

------
gommm
As an aside, I'd love to be able to rename my account to have a unique handle
across websites...

------
swhipple
Is there a difference between locking your account and just removing the email
and keying in a random password? Once you've logged out, your account should
be effectively locked permanently.

~~~
sokoloff
The difference is if you've posted anything that you regret and the account
can be somehow linked to you, that old content still is attached to you, you
just can't write any more of it...

~~~
tbrownaw
It would make a lot more sense - and probably be easier - to fix social norms
to recognize that people change, and that old comments from the person you
used to be aren't from the person you are now.

I would assume that this will happen on it's own, as people grow up with
exposure to their own permanent record and notice that they don't recognize
their old selves.

------
tbrownaw
_I mean it should be like a basic right on the Net to have your account
deleted._

No, it shouldn't.

Setting the expectation that individuals have the responsibility to clean up
after themselves, means that anything they _don 't_ clean up still matches
their current beliefs.

Which will cause problems when there are a few sites that you don't remember
being part of, or have lost your login info for.

------
nailer
dang, if you're reading: HN at one point had support for openid. You couldn't
convert openid accounts made to regular password accounts, so after openid
died, there's a bunch of loners on the HN accounts system.

I'd love it if there was some way for those of us who used openid to have our
openid accounts merged back with the accounts we use now.

------
protomyth
The WeLL[1] has a long experience with this concept[2]. They allow users to
remove all their comments with a placeholder being put in its place.

1) [http://www.well.com](http://www.well.com)

2) [http://www.well.com/yoyow.html](http://www.well.com/yoyow.html)
[http://www.well.com/conf/guidelines.html](http://www.well.com/conf/guidelines.html)
[http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/csoc/papers/voices/Voices.htm](http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/csoc/papers/voices/Voices.htm)

~~~
protomyth
Ok, got it, down votes for pointing out other community solutions - perhaps I
see why people want to delete their accounts

------
chippy
Is there a copyright angle here?

Do we own the copyright of our comments, and in theory could we legally be
able to demand sites that have our comments to remove them?

~~~
maxerickson
That's why sites always put "perpetual license" in their TOS, they don't want
to deal with copyright claims from their users.

------
sctb
Please email hn@ycombinator.com with questions or requests related to HN.

------
sgift
> Or at least give an option to disable/lock the account.

Change your password to a random string, add HN on your email systems spam
list, so you don't feel any cravings to reset it by mailing yourself a new
password.

------
fiatjaf
"I mean it should be like a basic right on the Net"? Oh good Lord.

------
happyscrappy
What does it matter? Don't use it. Or are you trying to send your past
comments down the memory hole? If we are suggesting changes to HN I think a
mobile style sheet should be at the top of the list.

------
youonlyliveonce
[https://i.imgur.com/SUncHzQ.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/SUncHzQ.jpg)

~~~
mousa
Woah thats some Illuminati stuff

------
angelseeker
You'll get the keyboard warrior effect even moreso if you allow account
deletion.

~~~
striking
The HN community is pretty well behaved, IMO. People just want disassociation,
in order to have their current selves be separate from perhaps a younger, less
intelligent, past self.

------
Sir_Substance
Lazy development. Any hurf blurf you hear about right of others to trace you
or readability of the forums or responsibility for your comments or futility
of local deletion is just a smoke screen for a bunch of developers that
_really_ don't want to re-engineer their products to support deletion months
to years after they wrote the spec that forgot to include it.

