We delete comments for people nearly every day. It's true that we don't allow wholesale deletion of account histories, because that would gut the threads the account had participated in. But we also don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN.
The idea is to balance the need to preserve history (community interest) and the need to protect users (individual interest). We don't get there perfectly, but I can tell you for sure that the vast majority of people who ask us about this end up happy with how we help them.
That's correct. HN generally doesn't remove entire account histories, because that would gut the threads the account had participated in, which is unfair to the commenters who replied. Our goal is to balance community needs with individual needs. pg wrote about this many years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226. That doesn't mean we don't care about individual requests. We take care of them every day. For example, we can randomize usernames and disable accounts, and we also frequently delete or redact specific posts that people are worried about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19459658
dang:
We delete comments for people nearly every day. It's true that we don't allow wholesale deletion of account histories, because that would gut the threads the account had participated in. But we also don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN.
The idea is to balance the need to preserve history (community interest) and the need to protect users (individual interest). We don't get there perfectly, but I can tell you for sure that the vast majority of people who ask us about this end up happy with how we help them.