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.
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?
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.
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.