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Seconded re moderation.

Also, the site itself - the ethos of the owners; I used to have an account, became disenchanted with the mods, decided to delete my content, close the account.

I then discovered;

  1. You cannot delete answers which have been accepted.
  2. The mechanism for deleting your own content allows you to delete a max of something like five replies per day.
I then took the time to look at the T&C, and SO as I remember it simply make all of your work their property.

I deleted everything I could, over the course of a significant number of days, and left.




I think not allowing deleting answers is ok, this is something like asking wikipedia to delete content you contribute; at some point it isn't really your content and its part of an article. If your asnwer is accepted others are discouraged to post another answer, so deleting content retroactively is really demaging. But also none of the answers should contain personal information so don't really see a reason to delete it.


Read the T&C. The answers are all licenced under creative commons with attribution so anyone can copy them. They are not owned by SO. This is why sites can copy all of SO to get better Google SEO also this is why ChatGPT etc can build their answers based on SO.

So remember it was never your property.


> it simply make all of your work their property.

Do note that your posts on SO are published with a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license:

https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

so regardless of who owns them, they can be reproduced, and probably are. So in many senses there is no deleting them.

Also, don't understand why you wanted to delete. Despite its problematic policies, SO is an important public resource and I assume so were your answers on it...


If you live in the EU, you could do a GDPR request to delete all your data. https://meta.stackexchange.com/legal/gdpr/request


I mean, they will remove your personal information from their databases.

Your answers will most likely stay, just anonymized.


The answers will stay they are licensed through Creative Commons Attribution licences so anyone can copy them.


Mmm! thankyou - I will give it a go.




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