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.
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.
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.
Arguably, you don't need actual usernames to follow a thread, just a way to differentiate one user from another. Imageboards get by with extremely weak identity and referencing other posts rather than users, although, imageboards aren't exactly concerned with long-term quality conversations either. Still, it's possible to follow a thread without any identities at all.
This would mean something a bit smarter than just replacing usernames with [deleted] though. Perhaps [deleted #nnn] or some other token.
Edit: and if you really wanted to get paranoid about ambiguity, generate a new token per thread rather than per user, making it all but impossible to correlate the entire posting history for a deleted account.
Also arguably, a thread for which a majority of users have deleted their accounts might not be worth following anyway.
Fair point, I was mostly considering [deleted] since I think I've seen it in an HN thread that I came across while searching an old article. Numbers would work just as well.
I wouldn't really consider the deleted accounts to have worse comments. Especially for old threads... some users just retire their accounts, but the comments are still valuable when stumbled upon in the future.
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.