Today I found out after 11 years on this platform there is no way to delete anything you create and post, including the account itself on Hacker News.<p>This seems strange and ironic considering a lot of our online comments revolve around data privacy, individual rights and the right to be forgotten.<p>I have deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and reddit accounts my life has dramatically improved. However I am unable to delete my hacker news account... leaving me wondering what is the status of my online data and status on this network. Clearly it is meant to be permanent. I wonder if you knew nothing is deletable here, and if knowing at some point you might want to, you’d regret existing on and supporting a network that will profit or benefit from your content in perpetuity without input from you.<p>Meanwhile they reserve extravagant rights to flag censor and ban any content you post at their discretion indicating they’re fully willing to remove content that they disapprove of.<p>My opinion: you should be upset that this platform/network is benefiting off you and not allowing you the rights and benefits to delete and control your own content... Much less paying you for the content you provide.<p>I have emailed HN@ycombinator.com and they don’t respond.
> Today I found out after 11 years on this platform there is no way to delete anything you create and post<p>How did you "find that out"? It's not true. We take care of these requests for people every day.<p>> I have emailed HN@ycombinator.com and they don’t respond<p>We always respond. It may take a while though, because the inbox gets brutally piled up. It looks like you emailed 3 days ago. There are 32 ahead of you in the queue. I'm sorry, but there's not much I can do but answer emails in the order they were received. (The actual process is more complicated, but that's what it boils down to.)
I think it's pretty sad that they don't warn you when signing up. And I think it's pretty lousy that they won't let you delete your account. I had an account that got into 4-digit karma before I realized I couldn't delete it. I was younger and wrote some stuff I'd love to get rid of. I've emailed the guys who run HN about it several times and every time it's the same lame excuse.
You should be allowed to delete your own comments for alot of reasons.<p>In particular, if you decide that a comment you made was overly negative, or offensive or has some other issue, then it is good for the quality of discussion that you be able to take the action and remove it. You are allowed to do this for a short time period after creating it, I think you should permanently be allowed to delete it.<p>I know HN does not like comments to be deleted because it breaks the historical value, but I think people, privacy, quality of discussion and individual personal right to curate your own online presence are more important than HN's right to maintain historical integrity. HN doesn't see it that way as far as I understand but hey, it's their site. Don't like it, don't comment.
I found this out maybe 15% into my HN career. I've emailed in the past to have specific posts removed and received a timely response doing so.<p>I didn't request a blanket delete however. I do understand the desire for posterity, and generally very much appreciate the lack of [deleted] a la reddit.<p>It's not hard to notice the lack of delete: it's somewhat well known edit windows close; then the delete window soon after. Maybe upfront documentation would be welcome. I imagine many people like us didn't think of it until after wanting to delete something.<p>I'd be very open to removing usernames from posts (they bear little in >99% of cases anyway). I'm wary of having entire posts be easily deleted, especially considering replies. My country does have a right to be forgotten (Canada), so I assume I could easily email or snail mail to have my profiles wiped. I wouldn't exercise this, though perhaps I'd consider a disassociation in the future.
> Today I found out after 11 years on this platform there is no way to delete anything you create and post<p>> This seems strange and ironic considering a lot of our online comments revolve around data privacy<p>I agree it seems strange this just now occurred to you after 11 years.<p>> I have deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and reddit accounts my life has dramatically improved<p>Why is that, exactly? Because you waste less of your time on them, or because nobody has your data from those services? If it's the later, how do you calculate value from something you can't observe?<p>> Meanwhile they reserve extravagant rights to flag censor and ban any content you post<p>Yeah, using a site that someone else wrote and pays for running the servers doesn't give you magical rights on the service. A fun fact is that free speech is frequently misinterpreted as the ability to say anything anywhere, but it's not that at all.<p>> My opinion: you should be upset that this platform/network is benefiting off you<p>That's not an opinion, it's telling people what to think which seems somewhat in vogue recently.
From dang (mod), Mar 2019:<p>> 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...<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19459744" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19459744</a>
I cut my teeth on Usenet, mailing lists, and IRC - on all of which the idea of unsaying something you said was a self-evident absurdity.<p>So no, I don't have a problem with it here either.<p>If I feel badly enough about something I've said in the past, I can always follow up that I've changed my mind / disagree with my past argument and the reasons why.
Ten years ago one of the most prolific and valuable participants of lesswrong.com used a script to delete all his writings from the site. A few days or weeks later, he reconsidered and gave the site permission to restore them, explaining that he was angry when he ran the script, but as you might expect if you've spent time adminning a computer, no one wanted to spend the considerable technical effort required to effect a restoration. Since then I have experienced non-negligible amounts of pain after following one of my bookmarks or a search-engine hit only to end up at a stub that was one of his former posts or comments.<p>>you should be upset that this platform/network is . . . not allowing you the rights and benefits to delete and control your own content.<p><i>I</i> would be upset if a significant fraction of the more than 558 bookmarks into news.ycombinator.com I have accumulated over the past 10 years stopped working because of a change in HN that caused a large increase in the rate of deletion of old comments. In particular, I worry about users who would use a script to mass-delete all of their comments here. (I arrived at the figure of 558 by actual counting: in a directory containing only bookmarks manually created by me, I grepped for "news.ycombinator.com" and for an abbreviation for HN that I use when I'm too lazy to copy and paste the url.)<p>The fact that it is hard or impossible for a prolific contributor to mass-delete his contributions is a significant part of the reason I chose spend as much of time as I have reading here -- and <i>searching</i> here: with Google Search becoming increasingly useless, an increasing fraction of my searches are searches of HN using Algolia.<p>I am of course okay with the site's starting displaying a strongly worded warning on the sign-up page.<p>ADDED. 13.3% of my searches of the internet since the start of this year have been searches of HN using Algolia. One painfully precise detail: I am counting only those of my searches that originated (in code I wrote) in Emacs, but that is the majority of my searches, and I have no reason to believe that they materially differ from the rest of the searches (which originated by my typing into the location bar of my browser).
While I'm pro right to be forgotten, and do believe HN should allow an account delete.<p>But HN's ethos is to inspire discussion and readability of it. Lack of a delete seems to be by design so that conversations are always readable.<p>You can see the spirit of that in their guidelines[0] such as "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive".<p>You can further see that in the design in how they handle deletes [1], where once "archived" things are permanent<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#editdelete-time-limits" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#editde...</a>
> I have deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and reddit accounts my life has dramatically improved.<p>How would your life be better if you were able to delete your account here as opposed simply not ever using it again?<p>> I wonder if you knew nothing is deletable here<p>That's not entirely true, but it is true that you can't just bulk delete every comment you made - and thankfully so, because reading discussions with bunch of deleted comments that have replies would make this place a lot worse.
So, they allow changing your handle to a random string, they delete selected posts if they don't break big threads, and they redact select info (like PII) from your posts, all of which upon request, and on a case-by-case basis.<p>To me, it seems reasonable enough actually, although the process could have less friction, i.e., instead of requiring an email conversation, just have buttons for edit/delete after their window has passed that the mods then review and get back to you for further clarifications or simply allow your edit/delete request.
My inability to remember everything I've posted on this account over the years makes me consider it unsafe to tie to my real identity.<p>I've grown over the years. Since I can't review and delete anything that no longer reflects who I am now, I've written HN off as a place to talk about anything that might identify me.
You can mail the mods to "anonymize" your account by changing the username to a random-ish string.<p>I still suspect that HN is not compliant with CCPA (the Californian GDPR) though, specifically that you can "request a business to delete any personal information about a consumer collected from that consumer".
Not really. Most internet forums stopped you deleting comments, posts or your account iun general. In 99% of ones I've come across, there's a time limit on editing a post, normal members don't have the right to delete their content, and accounts can't be removed.<p>And to be honest, I don't expect any different. What do you expect to happen if someone deletes their post on a site like this? If it's standalone I guess it'd be fine, but if there are replies (or it's the whole thread), then what? Do you remove a whole bunch of random people's replies as well? What if those people don't want their content removed but you do?<p>Forums are very much a collaborative effort, not an individual one, and I feel the interests of the community outweigh that of any one member here.
AFAIK you're not able to delete your stack overflow / stack exchange posts either. The site basically says anything you post is CC-BY-SA 4.0 so once you post it it's effectively available for everyone forever.<p>You can delete your account but your posts will not disappear. Maybe HN should add the same terms so you know your posts can't be deleted.<p>As for deleting your account that's annoying. My solution for at least not using an account is setting minaway to 9999999999 and the turning on noprocrast. suddenly my account is unusable.<p>Maybe a simple solution for HN is they could follow S.E. and when you delete your account they just change the username to user-<number>
The main reason I support allowing deletion of content is that for individuals in abusive households or citizens of certain governments, if they posted something in the past that was dangerous to their health or life, they should be able to delete it to ensure they are not harmed by a parent or spouse who may be in a position of power over them and may be abusing them, or in the case of a government it may target them for something they said in the past.
I’m with you on this, and don’t like the fact that delete windows for comments and posts is quite short and that accounts (along with content) cannot be deleted. This is why I never put any personal or demographic details in my comments here.<p>HN is also not a platform that changes much over long periods of time (in UI, UX or policies). So don’t keep your hopes up on this one being dealt with as you’d like it to be. HN the platform does not keep up with the times as much as you’d expect it to be for a platform with deep pockets behind it (don’t bring up Facebook in comparison; that’s a downright malicious platform). “The right to be forgotten” is a stranger here.<p>I’ve seen in past discussions that HN wants to preserve conversations and doesn’t want to delete content, especially if it means making threads meaningless. Imagine deleting a reply to a comment based on a request that in turn has replies from others beneath it. The people who posted those replies may not want their content to be deleted. I’ve seen platforms deal with this in different ways. Facebook deals with it by removing the entire comment thread or subthread when the top comment is deleted. Reddit deals with it by removing only that specific comment (marking it as deleted) and leaving replies dangling without any context.<p>The other side of the coin is that HN is not a platform you or I own. So the platform is well within its rights (up to legal limits) to do anything with your content.<p>People must really understand that anything they put on the web is susceptible to stay forever in corners they may not even be aware of. The content you post may also be mirrored on the Internet Archive with time based snapshots without your knowledge. The Internet Archive doesn’t have an easy way to request for deletion (or even exclusion from being archived). If you send emails, sometimes you get asked to provide more proof (like invoices for domain registrations) even after you’ve provided evidence of ownership through other means (without exposing personal information). Is the Internet Archive wrong to copy content and make it difficult (or impossible) to remove it from its databases? The answer depends on who you ask. You’d also find people who have different views on how it ought to be on HN vs. Internet Archive.<p>What people and platforms cannot seem to agree on is what content truly belongs to you in a way you can edit, delete and modify it as you please and have that be the only version that everyone else sees.
I am not very versed in those legal matters but I imagine there is a whole spectrum between Facebook (where all your content is personal and you should be able to take it out as needed) and Stack Overflow or Wikipedia (where taking out answered questions or articles when an author wants it doesn't make sense). I wonder how this is regulated, especially in regions with "strong" right to be forgotten e.g. Europe.<p>More than once I have stumbled on deleted Reddit comments that looked to have something I was looking for. Maybe it's good that the right type of content is posted in places with the right kind of deletion rules, but this should definitely be advertised clearly (so people don't start Q/A type subreddits, and conversely don't post personal info on HN).
Im okay with that. One should assume a transparent community and remove any hints to the real identity just in case. One can easily create a separate email address for HN or just use one for this type of semi anonymous identity on internet: HN, reddit, etc
I think you should be able to unlink comments from your account, but I don't support a blanket delete. Any old reddit thread is basically unreadable from auto-deleted comments.
It definitely should be possible to at least anonymize some comments (disconnect from the main account). Norms are changing so fast an innocent joke made in 2015 could be enough to get someone cancelled, and the retroactive norms are only getting stricter (I wonder what's acceptable today that's going to be enough to cancel people in 2025?).<p>I imagine many people who posted under their real identity, or revealed it, are now regretting it for this reason.
The guidelines should be more visible when signing up but HN recommends anonymous/throwaway if you have something sensitive to post.<p>Note that they usually have more than enough context to still link your accounts and will ban both if they want to, but that's their prerogative. Be careful with who you trust and what you put online, that's the best advice for everything.
Keep private and divulging information off this site. Also one can create a throwaway for any info they dont want associated to their main accounts. Eg bragging about stupid things they do or did at work, bragging about slacking, about being lazy at work, about things that we normally shy away for saying outloud IRL
I think I understand HN's philosophy (ie: this is the web; you can never <i>really</i> delete anything), but there are a few of my old comments I wish I could hide. Does there exist no compromise that is simpler than emailing HN, yet onerous enough to prevent HN from becoming a shifting pile of sand?
It does seem odd you can’t delete your own content, but beyond that, I don’t think any of our comments are worth paying for. Comments on HN feel a bit like recorded discourse in a techie Roman Forum. No one invites you to participate but people will remember what you say
Idea: Add a "post anonymously" option for comments. HN can dynamically generate a new account for each thread so all of your comments are linked to the same identity for the same story. This account can then be accessed through a special link shown only once.
Just adding my advocacy for a delete option. Hacker news has been around for long enough, it’s only reasonable that you give the content creators control over that content. Did i even sign a TOS back then?
I am also upset and concerned that I cannot remove the posts I want.
Having to send to someone the content you don't want people to know anymore is wrong and a huge psychological barrier.
Imagine some AI process reads all your comments and re-builds your digital identity on the other end. As long as it is not tied to your real identity you’re okay
I'm not sure why you would put any information about yourself on a public forum and expect it to not be permanent. Do people actually have that assumption? I fully believe that everything said here and anywhere else on the internet is being slurped up by some random guy/org's bots.<p>That's not paranoia btw, believing otherwise would be incredibly naive. So no, I am not upset and I don't think I should be upset. I think you are the one with unrealistic expectations. If it's on the internet it is permanent, gdpr be damned.
Wouldn't this be illegal for EU residents due to GDPR?<p>though even if they respond emails and help you I'm pretty sure they break EU laws without informing you about rules in advance with clear information about DPO, data processor/controller etc
Yes, this bothers me too.<p>HN should allow this for a small fee as a compromise between the conflicting interests of comment authors and readers. The fee would limit the number of [deleted] comments but when someone really wants to have their comments removed, they would be able to.
If you see this post before the inbound bots come and give it a -4 downvote, M5 Hosting controls this.<p>It's a front company. They have something like 30 names, only 7 employees who can be inferred every really worked at the company + are real humans.<p>Also, try finding the verified account on Twitter for Hacker News. You can't :)<p>The idea that this platform, full of comments and small stories from some of the best sysadmins in the world, it not a high value target...is somewhat naive.