Can we delete our accounts?

See the FAQ [0]:

"Can I delete my account?

We try not to delete entire account histories because that would gut the threads the account had participated in. However, we care about protecting individual users and take care of privacy requests every day, so if we can help, please email hn@ycombinator.com. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. More here [1]."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799

The problem is the data is already archived, indexed, and probably in some machine learning dataset

The stylometry "attack" doesn't get around plausible deniability. For example, for me, two of the top ten related accounts are actually me - but I don't think you could tell which and even if you could be pretty sure I could always say "no" and I think it would leave either you or an observer uncertain. I don't think my employer or future employer would fire me because an account that's kind of similar, lexically, to mine said bad things about the company - or whatever.

If your threat model is people cancelling you for controversial statements - I don't think there's anything to worry about. If your concern is governments or stalkers coming after you - then deleting your account probably won't solve the issue because they'll be able to access archived versions. These actors don't need to "prove" you said something to anyone but themselves. In this case the solution is just not to post anything sensitive regardless of the name you publish under.

Since nobody has linked it yet, there's a comprehensive document covering this and related topics, here: https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/

YC has multiple in-house lawyers. They're not going to risk their business over this. However, I'm unaware of any law that requires the process be completely automated.

HN doesn’t need to even to delete the posts themselves, just delete the association of posts with an account.

Do other commenting websites (like Reddit, Disqus, ...) allow the user to delete an account and all the associated comments? I think Reddit only shows [deleted] next to a comment, with the comment still there.

Are they obliged to delete the comments according to laws like GDPR?

Rule #1 on the internet: if you don’t want something on the internet, don’t post it to the internet because once you do it’s pretty much impossible to remove it.

An optional data retention policy would have the advantage of not exposing HNers to the risk of having their data taken to train a language model that emulates their style (which in the audio medium is called "voice morphing", and in the video medium is called "deepfakes"; it doesn't seem to have a name of its own in the written medium yet).

HN doesn’t care. In the past, I requested this very feature citing both the increasing ease and likelihood of correlating user data since 2006 and the very much increased safety risk of certain speech wrt to various authoritarian world actors.

In an email to hn@ycombinator.com, I wrote:

> ”I understand the user interface doesn't provide for comment removal, but with all due respect it's only a matter of time before that policy contributes to the imprisonment or even death of some of your users.”

> ”It's too late to be entirely safe from historical comments but we have no idea how much the threshold for what is truly dangerous to have said on the internet will change going forward. Even a small decrease in the personal risk going forward is important to me.”

HN’s response was no, because that would “gut the threads the account had participated in”. He then suggested there was upcoming an account renaming feature. Obviously, that feature would do nothing to alleviate the doxxing concerns brought up by the OP.

It was very disappointing.

YC literally put a higher value on maintaining old forum threads than reducing risk former users faced being detained, beaten or killed by religious or political organizations.

You know how much it sucks to google something, find a super relevant reddit thread, then because its old and half the accounts are gone it's just one deleted user replying to another? It would be sad to see HN become the same. Some of the most interesting content are old threads that are re-linked in new comments.

Based on HackerNews' current policies, it is impossible to address your concerns surrounding content posted.

HackerNews leadership have chosen to not allow anyone to delete content after a period.

Regardless, it would be pointless given how easy it is to scrape this website (on purpose).

Its rather too late now, the cat is out of the bag.

I think there are many other archives such as one posted above hosted by Google's bigquery.

a better strategy would be to divert your writing to something new and different, defeating simple stylometry analysis.

How come they still didn't doxx Satoshi Nakamoto, with all those smart tools?

Interesting. I'm more concerned with the stylometry showing accounts which don't belong to me saying things that I might not agree with and have never said being accidentally mistaken for one of my own accounts.

Dear Ones, the proverbial horse has long bolted,

rss feeds and easy site scraping has long leaked all your stylometry data which long ago was leached up.

What is the point of deleting your HN account, if multiple third party copies all ready exist?

This makes me glad that I decided a while ago to use only throwaway accounts on HN, to avoid doxxing. One account per thread, and no more. Good luck tracking that, stalkers.

HN is a project carried out with the motto of zero features. So there is probably no such feature and never will be.

You should be able to request your account be deleted if HN is compliant with GDPR https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/

There is also a psychological aspect of account deletion: Deleting an account can provide closure and make it clear to yourself and others that you distance yourself from a site - even if your old comments stay up.

By preventing users from closing accounts, HN is deliberately blurring the lines of who is still active on the platform and who isn't.

Lastly, if it really turns out there is a reliable method to associate HN accounts with a real-world identity, HN will get in trouble with the GDPR.

Really guys, leave the comments up if you have to, but give people a way to remove their account from it.

> HN’s response was no, because that would “gut the threads the account had participated in”

I participate at Flyertalk, and a good friend of mine had a major falling-out with them a few years ago.

As a leaving gift, he wrote a script to edit every single comment he'd ever made over the [many] years he'd been contributing, to remove his many many thousands of comments.

As a result, there are thousands of removed comments, and of course, many thousands of threads which are, well, gutted.

In our new GDPR-aware world, isn't that his right?

or at the very least be able to change your user name to something that is obfuscated

It's always funny people don't seem to get you don't own your data on HN.

The algorithms used are also not transparent.

Whether that's good or bad is a moot point to discuss while people are to stupid to even get the basics.

Let's talk about whether the cia could scape archive.org and use stylometry on single comments on a system we don't even get the basics on.