>There needs to be a balance between individual needs for protection, fairness to the other commenters in a thread, and community interest in having an archive. Threads are a co-creation, which means their ownership is shared
However, kindly they offer:
>We just have to use more precise tools than wholesale deletion. These include renaming accounts, retroactively assigning comments to throwaway accounts, deleting specific posts (if they don't have replies), redacting specific info from posts, and more.
What I do not understand, why is HN is insisting on keeping some kind of human intervention for doing this? randomizing the account name or "deleting specific posts (if they don't have replies)", wouldn't a user option in the user profile be sufficient since I'm not going to provide anything whatsoever in my email message but the request to delete/randomize x and y?
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23622865
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28287743