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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

The irony here that it's harder to delete your HN account and all your comments

HN has anonymous accounts and personally identifiable information can be hidden or removed by the user, which to me has the same effect. HN complains to me that I cannot reset my pwd if I ever forget it because I didn't even share my mail.

People often claim anonymous platforms are doomed to fail but I think social media is the main problem currently.

I changed my HN username earlier this year for reasons.

However if you search HN via the Algolia search link at the bottom of this page, you can still find my old posts under my old username.

Not to mention the 1,000s of self-hosted HN scrapers out there.

You can email dang and they'll work with you depending on what privacy stuff you need, but yeah it's a manual process.

People have changed the users on old comments they no longer want associated with themselves and such. There was discussion a while back about it (I haven't taken advantage of this myself).

>removed by the user

Only within a certain timeframe. Unlike reddit eventually your comments are no longer deletable or editable by you, and you have to email the webmaster in this case to ask for an old comment to be manually deleted, its not even an automated mechanism.

True. But the associated user might not be identifiable and I think you are free to edit any details here any time. You cannot really do much with raxxorrax or asdff.

I wonder at the time limit to edit/delete a comment on HN. I try to think carefully about the things I say and often have a change in heart about saying something long after the change window has expired. Is the logic behind this limit explained anywhere?

Is it harder, are you sure? There isn’t a button, but HN also doesn’t try to talk you out of it.

Unlike Facebook, Hacker News has no Personally Identifiable Information on you, didn’t ask for any, and isn’t trying to gather any. Email address might be the lone exception, but you can use any throwaway email you want. So you might have chosen to share some, but other than email, HN has no way to index it or even know that it’s personal to you. There’s no network, no photos, no credit cards. There are no ads that HN is selling your PII to. Unlike FB, HN doesn’t do any EU specific business or target EU residents in any way, so combined with the complete lack of PII, it’s very likely GDPR does not apply to HN. Comments aren’t enough, they don’t act as a catalog of PII.

That said, have you tried emailing HN to see if they’ll happily delete your comments? If there was a legitimate problem that you needed to erase, if your identity become known against your will, I’d bet the mods here would be happy to help you.

you cant

hence the irony ...

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