Conversely, they did help me out.
This is the identical line dang fed me, and what he did is useless. It changes nothing.
Stop saying you’ll go out of your way to help users when you clearly won’t. Changing my username on all my old comments to some other username is not enough. It’s trivial to figure out who I am, and then have all my comments attributed to me.
You should aim to actually do better, not just say that what you do now is good enough when it clearly isn’t.
On a case-by-case basis we can move a selection of comments to a separate username. We of course don't want anyone to be in danger.
Middle ground: on any given topic change all my comments to some random user I’d, then a different one for every topic.
threads will stay coherent, but people won’t be able to follow my old user name around topics for 14 years.
I’ll send an email in the morning. I have to sleep.
This is obviously not true. We care about thread persistence and coherence as a default, because some of HN's most historically significant threads are from the earliest years. We will take reasonable steps to protect people's identity and safety once we know the specifics of the situation. We routinely redact URLs, company names, project names and other identifying details from historical comments to prevent people's identity from being inferred.
You’re saying “we do minimum effort” .
I am telling you It is not enough, and you refuse to even acknowledge that. You are saying “tough luck” in fancier language.