Is that so bad? Granted maybe it's annoying looking at old threads, but as a user, the ability to go through and remove old and potentially regrettable posts is quite welcome.

Maybe a good compromise would be to remove the user information after a certain time period (~2 years). Hashing the username salted with the post title would be a decent way of systematically respecting user privacy while also keeping old threads readable. I wouldn't mind if HN did this.

You'd be surprised how much you could piece together with obfuscated (but still unique) usernames. I'd be in favor of your system if the hash was salted with the article's id, so that the hash of my username in one article was different than the hash of my username in a different article.

One day I'm going to run for office and I'm going to have to get lawyers to scrub HN of all my comments because they have no way for users to manage their content :-)

Really, usernames only have to be unique within a single thread, don't they?

You could get away with something as simple as incremental ids in that case - user1, user2, etc.

Yeah that was my reasoning. The salted hash would be an easy way to implement single-thread username consistency.

Edit: for better readability it could be further mapped into a table of human readable handles, similar to how Google does the "Anonymous Lemur" thing in gDocs.

Yep, it's awful. I find a thread in Google and all the useful comments are gone.

Why do your think your right to read a "useful" comment overrules the rights of the original writer of that comment? Not snark, a genuine question.

I'm not sure if rights is the correct term to use here. Those are choices made by the host, the experience they want to provide; and the members who have chosen to participate, accepting the terms of the host, aren't they? Well, I guess rights of some sort are involved, the commenter ceding copyright or some such to the host.

I'm not a lawyer, and admittedly haven't taken the time to look up the appropriate legal terms and other minutiae involved, rather relying on the kindness of my fellow commenters to extend to me the benefit of the doubt with respect to what I'm getting at, and helpfully clarify anything that needs to be. Thanks :)

I don't have any right to that when I'm a user. However I run various sites, and know that it is a terrible experience for people coming from Google, so I do not allow it on my own site. Once users submit their content they lose all rights to having it be modified or removed.

This is also why most online community/forum owners don't let users delete their own posts (or in a lot of cases, delete their account). Because it makes the content real hard to read/make sense of if some of it randomly goes missing for whatever reason.

That's why I prefer ephemeral threads like imageboards have.

There's almost nothing about most threads that will be of any long term interest to anyone - so you might as well allow them to auto-delete after a certain time.

Why is that awful? The script obviously worked....