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.
> 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.
I agree the website should have this feature but the "if you don't implement this feature you're potentially murdering future people" stuff is not a good argument.
To me, the possibility of my users facing serious physical harm would be a very compelling concern. If I worked on something of YC’s scale I’d take those kinds of ethical considerations very, very seriously.
Possibilities are imponderable; anything is possible. Probabilities are something you can weigh, and while I see the point you're making I think the probability of anyone incurring serious legal/political exposure via HN is actually quite low. It's easy to obscure your identity if you're so inclined, and awhile old comments can't be deleted, YC equally has no way to prevent them being scraped and archived.
Its a real concern in this case though. Read the news these days on what certain governments do to their activists based on their social media postings.
That becomes even more difficult if you want to have them find (and remove) all comments from all captures on all pages for a particular user.
Noting that you don't have authoritative control over HN, archive may be a bit reluctant to have {random person} asking for all of the comments that {random account} made on all the captures to be removed.
If archive was able and willing to do that (remove content from a random account as requested by a random person), I believe that it would be abused much more than it was used.
Perhaps the account the OP was concerned about wouldn’t have turned up in the stylometry demonstration it linked to if HN had deleted it one, five or ten years ago.
Yes, there are permanent risks for past posts but that’s no reason to throw up your hands and give up on any and all attempts to mitigate them going forward.
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.