With such efforts I think it is time for people start deleting their accounts, not because they want/need to hide anything, but some people may want to stay semi-anonymous by using aliases and data mining everything and correlating it with other sources (e.g. LinkedIn) may help identify them and cause trouble (e.g. someone wrote something about their workplace without naming it, but hey, it is "John Doe that works in MegaCorp".
> it is time for people start deleting their accounts
HN does not let you do that though. At least last time I asked about it, they sent me a response saying that they’d notify me when it became possible to delete an account. And they provided some reasons for why they don’t delete comments and accounts.
Well, how about the contributers honoring the wishes of the owners of the plattform?
Also my wish as a contributer is that the threads stay like this. So I can come back later and reread them. I often gained value in reading a linked old thread.
My advice for people not wishing for that, would be simply to stop commenting instead of demanding the site should change.
Could there be a middle ground to remove the account ID as a correlation between posts? The posts could remain as a graph of replies without retaining who posted which.
I know this means someone could still use stylometry to try to reaggregate the posts, but that's less reliable than HN actually telling us that the same authenticated user made all these posts over a decade.
I thought it goes without saying, that when you post something sensitive, that you don't want to connect openly to your account - you use a throwaway account. HN made it easy to do that.
"Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He'll have a world all to himself... without anyone."
