Comment by bibimsz
5 months ago
hacker news is a goldmine since you can't delete comments nor even delete your account. this site is a privacy nightmare, in a world where everyone is excited to cancel and dox for unpopular opinions (on this site that means anything to the right of bernie sanders).
I actually appreciate this. I definitely panicked that one time I posted something spicy about a past employer using this handle and couldn't remove it, but forcing that accountability makes me think about what I say and whether it's worth posting it for everyone to see forever.
It could be worse, I have arguments from the 90s when I was on comp.sys.msc.advocacy
Have you read the FAQ? HN won't hang you out to dry.
They will offer to rename your account name to something random.
They will not delete all your comments. They might agree to delete a very small number of comments.
That does not help much in the profile-building/AI perspective.
They should be transparent about this upfront, on the signup page, but I suppose that would hurt conversation stats.
Cliché but true: On HN we are the product.
I ingest, process, and archive the HN firehose. I know others do as well. Regardless of how one feels, once you put something on the Internet, any hope of control of that info is gone forever. Act accordingly. They are kind enough to make changes within some forum integrity tolerances, even though those changes are likely to help very little from an opsec perspective.
Edit: my use case is building a graph for archiving every link ever posted on HN (posts and comments), if that’s relevant. The contents of HN comments have little value to me for my workflow, nor do I profile users.
7 replies →
Correct!
Feel free to not post on here, if you're concerned about privacy.