Comment by lysace

5 months ago

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.

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lysace

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toomuchtodo  5 months ago

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.