[slowdog]

While I'm pro right to be forgotten, and do believe HN should allow an account delete.

But HN's ethos is to inspire discussion and readability of it. Lack of a delete seems to be by design so that conversations are always readable.

You can see the spirit of that in their guidelines[0] such as "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive".

You can further see that in the design in how they handle deletes [1], where once "archived" things are permanent

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#editde...

[rubidium]

@dang A suggestion that occurs to me based on this would be deleting accounts but not comments. Essentially all comments remain but are attributed to “anon_1” or something like that.

[dang]

We do that by randomizing account names. We have other tricks too—for example, sometimes people are just concerned about their comments in one thread, and we can snap those off and reassign them to a random username, which lets them keep their primary account.

We wouldn't reassign every anonymized account the same username, though, because that would make discussions hard to follow when there is more than one such account in the thread. That's especially important because the number of these requests builds up over time, and users never ask for their accounts to be renamed back (though one did!), so such an approach would act as a slow erosion in the threads.

[ta17711771]

And people say HN isn't making new features...you guys have the coolest mod techniques around.