[jjoonathan]

A comment that draws mob wrath today is likely to retain that ability into the future. Combine this with the increasing popularity of digging up old comments, taking them out of context, stirring a moral panic, and getting someone fired over them, and it becomes pretty clear that unpopular opinions (and adjacent) in the permanent record represent a serious liability that only increases with time and should not be underestimated.

[airstrike]

> Combine this with the increasing popularity of digging up old comments, taking them out of context, stirring a moral panic, and getting someone fired over them

I hear you loud and clear. Signed up for reddit in 2007 and last week finally decided to run "shreddit" and delete my entire post and comment history from the website. No way I'm letting some comment I made 13 years ago get taken out context and ruin my career or relationships.

[throwaway8941]

There are plenty of reddit message archives out there. I often stumble upon mutilated reddit threads while looking for a solution for some technical problem. The only thing shreddit does is wasting a few more minutes of my time.

Edit: why the downvotes? I am genuinely interested. Shreddit does not protect you from anything, it's only an illusion. I think more people should be aware of that.

[DavidPeiffer]

Even if it's not perfect, it's a significant step towards removing discoverability. The Google crawling will eventually drop the content associated with the username, making it massively more difficult for someone to dig up past history.

A motivated individual could still dig things up, but many people (even most users of reddit) are unfamiliar with the archives out there.

[Sylamore]

The issue is that regardless of Google/Bing caches, there are sites like Pushbullet that archive ALL comments and posts that were made on Reddit, with APIs that savvy people can use to check deleted/edited comments. Awareness of these archives seems to be spreading through Reddit.

[klyrs]

There are quite a few HN mirrors out there, too

https://hacker-news-example.factor.dev/

https://hn.matthewblode.com/

https://nilaykhandelwal.com

https://innerself-hn.com/

I'm not really sure why people would do this, except perhaps some seo shenanigans?

[jonfw]

This seems like an exceptionally rare event- for a person to a) have nothing better to do than stalk your comments, going back 13 years, b) be in enough of a position of power that they could use it against you, and c) be irrational enough to not understand how dumb it is to hold a 13y/o internet comment against you.

My opinion is this- if somebody wants to stalk my Internet personality, so be it. I'm willing to sacrifice those relationships.

I guess the problem would be if I ended up with some leadership/management position and a subordinate saw it?

[goatinaboat]

I guess the problem would be if I ended up with some leadership/management position and a subordinate saw it?

Like this guy fired over an article written 33 years ago?

https://nypost.com/2020/07/03/boeing-communications-boss-nie...

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Reminds me of this story: https://www.wired.com/2007/04/canadian-psycho/

[quanticle]

The person doesn't need to be in a position of power. All someone has to do is tweet something you said a long time ago, out of concept, and then someone else in a position of power finds it. Or it gets signal boosted by other people until it comes to the attention of someone in a position of power.

[jjoonathan]

Like that time a Developer Evangelist overheard two developers exchange dongle jokes and got them fired for it. It doesn't take much.

[thristian]

> This seems like an exceptionally rare event

A global pandemic is also an exceptionally rare event, yet it's wise to be prepared for such things because sometimes they happen.

As for "be in a position of power", there's a lot of websites with enough SEO to show up in the first page of Google results for your name. How much do you care about what potential employers/co-workers/business partners/romantic partners think of you?

For "be irrational enough", just look at any click-bait headline or random sampling of tweets. There's a lot of people in this world who are quite happy to take things at face-value without thinking too hard.

[mellow2020]

> How much do you care about what potential employers/co-workers/business partners/romantic partners think of you?

If someone judges me based on some randonm old comment without even talking to me, I absolutely do not want to work with them or be their friend, ever.

[skinkestek]

> If someone judges me based on some randonm old comment without even talking to me, I absolutely do not want to work with them or be their friend, ever.

This is fine for you and me right now.

It is not fine for persons like one of the guys who was mentioned in the story in "the Atlantic" who had, for the first time in his life landed a good job only to be thrown under the bus at the first opportunity.

I'm fairly certain if a judge haf given him his job back he would have accepted it.

Why? Because I have been in a tight spot myself and while I wasn't fired (I moved to a new city to a job I was promised only to be told on Monday morning that they had reconsidered and wouldn't hire me anyway) I know the feeling of going -in a few hours - from a situation where everything looks nicer than ever before to a situation where I'm begging every nearby company to hire me.

[mellow2020]

> I'm fairly certain if a judge haf given him his job back he would have accepted it.

From that doesn't follow that one should just say nothing (that isn't utterly benign and impersonal) on the web. This would leave something like participation in public debate to the forever unemployed or bots. If we think that far enough, you could also not communicate with other human beings in private messages, because they might take a screenshot or record it, and so on.

This could very well lead to a world where having a well paid job will come with less freedom, dignity and happiness than even being unemployed does today. I cannot affect the world much with my decisions, but by them I can unilaterally decide what kind of world I would have deserved to live in.

[goatinaboat]

Signed up for reddit in 2007 and last week finally decided to run "shreddit" and delete my entire post and comment history from the website

If only HN offered that option for people who signed up under identities that could be linked to their real identity back in the day when the Internet was sane(r).

It will live on in archive.org indefinitely anyway.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I remember once signing up for Disqus (I think), or some other “combined” commenter SaaS.

After I had entered my info, but before completing the process, it said “We found all these comments out there. Are any of them yours?”

It displayed a list of ancient stuff; a lot of it posted anonymously (I thought).

I was horrified, and immediately binned the signup.

The Internet can be a downright creepy place.

[novok]

Hear hear, there are old usernames that I wish I could delete from HN.

[leni536]

Please, no. It makes sense to remove username from a post. Removing content is horrible.

[goatinaboat]

Sure, but it could revert the username to Anonymous Coward, like other sites do. The acid test will be when someone decides to make it a GDPR issue, then HN will need to pull its finger out and implement this simple function users have been asking about for years.

[bartread]

> A comment that draws mob wrath today is likely to retain that ability into the future.

Maybe sometimes, not always.

I generally try to avoid being too controversial or, if I feel the need to make a potentially controversial point, couch it in thoughtful and reasoned terms (except on the rare occasions where I've drunk posted in which case it all goes out the window and I post something that makes no sense even to me the next day - and, of course, I don't recommend doing this).

You obviously can't see how many downvotes or upvotes a post on HN gets, or when they've come in, but I've certainly had situations where the score changes over time in a way that suggests a "wave" of downvotes followed by a "wave" of upvotes, and occasionally vice versa. I.e, comments that started out popular have become unpopular, and vice versa.

The other pattern I see from time to time is that you get absolutely roasted in the comments, but the silent majority upvote you massively. I remember posting something broadly supportive of Microsoft in some way or other where exactly this happened: I got completely slagged, but also picked up a ton of points.

I think this illustrates that the at least sometimes the mob involved in the mob wrath might be a lot smaller, and sometimes with less credible concerns, than you might think.

This is one of the problems I see with twitter: it's hugely adversarial yet only a small minority of people use it so when you go outside into the real world you realise it doesn't - or perhaps shouldn't - have that much bearing even though it's so prevalently cited in the media.

[jjoonathan]

> if I feel the need to make a potentially controversial point, couch it in thoughtful and reasoned terms

Did that save Stallman?

[orestarod]

Mob works with keywords, not with meanings.

[jjoonathan]

Exactly, that's a good way of putting it.