[Buttons840]

This is such a grey area. Do emails others sent to me belong to them? Do my HN comments make the entire conversation partially mine? If one of my comments is "well said", and the parent deletes their comment, is not my comment diminished? What do we do about quotes? Etc.

[capableweb]

Solved problem already: Hash the username + a salt and change that everywhere. Every comment is from a unique author + the comment body is still there + all the replies are still there but, author name has been removed.

[Buttons840]

That's a decent solution. But I think simply replacing the usernames with [deleted] is better. It leaves the comment but detaches the user and breaks the link between all the users comments.

[capableweb]

It becomes very hard to track conversations with N+2 users though, if more than one has the [deleted] username. Hence the hashing to get a unique [deleted] username for each user.

[kuschku]

That's not legal either. If the comment body contains personal information anywhere, GDPR also applies to it.