Ask HN: How do I delete my HN account?

[_qbjt]

Could @dang or someone else please help me with this? I've read that all one needs to do is send an email to [e-mail] but my requests have been ignored up to this point. Thanks.

[dang]

Sorry, it's just a matter of the inbox exceeding my capacity to process it quickly.

[_qbjt]

No problem at all, I understand inbox fatigue. I just sent you another email so you don’t have to go looking for the others. Thanks!

[cyber_kinetist]

Maybe try (politely) emailing him once more? He's probably bombarded with lots of emails all the time and might have missed yours.

Also, dang usually doesn't like people deleting accounts (since it goes against the HN philosophy of leaving the website as a permanent record). A more easily accepted request is to change the username to something different, which is not a bad option if you want to erase traces of yourself.

[flashgordon]

Does this not make it CCPA uncompliant? Or GDPR uncompliant (if HN is served in EU)?

[cyber_kinetist]

Good point (though I've heard HN is hosted on a single box at M5 hosting, so it's probably in the US) Maybe if you mention you're from California then he might accept the request right away.

[mtmail]

I emailed them now pointing to this thread in case your email was filtered by spam filter or such.

[_moof]

You can't.

[cyber_kinetist]

In the FAQ:

"We try not to delete entire account histories because that would gut the threads the account had participated in. However, we care about protecting individual users and take care of privacy requests every day, so if we can help, please email [e-mail]. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. More here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799)"

So if you have a really good reason to delete your account, then maybe dang will accept the request.

[selestify]

Doesn't sound CCPA compliant.