and when you architect managing user privacy as a drawn-out process that won't even begin until another human responds in a completely manual engagement, i can immediately see the motivation of the above poster wanting administration to provide an answer without the response time being calculated in business days.
completely fair game to shortcut an outdated hostile process with your own hostility, not really an unexpected result (e.g.: web scraping VS using an inaccessible API). it's an unacceptable approach in a modern context.
I once asked to change my username. This was done within hours. I once asked for my account to be disabled, if I recall correctly this was done within a day. I asked for it to be re-enabled a year later, and this was done within hours.
All of this took a single email every time.
I don't know what "Hacker News does not allow users to delete comments"-person wants or what they did or didn't ask at hn@, but it's completely valid to NOT nuke entire threads just because one person has a hissy fit. Reading old Reddit threads (and sometimes even recent Reddit threads) can be a real pain because of this. If they want their content anonymized or their account disabled they can do that easily, if they want some specific post altered or removed then I'm sure Dan will be accommodating.
If that's an accurate representation, then I'd see your point.
There are a few circumstances which might suggest hesitancy, e.g., has your account been compromised and the person requesting deletion isn't the original owner? But barring that, if you're requesting deleting your content, and you're clearly exercised over it, HN should delete your content.
An alternative might be to rename the account to something that's not traceable to you, though how effective that is will depend on what you've included in earlier comments or posts, and whether or not that's archived somewhere. (I don't know what or if you have done this, I do note that your account dates to 2011.)
> We're always happy to delete or redact identifying information. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. We don't do it by allowing wholesale deletion of account histories, because that would gut the threads the account had participated in, which would be unfair to any commenters who replied, as well as to readers and to the community.
> That doesn't mean we don't care about individual users' needs for protection—we care a lot about it, and help people with these requests every day. We just have to do so with sharper tools, and we have a big bag of tricks for taking care of these things. They include renaming accounts, retroactively assigning comments to throwaway accounts, deleting specific posts (especially if they don't have replies), redacting specific info from posts, and more.
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Neither GPDR nor CCPA require the deletion of the account or content contributed that does not fall under personally identifying information.
If there are comments that contain PII, that should be sent to HN. Make sure that it is clear that these are PII that contains information that is directly linking to a real person.
Though as noted, wholesale account and comment deletion isn't required and is disruptive.
I'm aware that accounts get renamed. I've run across a few instances, most recently through my front-page activity analysis. IIRC there are some glitches, possibly with Algolia still referring to the old name, or the old name showing up othewise in some archives.
I also strongly suspect there's an independent (and immutable, or at least more durable) userID value that's not the semantic name, which is kept internally to HN, and isn't publicly exposed (at least not that I've found).
completely fair game to shortcut an outdated hostile process with your own hostility, not really an unexpected result (e.g.: web scraping VS using an inaccessible API). it's an unacceptable approach in a modern context.