<story><title>Ask HN: Will HN allow account and comment deletions?</title><text>Ask HN: With the GDPR coming, the &amp;#x27;right to be forgotten&amp;#x27;, and the FB privacy flare-up, will HN ever allow comment and account deletions?</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>matte_black</author><text>Honestly, this should never be allowed.&lt;p&gt;It’s archaeology-hostile. It pisses me off to no end when I am searching for information on reddit and come across people replying to deleted posts by some paranoid user who wishes comments were more ephemeral like Snapchat.&lt;p&gt;This is what the next dark age of mankind will be like, people from the future looking for historical information and finding nothing but deleted or decayed data.&lt;p&gt;Here’s a tip: if you don’t want something to be up for all time, don’t even bother posting it. Keep it to your self. There are a lot of damning things and incidents that could end people’s careers and reputations that I’ve never posted about because I do not want the permanent liability.&lt;p&gt;I feel like the art of staying anonymous has been lost on people. It’s not that hard.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Will HN allow account and comment deletions?</title><text>Ask HN: With the GDPR coming, the &amp;#x27;right to be forgotten&amp;#x27;, and the FB privacy flare-up, will HN ever allow comment and account deletions?</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>et-al</author><text>This makes me a bit nostalgic for the older days when you just assumed you were chatting with a bunch of other weirdos online, so everyone went by aliases. And if you ever tired of your old identity, you&amp;#x27;d shed that old screenname, sign up with a different one, and maybe never mention the past.&lt;p&gt;Facebook changed everything by encouraging people to match their online accounts to real names, supply photos of themselves, and their family tree. Usernames became actual people. And all of a sudden, anonymity was lost.&lt;p&gt;And now people want to be forgotten again. I shake my head at the heavy-handed way of mass deleting comments. It’s understandable for Facebook where the person and account are closely tied, but for sites like HN, I hope we keep the shared knowledge, but just scrub out the name.</text></comment>