I wish we could petition y-combinator to allow them to allow a member to delete their Hacker News account and comments.
This year for spring cleaning. I deleted facebook, twitter, disqus, and thousands of comments I left on websites from over a decade ago. No archiving, just permanent deletion. It was the the most beautiful feeling. I felt free. Like a new person. Like there wasn't a part of me roaming around on the internet building up dust anymore.
I know space is cheap and startups love data but we should study what all that does to a person emotionally.
IF {Google Glass was suppose to keep us connected /BUT/ Google glass failed because we felt too connected /BECAUSE OF/ a human emotional desire to be left alone and let the mind relax.}
THEN {Permanently archiving all your content is suppose to be a feature /BUT/ people are deleting their content /BECAUSE OF/ a human emotional desire to start over, clean up, and not leave things strewn about}
That being said I really wish the Hacker News team would add a "DELETE ACCOUNT and all comments" feature. It's ironic that Y-Combinator's hacker news team stands up for so many positive internet movements yet feel that they can permanently keep all the content I generated. It is MY content after all. Do they own the copyright to MY words? The excuse has always been "it's a part of the public dialog". Everything is. Facebook, Twitter, & Disqus are also part of the public dialog. And they let me delete myself off of their services.
If it makes you feel any better, I am pro Hacker News not allowing you to delete content and also extremely against Twitter letting you delete content. You saying something to me should be just as much a belonging of me as it is of you. Imagine a world where you could just arbitrarily retract all the emails you ever sent me, all the text messages you ever sent me, and all the letters you ever mailed me, just because you decided you wanted a "clean slate". (And while I am going to mention in passing that way way too often I see people be extremely mean to other people and then use content deletion to gaslight others into thinking "this user isn't so bad and I can't find any evidence of your assertions otherwise", I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and only want to mention this at all as my comment feels incomplete as an essay without this.)
As for your copyright, the terms of service on websites deal with this, making certain that the content you provide is licensed to them (it has to be, or they wouldn't even be able to distribute it at all), and can spell out altered terms to avoid the problem of someone insisting their comments be deleted later. Further, even without extra clauses, I would argue for copyright purposes the "work" is the conversation, not your words, and so any lack of clear ownership should either argue for the entire conversation to be deleted due to one objector (which I think might be more likely by law, and what the terms of service are dealing with) or none of it to be able to be deleted until everyone agrees (which seems more clearly correct and what the terms should state if deletion is to be allowed); I can't come up with a scenario where it seems OK for you to delete just your part unilaterally.
You decided to go to a public forum and contribute to a public conversation. The fact that you said something meant that some people replied to you and others upvoted you instead of saying the same thing, making your comments load bearing and structural. You going back later and deleting what you said changes the context of what I said. For a great (related, though slightly different) example, seek out the account on reddit whose name was something like "edited_to_make_you_look_dumb", which would later edit what they said to make all people who responded to it look really dumb. The two hour window on Hacker News feels about perfect to me, giving time to fix typos, make minor structure and formatting fixes, and even delete things while other people still have time to react and adjust, but then locking the content in for the later record when the content becomes part of the archives.
When you go on a redact and purge, you are destroying something that not just that you created, but something that tons of other people took part in, and you are individually revising the historical record. One may as well argue "I also want everything I said in public comment at last week's City Council meeting redacted from the minutes and I want everything I said at last week's trial redacted from the transcript". This is how you should treat saying something in public as part of a public dialog: you said something in public, and now are part of the public record. Again: if you weren't prepared to say something in public, don't say it in public.
And honestly, I would much rather you not contribute to a conversation if you are going to come around later asking for your part to be deleted. It is as if we are going to paint a mural together, but for some reason every five years you go around finding all the murals you helped with and take back all your paint. If you hadn't have been there at all, someone else might have helped more, and it isn't at all clear our mural would be drastically worse off: but you removing your paint destroys the mural and invalidates all of the work of everyone else involved. It wasn't "your paint", it was "our mural", and you shouldn't get to unilaterally alter it :/.
if people can change both their username and email.
But the risk is that something said once can and will be used against a person in the future. The worst examples of that are currently being demonstrated by US border control Googling people and asking for social media login information.
If permanence needs to exist to retain context of discussions, then let only the content be permanent and not the identity of the person who said something.
As long as past statements and sharing can come back to haunt you, especially with the current government trends, I think the freedom to delete your online postings is almost a basic human right regardless of the tos you reluctantly clicked on to register.
I disagree 100% with you on this. You have good points but those very points are the very reason why I'm for deletion and against data retention.
"And honestly, I would much rather you not contribute to a conversation if you are going to come around later asking for your part to be deleted." That statement perfectly describes what's wrong with the silicon valley "dataphile" era. You're encouraging the shutting down of conversations, not the growth of more.
Even Y-Combinator said it in interviews that founders reveal more during more intimate interviews and talks than ones on camera. When you go around with a microphone and camera and record and set into stone what people say it doesn't encourage them to say more, but rather less. Because they're not sure if that information can be used against them in the future. When you fail to give users privacy and data retention rights they may just run away from your platform altogether.
There's a dread a user feels when they realize they don't remember what they said or who they were 10 years ago, but the whole internet does.
1) I don't mean this as an insult but what is your age? Because when I was younger my views matched yours, as I grew older the mental stress of my digital self being all over the place began to build up. It's something that happens with time and age. Sure there are outliers but for the most part we all slowly tun into privacy advocates as we get older.
2) "When you go on a redact and purge, you are destroying something that not just that you created, but something that tons of other people took part in"
It's better to create and delete rather than to never have created at all. Also, we're talking about Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News, and blog comments. This isn't a scientific journal, National Geographic, a Newspaper, or a text-book. We're talking about internet comments here. There's a time and place for data retention and I don't believe this is it. The burden of feeling like your life is cataloged on the internet with you having no control over it. The burden of feeling like your identity is split up in a million different little pieces is not a feeling you want your users to feel. No facebook or twitter or HN post is worth undermining basic user rights of privacy and deletion.
3) Your views on data retention seem extreme to me, the very conversations you're trying to permanently save will in a few months become outdated, no longer visited, not important, and useless. So what if someone deletes a comment and people reading 5 years in the future don't see it. What is the importance or significance of it that makes it worth destroying user rights. This is a sort of "Data Pack-Rat mentality", an obsession with archiving and compiling everything that everyone has ever said into a perfect neat little collection. And anyone that gets in the way of that perfect collection is a threat to it. You're more sympathetic and caring toward "the collection" than the users who create those collections.
I'll agree to disagree with you. I can't and don't want to change you but at least now you know why I am the way I am. Who you were 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago is not who you are now. What you care about changes, what you think changes, your identity changes, your dreams change, and unfortunately comments do not.
I believe User rights are more important than a perfect archive of some internet comments on a website.
I sympathize and am inclined to agree with your position, but be a little more charitable and don't try to psychoanalyze other commenters; the second half of your third point is unnecessarily harsh, and doesn't help the argument.
I can understand the viewpoint against allowing deletions, and it's not necessarily a "ratpack mentality" of storing it all: it's losing the pearls in the chaff. Sure, most comments are worthless after a few days, let alone months or years, but a few are still valuable. I've been browsing the web for quite a while now, and I've never bookmarked much, let alone tried to "save it all", yet it still pains me a little that the few links I did save are mostly lost.
That said, I don't think that's enough to justify not allowing deleting comments. I'm just saying we shouldn't paint a caricature of people with different positions, even if we fully disagree with them.
All that aside, there's another point: HN can't actually delete your comments, they can only delete their copy. Dumps have and will be made, and a simple search can find comments by your nickname outside of news.ycombinator.com, and this is inevitable on an open site. Isn't there the danger of creating a false sense of privacy?
2.) Even if you would be able to delete it, your comments would probably be cached by google, archive.org etc
3.) You contradict yourself here
> So what if someone deletes a comment and people reading 5 years in the future don't see it.
The reason you are able to delete a comment immediately after on HN but not later (as I see it) - let's say you're tired or drunk and reply with wrong information or being rude and realize it after you already pressed reply.
This has nothing to do with data hoarding, you realize that if enough people would be able to remove their comments the whole thread would be destroyed and no longer make any sense for new readers. Also it might misrepresent what other people were replying to, when taken out of context some innocent reply could be labeled racist, sexist or what have you. It could bring much bigger consequences than your worries that "your shit is out there".
It's ironic that Y-Combinator's hacker news team stands up for so many positive internet movements yet feel that they can permanently keep all the content I generated. It is MY content after all. Do they own the copyright to MY words? The excuse has always been "it's a part of the public dialog".
Am I understanding correctly that you asked (politely) by email to hn@ycombinator.com and they refused because "it's a part of the public dialog"? If so, I'm surprised and sympathetic. That response seems out of keeping with their generally accommodating approach.
I did't delete all my accounts because I've said something wrong. For the same reason people don't spring clean their home because they're getting rid of murder evidence. It's all about getting rid of the feeling that you and your thoughts from 20 years ago are all over the place. Little pieces of you are everywhere all over the internet.
There's a dread that a user feels when they realize they don't remember what they said or who they were 10 years ago, but the whole internet does.
That you've said something wrong is not always grounds for deletion
> Little pieces of you are everywhere all over the internet
This is why it's important to choose random nyms not attached to your main identity in any way, and to strive for anonymity. On HN, create a throwaway account and run your posts through something like anonymouth[0] if you're concerned with correlation attacks, or having your stylometric patterns uncovered...
This year for spring cleaning. I deleted facebook, twitter, disqus, and thousands of comments I left on websites from over a decade ago. No archiving, just permanent deletion. It was the the most beautiful feeling. I felt free. Like a new person. Like there wasn't a part of me roaming around on the internet building up dust anymore.
I know space is cheap and startups love data but we should study what all that does to a person emotionally.
IF {Google Glass was suppose to keep us connected /BUT/ Google glass failed because we felt too connected /BECAUSE OF/ a human emotional desire to be left alone and let the mind relax.}
THEN {Permanently archiving all your content is suppose to be a feature /BUT/ people are deleting their content /BECAUSE OF/ a human emotional desire to start over, clean up, and not leave things strewn about}
That being said I really wish the Hacker News team would add a "DELETE ACCOUNT and all comments" feature. It's ironic that Y-Combinator's hacker news team stands up for so many positive internet movements yet feel that they can permanently keep all the content I generated. It is MY content after all. Do they own the copyright to MY words? The excuse has always been "it's a part of the public dialog". Everything is. Facebook, Twitter, & Disqus are also part of the public dialog. And they let me delete myself off of their services.