> Sites already have to offer exports to be GDPR compliant
Not necessarily. There are limitations in Article 20 of the GDPR. For one it only covers personal data you provided. Not all content you ever created on a platform. This part of GDPR does not make platforms your free backup.
So if HN fell under this provision (and I am not SURE as IANAL) they would not necessarily be forced to provide all comments you ever made.
>> Sites already have to offer exports to be GDPR compliant
> Not necessarily. There are limitations in Article 20 of the GDPR.
I'm AOK with restricting user-rights to save-the-things-that-are-about-to-be-deleted to sites that meet a GDPR style minimum bar for engagement. Minor minor minor sidebar, I think sites should have to have advertised machine-to-machine accessible metadata on what their site's terms of service are.
It's dead now, not a good implementation, & probably not a good fit in the particulars, but the vague wide-scale idea of P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences, a terrible name for a spec exposing what was more usually data-rights to the content than privacy concerns) kind of has some illumination for what a future path here might look like. It should be known. We should entail ourselves knowingly. This is one place GDPR doesn't really seem to address, that it misses the mark: I believe fully in small scale operators, in letting them do their thing, but as a user we should know what compacts we're entering into. Without having to read elaborate/complex human-authored terms: the machines should be able to tell us what minimum bars are met.
Not necessarily. There are limitations in Article 20 of the GDPR. For one it only covers personal data you provided. Not all content you ever created on a platform. This part of GDPR does not make platforms your free backup.
So if HN fell under this provision (and I am not SURE as IANAL) they would not necessarily be forced to provide all comments you ever made.