I think it's pretty sad that they don't warn you when signing up. And I think it's pretty lousy that they won't let you delete your account. I had an account that got into 4-digit karma before I realized I couldn't delete it. I was younger and wrote some stuff I'd love to get rid of. I've emailed the guys who run HN about it several times and every time it's the same lame excuse.
When did you email us and what did we say? This does not sound at all like the email conversations we have with users.
If someone emails "I was younger and wrote some stuff I'd love to get rid of", the obvious response is: "Happy to help! What are the links? We may not be able to delete the posts altogether (it depends on whether they got replies, and how many) but there's nearly always something we can do, and we don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN." I've written that kind of thing so many times I'll probably start mumbling it in my sleep soon.
I'll admit I'm impressed you responded to my comment! The last time I tried was a few years ago.
I would have to go back to my inbox to find your response but I remember being pretty disappointed. I don't think you wrote anything that was specifically unkind but I remember being struck by the response. I thought "wow, these guys really don't care if someone wants to delete or hide their account." It is completely possible I caught you on a bad day.
Please do! I'd love to see the old emails, too, because maybe there's something to learn about how to respond better. Or maybe we already learned it in subsequent years.
I always assumed one could run a script or something to edit their comments to blank comments since deletion is not possible - the way many users on Reddit prefer to do.
Just found out the edit option disappear after a few minutes/hours on HN
Now I'm really bothered too, about the lack of a delete button.
The problem is that if you leave the deletion and edit windows open forever, people will come back and abuse them in order to change the meaning of threads after the fact. Sometimes, and unfortunately not even that rarely, they do it maliciously, for example to make repliers look bad. So there needs to be a balance between allowing edits for a while—for legit uses like fixing errors, clarifying, adding new information—and not allowing them forever. We can argue about what the length of the window should be, but a few hours seems like a fair balance to me.
It's important for the coherence of HN threads that discussions proceed in a mostly-append-only way, and that the history be sort of 'committed' or 'trusted' after a while. That doesn't mean that nothing can change, just that at a certain point, changes need to go through a manual process, as I've explained in other comments in this thread.
