I can delete my FB, Google, Apple and Reddit data. Why not Hacker News?

For users who might not know about the approach we take—here's a typical response I send to emails:

HN doesn't remove entire account histories, because that would gut the threads the account had participated in, which would be unfair to the other users in those threads. But we can randomize the username and disable the account if you'd like.

We also often delete or redact specific posts that users are worried about. If that would help, send us links and we'll take a look. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN.

The reason for this approach is that deletion is a complex issue with tradeoffs between competing interests: individual interest in privacy, other commenters' interest in having their posts remain intelligible, the community's interest in having its archive preserved. There are no perfect solutions, so a line has to be drawn somewhere.

One reason why I say there are no perfect solutions is that there are copies of the HN archives all over the internet. We don't control those, so a determined attacker wouldn't find it hard to get around any deletion we do, even if we deleted everything.

Since there's no way to satisfy all concerns nor to provide perfect protection, it's all about where to draw the line in the solution space, knowing that any line we draw is going to leave something unsatisfied. The way we draw the line–no wholesale deletion, but specific deletion/redaction along with username randomization—has so far held up as a good compromise over the years. It goes back many years: pg wrote about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226, and if you read deeper in that thread you'll see that he agreed with username randomization as the key missing piece. We added that some years later. Until new information shows up that changes the landscape significantly, I think it makes sense to stick with it.

We care a lot about meeting users' concerns for protection and we take care of these requests literally every day—we just try to do it with more precise tools than wholesale deletion. It's rare for anyone to go away unhappy—certainly 99%, probably 99.9% are satisfied with how we respond. Those that do go away unhappy tend either to express their concerns rather theoretically (as a philosophical argument rather than something specific they need) or to be mad about something we did on the site (perhaps understandably, but that's not necessarily a reason to change this policy).