alt Hacker NewsAnd it’s utterly useless, because your username and all comments get THE SAME random user ID. So once someone identifies that ID as you, it does nothing.
When I asked dang to do better after me and my family got death threats online, dang told me “tough luck”
To this day thousands of my comments from my old username are on this site and trivially east to link to my real name. (Links to my website, etc)
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altairprime • today at 12:21 AM
My first BBS handle was my full real name, and I barely managed to purge myself from DejaNews before Google bought it, so I empathize. The modern internet has been a severe learning experience and, given how many replicas of HN exist, the cat is well out of the bag. Teach others to be more careful, as I do.
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> dang told me “tough luck”
He (nor I) would never write that or anything like it. What we always say is that we aim to find a compromise between a user's wish for their entire history to be erased and the rest of the community's expectation that when they participate in discussion threads, those threads will persist unadulterated into the future.
We are always willing to redact PII and do other things to prevent people's real identities from being recognized from their HN activity. We help people with requests like this all the time.