We all make mistakes and say things we later regret, sure the content forms part of a bigger picture which should be preserved but shouldn’t we be allowed to tidy up our publicly available historic opinions if they don’t match who we are now?

I’m pretty careful in what I post on social media or on websites, but I’ve definitely said things in the past that I wish I hadn’t, both on and offline, and unless I were a person of significant public interest (such as a politician) I don’t think it’s important for those mistakes to be documented for eternity.

In fact, if you don't want your anonymous account tied to you anymore in any way, sell it off to someone else. I bought this account for $500.

Of course, there are ways to throw some dirt into those gears, like posting fake details or trading/selling accounts every now and then...

And are you saying that the previous owner of the account is the one who didn't want it tied to him anymore, so he sold it to you (and you are therefore providing an anonymizing service to him?).

I wouldn't go that far, though I am generally sympathetic to your overarching argument.

I wouldn't go that far in part because I'm a woman and women seem to attract stalkers a lot more than men. I was a homemaker for a long time and had a very private life. Trying to figure out how to interact effectively in the public sphere has been a struggle for me.

Part of that is me. Part of that is other people. People react differently to a woman than to a man.

So, on the one hand, I needed to figure out what I was simply doing wrong. On the other hand, I needed to figure out how to effectively navigate a situation that can, at times, be actively hostile and dangerous, even if I am not doing anything wrong. Those two things confound each other and I don't know of any good sources of instruction.

This has helped make me very aware that sometimes people get into real trouble and need extraordinary measures to help extract them from the mess.

I think those extraordinary measures should be made available at times. But I also think it should not be the default solution.

I generally agree with you that there are other approaches that we need to be pursuing that are more nuanced and that try to balance different concerns. I think gutting the value of a forum so that people can remove all their content at will on a whim can readily go bad places. I am not crazy about it as a policy/law.

Thanks.

I went through a lot of changes in a short period of time and basically rebooted my entire internet life for various reasons. Some people have noticed I changed handles here and some haven't. To try to clear up any remaining confusion, I recently noted in my other profile that I am now posting under this handle.

Thankfully, there's a really easy solution that HN today will not consider/is not taking seriously enough: Just change the goddamn displayed username for each comment to "<deleted>" or whatever.

1) this kind of (seemingly; it's all a black box in reality though) naval-gazing-based decision making is exactly why the GDPR makes sense. We can't run our lives on the whims of a few random people.

2) Does YCombinator tell us all of this stuff when we sign up to HN? No. We have to find it out by ourselves. When we e-mail them to ask them to delete our contributions, since there's no delete button, they just say "sorry, we can't do that".

This kind of stuff is what the GDPR is good for.

If a US company has no physical presence in Europe I see no reason why they should comply with their bullshit.

And under a Trump administration... good luck.

Do you really think YCombinator has no EU exposure? It's a multi-billion dollar company.

There's your requested blog post. It's been slightly edited from the original (plus a few paragraphs tacked on to the end of it), so you can enjoy reading it a second time to look for the small differences between the blog post and what you remember of the comment.

(I have fixed multiple typos in the past few minutes. If you refresh, it might stop being gibberish.)

FYI, the piece is not a rant.

Also FYI, I am talking about people like you. Your problem cannot be solved by the mods deleting your multiple cross referenced accounts that you complain you want deleted while continuing to make new handles and then voluntarily outing yourself each and every time. It just would create headaches for the mods while feeding your delusion that your behavior is not the issue and does not need to change.

As et-al said in a sister comment, in "ye-olde-internet" pseudonyms and some degree of anonymity was de-facto. When the real-names policies first started coming out, there was real pushback. Nowadays I see much more sentiment towards having some central authorities to protect users, and it worries me as, among other things, a loss of agency and empowerment to protect onesself. (do not read this to say that there are spaces regulation isn't important; but pushing the line too far and normalizing a lack of awareness and ownership over your situation is a real risk if the pendulum swings too far)

Do you feel it is reasonable to ask this of adolescents who might disregard or circumvent measures their parents put in place (if they even have them)? They are not yet aware of what consequences this can have or the magnitude and seriousness of them. They are not mature enough to do so in many cases.

This is what the next dark age of mankind will be like, people from the future looking for historical information and finding nothing but deleted or decayed data

No. It absolutely should be allowed. Sites like the internet archive exist to preserve internet data.

For now. But one day they'll come for those archives too.

Also, even records of mundane communication people had throughout thousands of years in the past is of great value to archaeologists in learning about how people lived their lives and how different events affected them.

Since we live in a time where we have the privilege of rediscovering the past in greater detail than ever, we should have the introspection to be mindful of what we are leaving for our future as well.

Meanwhile, works by Archimedes, Homer and Shakespeare, as well as innumerable other cultural artifacts, have been lost to time. As well as the original tapes of the moon landings. The ancient Sumerians writing their tax records in cuneiform never intended to leave a record for the ages. We still probably wouldn't know how Egyptian hieroglyphics worked if not for one artifact that happened to have it printed alongside known languages - and we still have no clue about Linear A, and many other languages.

What gets left behind as an artifact of the ages tends to be determined by random chance, and beyond that, the cultivating desires of the wealthy. In other words, it almost certainly won't be you or I who decide the value or longevity of our work.

>Since we live in a time where we have the privilege of rediscovering the past in greater detail than ever, we should have the introspection to be mindful of what we are leaving for our future as well.

The web wasn't meant to provide a lasting store of knowledge. It is ephemeral and stateless by design. If you want people to think long term about the collective data archive of humanity, asking everyone to just never delete anything is not going to cut it.

Who owns the data?

Any current archaeologist would give an arm and a leg for a few good reddit/HN threads from ancient Rome.