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.
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.