If I attended a social club and my comments from 10 years ago were permanently engraved on the walls, I'd be much less honest and open.

You can use alts and delete old comments.

Yeah. Let's delete old blogs and shut down the internet archive as well.

Personally I value the web as a knowledge store that persists.

Use a non-logged chat service if you want a transient medium.

There's no deleting beyond a time limit on HN

you can request to the admins if you really need to

Changing alts is a lot more pro-social than deleting your comments: with alt rotation your old writing is still available for others to learn from.

Interesting. Here I am thinking one of the best things about HN is how the usernames being a lighter shade makes them easy to ignore entirely and focus only on what's being said instead of the speaker.

That's what makes it so awesome when you start recognizing the same username on comments where you subconsciously bother to check the name because it was so interesting

> check the name because [the comment] was so interesting

I wonder how many people have that reflex. I personally don’t.

I would hope most people. I can't imagine being so incurious that I'd read an awesome comment and not wonder who wrote it.

Why should it matter who wrote it?

One big reason I care about who wrote things is expertise. I've consistently seen informed and sensible security-related commentary from tptacek, so I would pay more attention to security-related advice with his name on it than if it was a name I didn't recognize.

And here am I going with the AI search engine flow, where Google's I feel Lucky is just a planet wide obedience to authority experiment whilst reading these comments like its something out of this unofficial textbook https://www.reddit.com/r/SocialEngineering/comments/xkw4p/th...

If people find a visit to Reddit to be unpalatable, may I suggest this highly spooky website link? https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm

I wonder if the reason why people find hacker news to be so pleasant, is the subconsciously edgy non conformist website name, like its something to brag about at middle class dinner soiree's or a person in the street like a passive aggressive superiority boast, where its predominantly focused on science and technology subjects, in which to fuel the Ego driven quest for knowledge.

Would that be fair?

And yes I've been ruining the deceitful magic of Father Xmas not being real since I was 5 years old.

I guess it wouldn't if one didn't value people. YMMV, but I think people are kind of cool — so if I hear a great song I want to know who the artist was. It helps me build a mental model of what I might be able to expect from them. I'm kind of shocked that this might not be obvious to everyone, TBH.

When you've been on the site 10 years, I guess you start to notice more patterns. You'll get there, young buck. ;)

On the contrary, it makes it harder to immediate spot and ignore shitposters or people who consistently make really stupid posts on certain kinds of thread, of which sort there are several very active posters. It's a big part of why a certain kind of trolly posting thrives on HN in a way that it doesn't some other places with sigs or user images or otherwise more-prominent user ID.

My kingdom for an ignore-list.

HN is an accessibility nightmare thanks to the low contrast of so many critical UI elements

You can fix that with an extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/high-contrast/djcf...

Of course Reddit lets is political allies doxx and harass Reddit's political enemies without reservation, so this will likely affect those accounts more so.