HN is hostile to the idea of user control of one's own content, so there was a signal from the start not to use it for more than anonymous throwaway comments. But Reddit allowed editing and deletion of comments so people used it more freely for years before the trust was broken. Now there's little confidence that deleted comments won't continue to be used.

This is exactly aligned with my point. Expectations matter. Social contracts matter.

Legality is always the argument that tyrants hide behind.

>Did you know that HN has an API? Technically all your HN posts could be downloaded and used for AI training as well.

It already has been used by LLMs

dang will get his own layer...