Thanks dang

I want to double down on this. I have (unintentionally) run a foul of HN's guidelines, and dang has been extremely polite, patient, and even-handed. I'm definitely not getting preferential treatment. I'm highly skeptical of claims to the contrary.

Ditto. Whenever I messed up, dang always did a great job listening to my explanation and helping to correct. Honestly, he's more lenient in posts that are negative to YC companies to prevent any chance of favoritism (I've experienced this directly when bakinyg posts or comments that are critical of one of them)

I was totally unaware that HN mods would treat certain accounts better than others, and give special anonymous edits, totally news to me.

I have seen a lot of selective application of HN rules over the (many) years. My 2 cents.

All these features are covered in the FAQ What does [deleted] mean?, Can I change my username?, Can I delete my account? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Strange you can change the username for a specific comment vs. all comments. It makes it so that a comment is attributed to someone else. Very odd.

In case it's of interest, here's the standard language from emails I send people:

We try not to delete posts that got replies, because doing so would be unfair to the other commenters in the thread. What I've done so far is reassign it to a random user ID, so it's as if you'd used a throwaway account to post it and there's no link to your main account. Does that work?

Sure, it is just a strange feature that me, being someone who has been posting here a long time, didn't know

As I just mentioned in a previous comment, I'd like to note how much I appreciate that you keep the contents of posts with replies. It's not only unfair to other commenters, it can also be unfair to readers. There's nothing worse than seeing only one side of a discussion, where the possibly-useful information was purged or edited into personal attacks on the other user. I much prefer SO-style attributed edits (though for a discussion forum this should be limited to mods, not arbitrary users), but time-limited editing with manual thought out exceptions as implemented here is a close second, far preferable to Reddit and other forums that allow arbitrary editing forever and only show a date (if that).

This is a trash policy. It's reputation laundering as a service.

Wouldn't it be worse if HN didn't honor its users' requests to delete data? I legitimately don't know, it seems like both approaches would cause issues.

I know it's easy to feel that way when the user asking for help has been labeled $bad for whatever reason. But I doubt you would say that about most of the users who ask for this help, and if we're going to do it for some, I don't feel comfortable picking who gets helped and who doesn't. Nor do I think the community would support us in doing it that way.

It’s not about picking. It’s about doing it at all.

Now you’re active participant in a cover up. They want to delete something, edit something? Fine. The controls are there. Everyone knows that. But that’s not what this is. This is taking extraordinary action to gaslight and coverup. That’s what’s trash. It’s the secrecy. It’s changing of the archive. That’s what trash.

In all my decades of dealing with public forums, I have never seen this as something done in a reputable forum, outside of a court order.

It’s a betrayal of trust. The fact that you’re not defending it on the merits, but rather that it’s supposedly open to all that knew about the secret door is just the chef’s kiss of abuse of power. If I was asked to do this, I would quit.

Dang, every time you do this, it shows contempt to everyone on this forum. It’s absolute trash. It is bad, and you should feel bad. But of course, you don’t feel bad about doing it. You feel good about it.

I just don't think you would say that if you saw the full range of requests we get. Some feel excessively fussy to me (ok, a lot feel that way) but some are coming from people in genuine distress.

I do not care. People fuck up all the time. It’s not anyone’s job to bail them out from their actions.

Usually when people say that, they're putting more on other persons ("they fucked up") than they are on themselves ("but, circumstances"). If you're not doing that, I respect your position. But that's a hard karmic row to hoe. Personally I'd rather bail people out because I might want to get bailed out myself in the future.

Why bother with performing edits and customized redactions and renames when it's easier to simply delete the comments or accounts?

Because there's value in preserving history and this value grows as the site ages.

This thread has been a bit of an eye opener for me in terms of community management and engagement. Bravo!

The worst thing about browsing old Reddit threads is when half the discussion has simply disappeared because the user hates Reddit and edited/deleted all their comments. There's an awful lot of information lost there, and sometimes it's extremely difficult to find elsewhere. The same goes for the occasional deleted accounts and posts I've seen on other forums around the web by people the forum administrator have deemed "toxic" and purged posts instead of simply banning the user (I only have a single vague memory of a forum other than Reddit where a user voluntarily removed all of their own posts, likely due to the difficulty of doing so).

Why not just allow users to do on their own?

For a few reasons: there are lots of ways to abuse those features, which unfortunately some people would take advantage of; we want to preserve the history of the threads rather than have them be gutted or anachronistically edited; and because wholesale deletion would be unfair to the other commenters who participated in a thread (pg wrote about that way back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226).

That doesn't mean we don't care about protecting users with privacy and other concerns—we certainly do, and like I said we take care of these every day. We just try to do it with more precise tools than wholesale deletion.

It's basically a tradeoff. We're trying to balance the community interests of a public forum with the need to protect individuals. There's no perfect answer, but we're committed to both sides of it. Of the people who ask us for these things, well over 90% end up satisfied. Probably 99% actually, but I don't want to make claims I'm not sure of!

Dang thanks for the explanation, it is tough for you being the sole moderator here.

Is gnabgib an actual moderator here or did he made a bot account that does regex matching to some words to try to do backseat moderating to farm points?

His account made numerous robotic comments that missed the key context which a human would not have missed.

gnabgib isn't a moderator but as far as I know is a genuine user and human being and valued contributor!

p.s. I'm not the sole moderator here, fortunately—I'm just the only one who posts publicly.