Even if you could delete comments, in this day and age it's not a real deletion. They'd just put a "deleted" flag on the comment in the DB.

There's likely many iterations of HN comment datasets out there from "show hn: I scraped everyone's comments for my comp sci/big data class" over the years.

And there's a bunch of full scrapes of HN around anyway.

The HN email address takes personal requests for comment deletion.

That’s actually how I got my Facebook deleted in 2015, and it appears I am still banned. I posted a picture, from behind, of a cowboy wearing only chaps. I tried to join again around 2022 to sell some stuff and they rejected me.

Probably the best move I made for my mental health tbh.

You've always been able to delete for 2 hours and then the post becomes effectively permanent, modulo emailing dang to get it deleted by an admin.

Have they stated the justification for this anywhere? You'd think a site that brands itself as being for hackers would value its users having control over their comments/privacy.

There's value in editing for clarity within a window of a live discussion. After the live discussion is less active, it's important to be able to reference things or see a coherent view of the discussion and what people were responding to.

Yes, it's because the comments create a discussion thread that then becomes impossible to follow (or worse, misleading) if certain comments within it are either deleted or edited to say something different. The idea is that what you write becomes communal property once it's been responded to, because it's part of a community discussion that loses meaning if people start deleting individual comments.

I believe that, even within that two hour window, you cannot delete if anyone has replied to it.

You can still edit it to say "[deleted]" or something, though.

You can do it just you have to email dang directly about it. Pretty stupid system.

Pretty sure they only change the username to something anonymous though, and remove any PII in comments you've written, right? They won't delete the comments themselves AFAIK.

Archive.org probably already has it anyway.