Yeah, I'd be open to replacing the username. One of the biggest things I overlooked when I wrote HN is that I didn't make any provision to let people change their usernames. There are no internal ids underlying usernames; the actual usernames are stored everywhere. But if I wrote something to let people change their displayed username, it could also be used for this.

There are potential downsides, like unexpected social consequences. One of the reasons HN users restrain themselves from getting into flamewars is because they're expected to. When people are expected to behave, they usually do.

Each HN user is, literally, their comments + their submissions. This may be an anonymous forum, but people feel a strong connection with their HN identity. When they make comments that cause them to look silly, they feel silly. Why is that?

If you let people change their identity, people may subconsciously stop trying so hard to live up to their current one.

Maybe allow each user to change their username only once.

There are also practical downsides: information on the internet is often scraped, archived and cached. For example at https://www.hnsearch.com/ and http://hackerslide.com/

If deletion is allowed, it would be easy to add "undelete" from a previously scraped copy, or even a page for all deleted comments with previous user details. Both of these already exist for Reddit. In a way, deleting a post would highlight and bring it to the attention of people looking for controversy or accidentally leaked information.

something like this would be interesting I think: <randomnumber>+accountdeleted so unlike reddit, in a discussion if multiple users delete their account but keep their comment, you don't get confused if its the same user or different user.

If it was also the feature users could use to change their displayed username, it would have to work that way.

There's also the issue of "does the username belong to the user". So if user a deletes their comment and user b quotes them both by comment and name, should user a's name be masked when they delete said post? Well, isn't that user b's content that's now being infringed upon? The current non-delete mode is fine - just don't write stuff you don't want on the web on a forum, and if you do then update with a new comment retracting the statement.

>So if user a deletes their comment and user b quotes them both by comment and name, should user a's name be masked when they delete said post?

I don't think so - it's clearly unreasonable to expect every instance of a username to be policed like that, particularly considering cut-and-pasting quotes. I'm fine with the idea that if it's in a thread it's no longer 'yours.'

But I also think it should be possible to remove ones' own account and have the username on those posts no longer point to an active account.

I also think there should be a "post anonymously" option as well, which there practically already is in the form of throwaway accounts. Might as well just make it official.

Replacing the "deleted" username with its hash in the template would probably be enough.