[comrade1234]

I swear many years ago you could delete old posts but not any longer. About all you can do now is do something so egregious that they delete your account.

[bink]

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.

[nozzlegear]

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.

[Macha]

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

[46493168]

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.

[nostrademons]

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.

[pesus]

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.

[AnimalMuppet]

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.

[asdff]

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

[nozzlegear]

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.

[layer8]

The HN email address takes personal requests for comment deletion.

[helterskelter]

Archive.org probably already has it anyway.