[etfb]

I agree with most of his points. I stopped reading Slashdot because I didn't like how the voting affected my interaction with the site, and I went cold turkey on Reddit and haven't been back (or even missed it) for maybe a year now. Maybe I should ditch my HN account too. Other than as an experiment in how to craft an inoffensive comment that will be accepted by the tiny subset of humanity who lurk here, it doesn't really have much benefit.

What a shame there's no "delete account" option. Should I do something unutterably awful to get pg's attention (accuse him of murdering kittens or raping puppies or writing software in Visual C++?) or shall I just do as the OP did and change my password to something unmemorable? If I change my email to a random mailinator account, that will make password recovery impossible too, I suspect.

[carrotleads]

well the OP mentioned changing the password to long unrecoverable string.

How did he manage to come back? did he store pwd somewhere? pull strings at YC??

How?

[etfb]

Made a new account? I don't know.

It's kind of crazy that there's no "forgot password" option. I can understand not allowing account deletion, because you don't want to break conversations by having someone's comments mass-deleted, but not having a password retrieval mechanism is just foolish. Amateur hour incarnate. This does not look like a system designed by someone who's making a real commitment.

[mhartl]

I've wondered the same thing. He returned under the same username, so it looks like he recovered his password somehow. Matt is a Y Combinator alumnus, so it's possible he talked to PG directly.