Not to mention that you have no rights over the content you create on SO. You can’t take your content off the site if it happens to be an answered question or an accepted answer. Their reasoning is “but the content would be gone and would stop helping people”. The way it completely dismisses your efforts and your emotional connection with your own creation is the greatest indictment of how SO lacks the human perspective. No other platform, not even post-Elon Twitter or Facebook does this. The only exception could be Wikipedia, and it communicates its content format and collective editing mechanics very clearly. SO just isn’t that but thinks it’s whatever it works for them.
I do because I’m not a robot? I wrote answers that made it to HN’s frontpage (this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243389). Later, that answer was edited by automod to remove “Hello” line because somebody hated that people greeted each other on SO.
Something long enough to be a blog post like that isn't what the site is for. I'm not saying you shouldn't care about things like that.
And I wasn't talking about the issue of mods deleting entire answered questions. I was talking about single contributions, and mods deleting things is the exact opposite of what my post was addressing!
On the other side, that compiler post is fun but it's not some big effortful thing. Caring about it some makes sense, but I wouldn't care about it that much.
> Something long enough to be a blog post like that isn't what the site is for
It wasn't a blog post on the site; I extended it to a blog post after mods closed it and flagged it for deletion. As a top 0.5% or whatever contributor of SO, believe me, I know what the site is for.
> but it's not some big effortful thing
It doesn't have to be. It's my thing. It sounds like me, it carries my spirit. Nobody else would have written it then. It reflects a period of my life, how I perceived things; and more importantly, its continued existence has an impact on me regardless how it's licensed. Say, if my writing style, or my choice of words, or my tone were associated with a traumatic event in my past, SO's insistence on keeping it up would be explicitly abusive, don't you agree?
Even if no such event had occured, SO's or HN's insistence on keeping my content online against my wishes is also abusive; it deprives me of control over my thoughts and my words. Is it legal? Yes, 100%. But, is it ethical? No, I don't think so. And for what? For keeping the answer for "how can I simulate a click on a DOM element?" online, as if that problem immediately becomes "unsolveable" when that comment, heck, the whole SO web site goes down. What a pretentious excuse to keep your income stream steady.
> Say, if my writing style, or my choice of words, or my tone were associated with a traumatic event in my past, SO's insistence on keeping it up would be explicitly abusive, don't you agree?
No, I'd say your trauma is causing you to make an unreasonable demand. The writing style in a short technical post existing somewhere should not be harmful.
> SO's or HN's insistence on keeping my content online against my wishes is also abusive; it deprives me of control over my thoughts and my words. Is it legal? Yes, 100%. But, is it ethical? No, I don't think so. And for what?
It's supposed to be a collaboration, especially SO, and keeping things intact is important for that.
Just yesterday I found a helpful guide on reddit where half the posts were "." It's pretty clear how a site where the primary purpose is guiding people would do a worse job if it worked that way.
> And for what? For keeping the answer for "how can I simulate a click on a DOM element?" online, as if that problem immediately becomes "unsolveable" when that comment, heck, the whole SO web site goes down. What a pretentious excuse to keep your income stream steady.
If it would affect the income stream, then it's something that makes the site bad for users. You can't argue both sides of that at the same time.
> As a top 0.5% or whatever contributor of SO, believe me, I know what the site is for.
Maybe? I don't think most contributors would be anywhere near as upset about an inability to delete posts.
SO wants text like you gave them, I don't think they want the level of emotional investment in those pieces of text. (They might want emotional investment into the site itself, but that's a different thing.)
> I don't think they want the level of emotional investment in those pieces of text
Of course they don't. They want you to be a free ChatGPT as much as possible. The less human you are, the better for them. That doesn't mean that what they are doing is okay or harmless.
The question was about whether hacker news allows you to remove your content? It does not. You can send an email just to have your content anonymized, but it will remain forever.
I happen to have tried this multiple times. Every now and again I want to erase all trace of me on the internet. HN doesn't allow it. They tell you that you can give a spreadsheet with comment ids and how you want to rephrase things in case you've given TMI about yourself (in order to anonymize). I just don't have the time to go through my entire history to do this. So I attempt to post less, knowing I don't own my comments and I can be tracked
Perhaps if HN eventually improves in this area then we will have all the proof we need that it is in fact becoming more and more like Reddit. Because it seems like a lot of the discourse is already checking a lot of those other boxes.
The content is licenced under the Creative Commons license, which ensures that everyone can take it and make something useful out of it. For example in the case Stack Overflow turns evil, adds a paywall or something like that.
This is a lot better than almost every other comparable site with user-created content. In most cases the company has the rights there and can do whatever they want with it, and users have no right to reuse the content of the site.
