As someone who's been commenting on various sites for 20 years, I consider my comment history to be the very clearest representation of self and who I am. Like if my progeny ever wanted to know about me they could go read what I've written over the years. But then, I never crap post (some may disagree), and I usually always write sincerely. So the idea of shredding all that is kind of startling.
Crap is definitely measured by the eye of the beholder, and not the depositor :D
Of course these days with AI able to do analysis of everything we've ever wrote, duplicate our speech, and mimic our look, we may find out that leaving all this information in public was a foolish mistake.
I don’t see how someone posting a helpful answer to a question destroys their identity, I guess it could be mixed in with unsafe or embarrassing things but please can people take the time to go over each message to see if it really needs deleting? It might be a lot of work but it will do so much good compared to indiscriminately wiping everything and breaking the history of conversations other people were involved in without their permission
I think frequently making new primary accounts is a good compromise between preserving obscure knowledge and preserving privacy. A few times a year I'll even check my old inboxes just in case I can help someone since I myself have gotten lucky messaging inactive accounts about really obscure topics and getting a response.
You would still have to take additional measures if you post in some communities with any regularity.
It sets a dangerous precent because these tools make it seem like you can remove stuff from the internet for good, when you cannot. They don’t do anything for services that crawl reddit and archive all your posts.
It's more of a "you might not be able to". Even with all the archival things that target Reddit currently, plenty of accounts who purge their comments squeeze through just fine.
If you post on the internet, yes, you do need to understand it's not sitting in one database table somewhere. It doesn't mean it's futile to try and clean up though.
Plenty of information is archived after being deleted from its original source, it's just common that the particular information you're looking for is not included in any archives at all, much less any archives you can access.
Thats an interesting view to take on HN given how much HN prevents editing/deleting old content. (To be clear I am not majorly in favour or against either side.)
There are already businesses that will buy an established reddit account from you. These arrangements exist for anything with accounts with rep, whether they be reddit accounts or instagram or runescape accounts.
Removal of the comment itself matters, nobody owes you information forever.