I know it's easy to feel that way when the user asking for help has been labeled $bad for whatever reason. But I doubt you would say that about most of the users who ask for this help, and if we're going to do it for some, I don't feel comfortable picking who gets helped and who doesn't. Nor do I think the community would support us in doing it that way.
It’s not about picking. It’s about doing it at all.
Now you’re active participant in a cover up. They want to delete something, edit something? Fine. The controls are there. Everyone knows that. But that’s not what this is. This is taking extraordinary action to gaslight and coverup. That’s what’s trash. It’s the secrecy. It’s changing of the archive. That’s what trash.
In all my decades of dealing with public forums, I have never seen this as something done in a reputable forum, outside of a court order.
It’s a betrayal of trust. The fact that you’re not defending it on the merits, but rather that it’s supposedly open to all that knew about the secret door is just the chef’s kiss of abuse of power. If I was asked to do this, I would quit.
Dang, every time you do this, it shows contempt to everyone on this forum. It’s absolute trash. It is bad, and you should feel bad. But of course, you don’t feel bad about doing it. You feel good about it.
I just don't think you would say that if you saw the full range of requests we get. Some feel excessively fussy to me (ok, a lot feel that way) but some are coming from people in genuine distress.
Usually when people say that, they're putting more on other persons ("they fucked up") than they would on themselves ("but, circumstances"). If you're not doing that, I respect your position. But that's a hard karmic row to hoe. Personally I'd rather bail people out because I might want to get bailed out myself in the future.
The worst thing about browsing old Reddit threads is when half the discussion has simply disappeared because the user hates Reddit and edited/deleted all their comments. There's an awful lot of information lost there, and sometimes it's extremely difficult to find elsewhere. The same goes for the occasional deleted accounts and posts I've seen on other forums around the web by people the forum administrator have deemed "toxic" and purged posts instead of simply banning the user (I only have a single vague memory of a forum other than Reddit where a user voluntarily removed all of their own posts, likely due to the difficulty of doing so).
Wouldn't it be worse if HN didn't honor its users' requests to delete data? I legitimately don't know, it seems like both approaches would cause issues.
