21–30 of 42 posts
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you didn't answer my question
My job is not to facilitate someone else’s needs and wants. The problem here is a lack of a delete button. That is primus here. I don’t have to answer your question. You have to answer mine.
Why should they? The comments are handy years on. Use a pseudonym?
If my comments are not handy, delete them. If they are handy then I deserve compensation. If I created it I can destroy it. If I created it and was not compensated then I maintain ownership and copyright control. Delete them now! This has been fought in courts and won.
If you do not wish your User Content to be displayed, I recommend that you do not upload it to the site.
[disclaimer to avoid any possible appearance of pretending to be affiliated with the site in any way beyond just being a user of it, goes here]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My job is not to facilitate someone else’s needs and wants. The problem here is a lack of a delete button. That is primus here. I don’t have to answer your question. You have to answer mine.
There is a delete button, but it doesn't last long
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If my comments are not handy, delete them. If they are handy then I deserve compensation. If I created it I can destroy it. If I created it and was not compensated then I maintain ownership and copyright control. Delete them now! This has been fought in courts and won.
The legal notes at https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou say "By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If my comments are not handy, delete them. If they are handy then I deserve compensation. If I created it I can destroy it. If I created it and was not compensated then I maintain ownership and copyright control. Delete them now! This has been fought in courts and won.
Most HN users are circumventing copyright restriction and paywalls to make content available to a wider audience. Weirdly enough they draw the line with citations, this is why so many projects are attributed to weird internet nicks. Usually doxxing those nicks wouldn't result in financial compensation, but lots of legal trouble. What you want is fringe and confusion to me, especially in this context. You control your…
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There is a delete button, but it doesn't last long
Then that’s a problem. If my content is worth something then I should be paid or is should have a delete button. This isn’t trivial. I’m well versed in copyright. I have copyrights and receive in software, and from record labels. Compensation or deletion, there is no middle ground. Period
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a delete button, but it doesn't last long
Then that’s a problem. If my content is worth something then I should be paid or is should have a delete button. This isn’t trivial. I’m well versed in copyright. I have copyrights and receive in software, and from record labels. Compensation or deletion, there is no middle ground. Period
I think that you have a really good point but at the same time missing the point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then that’s a problem. If my content is worth something then I should be paid or is should have a delete button. This isn’t trivial. I’m well versed in copyright. I have copyrights and receive in software, and from record labels. Compensation or deletion, there is no middle ground. Period
How deep does this go?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a delete button, but it doesn't last long
Then that’s a problem. If my content is worth something then I should be paid or is should have a delete button. This isn’t trivial. I’m well versed in copyright. I have copyrights and receive in software, and from record labels. Compensation or deletion, there is no middle ground. Period
does reddit have an option to mass delete all comments?
For users who might not know about the approach we take—here's a typical response I send to emails:
HN doesn't remove entire account histories, because that would gut the threads the account had participated in, which would be unfair to the other users in those threads. But we can randomize the username and disable the account if you'd like.
We also often delete or redact specific posts that users are worried about. If that would help, send us links and we'll take a look. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN.
The reason for this approach is that deletion is a complex issue with tradeoffs between competing interests: individual interest in privacy, other commenters' interest in having their posts remain intelligible, the community's interest in having its archive preserved. There are no perfect solutions, so a line has to be drawn somewhere.
One reason why I say there are no perfect solutions is that there are copies of the HN archives all over the internet. We don't control those, so a determined attacker wouldn't find it hard to get around any deletion we do, even if we deleted everything.
Since there's no way to satisfy all concerns nor to provide perfect protection, it's all about where to draw the line in the solution space, knowing that any line we draw is going to leave something unsatisfied. The way we draw the line–no wholesale deletion, but specific deletion/redaction along with username randomization—has so far held up as a good compromise over the years. It goes back many years: pg wrote about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226, and if you read deeper in that thread you'll see that he agreed with username randomization as the key missing piece. We added that some years later. Until new information shows up that changes the landscape significantly, I think it makes sense to stick with it.
We care a lot about meeting users' concerns for protection and we take care of these requests literally every day—we just try to do it with more precise tools than wholesale deletion. It's rare for anyone to go away unhappy—certainly 99%, probably 99.9% are satisfied with how we respond. Those that do go away unhappy tend either to express their concerns rather theoretically (as a philosophical argument rather than something specific they need) or to be mad about something we did on the site (perhaps understandably, but that's not necessarily a reason to change this policy).