> Then you’ll have to request multiple people who run services that backs up every reddit post.
Including Archive.org.
> But that’s still way better than HN. At least on reddit you can easily delete posts and accounts.
This is a topic where the interests of the community and the needs of an individual come in conflict, and I don't think there's an universally agreed-on standard practice. By community I explicitly do not mean the platform that's hosting it, though they have interests desires too - just the collection of people reading and posting.
A deleted comment in the middle of a thread is often extremely disruptive, as everything below it in hierarchy (and other locations linking to it) loses crucial context. Being able to distance yourself from your comments (through deleting the account, and thus making the comments show a "deleted user" as author), but not to delete the comments themselves, balances these competing interests properly.
If a user wants to delete the comment user should be allowed to delete the comment or account. Period!
Reasons like community interest are not strong or proper imho.
Also there’s no information about whether HN logs user IPs or any other info. Or info about how many IPs are logged. Whether they log all the IPs or last K IPs. For how long those IPs are stored.
> Then you’ll have to request multiple people who run services that backs up every reddit post.
It's less about scrubbing it from the internet, but scrubbing it from Reddit (or twitter, fb, etc) themselves. Even if some obscure content farm is hosting the comment, it's still a small fraction of visitors.
Yes, but that fraction is exactly the one you want to avoid. Someone who just reads a thread or searches for a solution will move on unhappy. Someone who wants to find dirt on you will dig through these archives and mirrors.
But that’s still way better than HN. At least on reddit you can easily delete posts and accounts.