Ten years ago one of the most prolific and valuable participants of lesswrong.com used a script to delete all his writings from the site. A few days or weeks later, he reconsidered and gave the site permission to restore them, explaining that he was angry when he ran the script, but as you might expect if you've spent time adminning a computer, no one wanted to spend the considerable technical effort required to effect a restoration. Since then I have experienced non-negligible amounts of pain after following one of my bookmarks or a search-engine hit only to end up at a stub that was one of his former posts or comments.
>you should be upset that this platform/network is . . . not allowing you the rights and benefits to delete and control your own content.
I would be upset if a significant fraction of the more than 558 bookmarks into news.ycombinator.com I have accumulated over the past 10 years stopped working because of a change in HN that caused a large increase in the rate of deletion of old comments. In particular, I worry about users who would use a script to mass-delete all of their comments here. (I arrived at the figure of 558 by actual counting: in a directory containing only bookmarks manually created by me, I grepped for "news.ycombinator.com" and for an abbreviation for HN that I use when I'm too lazy to copy and paste the url.)
The fact that it is hard or impossible for a prolific contributor to mass-delete his contributions is a significant part of the reason I chose spend as much of time as I have reading here -- and searching here: with Google Search becoming increasingly useless, an increasing fraction of my searches are searches of HN using Algolia.
I am of course okay with the site's starting displaying a strongly worded warning on the sign-up page.
ADDED. 13.3% of my searches of the internet since the start of this year have been searches of HN using Algolia. One painfully precise detail: I am counting only those of my searches that originated (in code I wrote) in Emacs, but that is the majority of my searches, and I have no reason to believe that they materially differ from the rest of the searches (which originated by my typing into the location bar of my browser).
>you should be upset that this platform/network is . . . not allowing you the rights and benefits to delete and control your own content.
I would be upset if a significant fraction of the more than 558 bookmarks into news.ycombinator.com I have accumulated over the past 10 years stopped working because of a change in HN that caused a large increase in the rate of deletion of old comments. In particular, I worry about users who would use a script to mass-delete all of their comments here. (I arrived at the figure of 558 by actual counting: in a directory containing only bookmarks manually created by me, I grepped for "news.ycombinator.com" and for an abbreviation for HN that I use when I'm too lazy to copy and paste the url.)
The fact that it is hard or impossible for a prolific contributor to mass-delete his contributions is a significant part of the reason I chose spend as much of time as I have reading here -- and searching here: with Google Search becoming increasingly useless, an increasing fraction of my searches are searches of HN using Algolia.
I am of course okay with the site's starting displaying a strongly worded warning on the sign-up page.
ADDED. 13.3% of my searches of the internet since the start of this year have been searches of HN using Algolia. One painfully precise detail: I am counting only those of my searches that originated (in code I wrote) in Emacs, but that is the majority of my searches, and I have no reason to believe that they materially differ from the rest of the searches (which originated by my typing into the location bar of my browser).