Many of the arguments revolve around “what’s on the internet is permanent anyway so why encourage any illusion to the contrary?”
I’d like to propose a different way to think about this: Say you get a tattoo.
You love your tattoo. People take pictures of you and your tattoo. This means your tattoo is now in formats and places that are beyond your control.
Later, you change your mind about the tattoo, so you get it removed from your skin, because that is in your control.
Being a reasonable person, you don’t go about asking the people with a picture of your tattoo to delete the picture. You’ve changed as a person, and while you don’t want what you now consider to be a mistake to follow you around forever, you’re okay with reflecting on and acknowledging the fact that you did indeed have that tattoo at one point.
Why not something equivalent for HN? Example: provide the ability to hide comments you’ve made from your own profile, but don’t provide the ability to delete them.
Sure, it means those comments are still there and attributable to you. But having the ability to put only your best foot forward when people find your HN profile would mean a lot. Especially for those of us that aren’t anonymous.
This is an intimidating crowd of people. My own engagement has been limited by the fact that I’m worried I’ll say something I regret in the future. Maybe this isn’t a problem for you because you don’t use your name or you just don’t care, but clearly this question getting asked all the time means this feature or something like it is in demand by the community.
I don’t want anyone to have the ability to amend the historical record however they like, but I do want everyone to have control over how they are presented to others. i.e. you don’t have to wear that tattoo forever, but you don’t get to delete pictures of it from other people’s phones.