Have your extensive comments about the CCP on HN caused you any hassles?
The fact that comments cannot be deleted is increasingly unethical as ML makes privacy easier and easier to pierce. People who made rational decisions about the risks of sharing various opinions on a small site in 2010 are now locked into the consequences a decade later when both technology and political landscapes have changed.
It would be truly surprising if HN history doesn't eventually play a key role in someone being imprisoned or executed due to having expressed views that a country, religion or other organization finds objectionable.
> Have your extensive comments about the CCP on HN caused you any hassles?
CCP currently cannot monitoring all foreign websites, so (currently) I don't think people will be hassled because of few archived comments on HM. But who knows, that may change in the future, and somebody may report you just like what people did during Cultural Revolution[0]. So, keep yourself anonymous under another name is always important.
In China, domestic websites are required by law to verify you and record your true personal identity (Phone number for example) when you trying to post anything on it, so you can't be anonymous. When I using that kind of website, I never do anything sensitive (Or even post anything useful).
Just because it doesn't happen now, doesn't mean that will always be true. Even anonymous accounts are unsafe. ML with writing analysis and known writing samples could very likely allow attribution of even anonymous writings. May we never live in that world!
> The fact that comments cannot be deleted is increasingly unethical ...
Just assume that a few seconds after you post a comment Google, Bing, Facebook and a few other major Internet sites have scrapped your comment and are analyzing it.
And there a few aggregators that repeat the HN content and alternative UI for HN.
And some users make a local copy to run some statistics or detect dupes or just for curiosity. Some moron even made a Chrome extension to show the deleted and edited comments in HN.
And assume that the spy agencies of the major countries are making a nice backup of all your comments.
So after pressing the send button, just assume that there are 30 copies of your comment floating around.
A delete button only deletes one of them. The idea of Tweeter that you can delete a tweet and everybody really delete it is hilarious. Just assume the there is no "delete" button, it's just a "hide" button.
"Deleting" a comment is useful against a clueless neighbor that hates you because your dog barks too much. If a country with nukes hates you, they probably have the technology to save a copy of the "deleted" comment.
What you write is a reasonable precaution in 2018. Many, many HN posts and accounts were created before the Snowden revelations, before Xi came to power and before the Charlie Hebdo attack.
Many comments will be and have been mined years after their original posting. It's truly doubtful any country was logging every HN comment in the year you opened your account, for example.
I sometimes censor myself online by deciding not to comment or reply to things - both here and on other places for precisely this reason. Not fear of imprisonment or execution, just a concern that the comments might cause me hassle or grief at some point.
The fact that comments cannot be deleted is increasingly unethical as ML makes privacy easier and easier to pierce. People who made rational decisions about the risks of sharing various opinions on a small site in 2010 are now locked into the consequences a decade later when both technology and political landscapes have changed.
It would be truly surprising if HN history doesn't eventually play a key role in someone being imprisoned or executed due to having expressed views that a country, religion or other organization finds objectionable.