> An alternative which is more in keeping with the spirit is to just make a new account every now and then.
This is what I do. I wish HN allowed you to have your username redacted automatically from all messages older than 6 months, so I wouldn't need to.
The idea is that the text of all your comments remains, but the username changes to [redacted] once the comment is six months old. All six-month-old comments by all users who have enabled this feature all appear to have come from one huge account called "[redacted]". This would preserve the discussions, while removing attribution and linkability between comments. There's really no need for abuse/spam management on six-month-old posts (if it wasn't flagged in six months it doesn't need to be flagged).
Probably the only downside is that up/downvotes to ancient posts couldn't affect the post-owner's super-important InternetPoints(tm) count, since if they did it would be possible to wiggle the upvote on a comment and then scan to see which account got a point-bump. So [redacted]'s comments wouldn't have up/down-vote arrows.
I think HN has enough 'karma traffic' that a timing attack against someone's Internet Points wouldn't be very feasible. But the easy implementation is to literally have a [redacted] account in the database, and point all the posts at it. I'm not sure it matters; leaving behind royalty checks for old posts is a fair trade for anonymizing the data.
This is what I do. I wish HN allowed you to have your username redacted automatically from all messages older than 6 months, so I wouldn't need to.
The idea is that the text of all your comments remains, but the username changes to [redacted] once the comment is six months old. All six-month-old comments by all users who have enabled this feature all appear to have come from one huge account called "[redacted]". This would preserve the discussions, while removing attribution and linkability between comments. There's really no need for abuse/spam management on six-month-old posts (if it wasn't flagged in six months it doesn't need to be flagged).
Probably the only downside is that up/downvotes to ancient posts couldn't affect the post-owner's super-important InternetPoints(tm) count, since if they did it would be possible to wiggle the upvote on a comment and then scan to see which account got a point-bump. So [redacted]'s comments wouldn't have up/down-vote arrows.