Hacker News doesn't allow old threads to deprecate and doesn't allow you to delete your account. You choose to create a permanent public record of everything everyone has ever said on this forum, and I've seen mods go back months into a commenter's history to do exactly that.

What's good for the goose should be good for the gander.

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tomhow 4 days ago | parent [-]

Anyone can email us to have comments deleted if there are no replies, or anonymized/redacted if they no longer want the comment linked to their identity.

We cite past comments only to demonstrate a pattern when taking action against a user who has a history of guidelines breaches.

It's a long-established norm on HN that weaponizing historical comments in a present-day argument is not considered a fair debating tactic, as we have no idea if the person still agrees with what they posted a long while ago, nor whether the context of the historical comment is relevant to the present topic.

Geese and ganders have nothing to do with it and I don't know why you're using my efforts to uphold fair debating between community members as grounds to attack our moderation.

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lawlessone 4 days ago | parent [-]

>It's a long-established norm on HN that weaponizing historical comments in a present-day argument is not considered a fair debating tactic,

I think it's fair to use past comments to highlight bad faith actors.

	▲	tomhow 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The energy of "highlight[ing] bad faith actors" is not what we're going for here. The guidelines ask us to "assume good faith", and there are valid reasons why someone's present-day position could (appear to) contradict a historical position. The best reason is that they have undergone some personal growth, which we would hope of most people over a year or more, and we definitely want to allow space for that on HN.