We go to great effort to find the right balance between a user's need for privacy and the community/public benefit in keeping threads intact and coherent (moving every one of a user's comments to a different username makes the threads incoherent).

On a case-by-case basis we can move a selection of comments to a separate username. We of course don't want anyone to be in danger.

▲

testing22321 an hour ago | parent [-]

It seems like you’re more concerned about keeping threads from years ago coherent than you are about my wishes and safety.

Middle ground: on any given topic change all my comments to some random user I’d, then a different one for every topic.

threads will stay coherent, but people won’t be able to follow my old user name around topics for 14 years.

I’ll send an email in the morning. I have to sleep.

	▲	tomhow 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> It seems like you’re more concerned about keeping threads from years ago coherent than you are about my wishes and safety. This is obviously not true. We care about thread persistence and coherence as a default, because some of HN's most historically significant threads are from the earliest years. We will take reasonable steps to protect people's identity and safety once we know the specifics of the situation. We routinely redact URLs, company names, project names and other identifying details from historical comments to prevent people's identity from being inferred.