well our community is a bit small. unlike this one, our “username” is being displayed instead of name, and it cannot be changed by ourselves (for those users who signed up at an eariler time). People who posted a lot, especially have a popular topic (talking about thousands of replies) usually remembered by public. And for the user profile… I mean most people do not read that. Deleting profile does not effect much.
When after anonymatization, what we see is just a name change, and thats it. I can still pull up his past posts and everything.
This raises the issue of privacy after this user wants to quit. We realized that there is no deleting his posts and replies, just a name change, which is the same that I can easily do it myself (well at least in our site, for those users who registered at a later time).
I hated this rule is not being displaced in the beginning, and misguide users to share personal information with knowingly can be removed if undesired at a later time. If this rule is known to public, doesn’t that push away for those who want to share? If everyone think that way, does a community really exsit?
So based on what I know so far, is that discourse default settings “trick” people to share and let them know cannot be deleted after. This doesn’t make sense to me.
Imagine if you share a video on youtube to public and you cannot delete or set it as private later on, I bet people will be mad at YouTube too. Hope this last example can help you understand my point. I do not mean to offend anyone, but just simply here to discuss and please help me understand your point of view.