Let’s talk about deletion.
Not question deletion, which works this way, for the record. The deletion I want to talk about today is account deletion.
Stack Overflow is a bit unusual in that our accounts are ultra lightweight. We don’t require registration; we allow essentially anonymous posting. We were inspired by Wikipedia in this regard. We wanted to reduce the friction of asking and answering to little more than entering an anonymous comment on a blog. For example, we often don’t even have an email address for our users. And we’re fine with that. I can’t think of very many sites with as loose a definition of account as Stack Overflow. …