What's so hard about understanding somebody's desire for their art to be in the world without violating the boundary between that and their personal life?
It is difficult for many people. Whenever I read about W, I see people offended there was (what they consider) an overreaction, and that everything was deleted. Personally I only see that as exerting extreme caution after something really bad happened. Beyond that, it is their right to share or stop sharing when it stops being fun.
People seem to have forgotten the old hacker ethos: doing stuff for fun. Many people are more now attracted by publicity and fame than by the fun part - look at how many want to be influencers! Or even worse: by extracting value from than fun spirit - look at social networking being used to create fame by manufacturing outrage!
Some people who do things for fun may also want to be forgotten. They just care about the fun. Yet many people think they have a right to whatever they create. It's hard not to see that.
Personally, I see that because I do not want any of the stuff I do online have any link to what I do offline. I do not want my identity leaked either.
Yet here on HN when I will delete my account, my posts will stay. And I can't edit them in any way. So much for being about hacker values!
I think many people who weren't following his art in real time make the reasonable misunderstanding that his works are code and documentation participating in the vast human project of Open Source Software, since they tended to have names like "_why's (poignant) guide to ruby" and not more descriptive names like "cartoon foxes and how mad I reacted in front of my expanded family that time when my mom said my sister uses cocaine and how she didn't end up killing herself and stuff like that and some ruby code".
I mean, he did write some widely used open source. I think the most popular yaml parser? And an html parser or generator or something that some people were still using but most already moved to another one inspired by it? And there was a community around projects like Camping and Shoes?
So less-involved people judged him like they judged the left-pad guy (which, I mean, was in his full right to remove all his code from npm, but was a bit unkind to the vast community of left-pad dependent day-job developers).
But almost everything he did was 99% art, and his persona shared a lot of things you might not want your boss or mom to read, so I think he should be judged more like Kafka requesting his books to be burned.
Camping and Shoes were also 99% art, and I think nobody who was actively part of their communities was very much hurt and the sentiment in their communities was more of worrying for his well being.
But he let it be known that he's ok and just wanted to quit so they just let him be.
The outrage was mostly from people reading "popular open source developer deletes his github and vanishes" without context.
And yeah, when I was 16 I used to post on HN and for some stupid reason all my comments began with "Hi, I'm <full name>" and it's the most embarrassing thing ever, and Google will never forget...
About your HN, Google will never forget but maybe you could nicely ask HN for some understanding (I mean, you were a minor!) or in the worst case try to GPDR you way through?
Expecting to maintain a large public reputation and stay anonymous and then stopping when the facade is cracked is pretty unrealistic.