Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address
Doing real deletes on user accounts is a surprisingly challenging problem and I'd be willing to bet very few companies do real deletes where all of your data is wiped permanently from the company.  For legal and financial reasons, companies often need to keep track of historical user activity.  If a company states in their investor quarterly report that they had 1M active users, they better be able to prove it in an audit.And in a naive relational database implementation, deleting a user would cascade and delete activity associated with that user.The easiest way around this is to do soft deletes where the data stays in the db, but the flag deactivates the user's account.  Looks like the NYT just did a poor implementation of a soft-delete.