[dang]

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Your comments are actually pretty good, but preserving the container is more important, and it's undermined when you use it this way.

HN is a community. You needn't use your real name, of course, but you should have some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

[SignalsFromBob]

I appreciate all you do as a moderator to fend off obvious trolls and griefers. I'm sure it must be a thankless job. However, I feel that your comment is not helpful or constructive. People have legitimate reasons for not wanting to create too long of an online trail so they can remain anonymous. That's okay. If their comments are "actually pretty good" then that's good enough; The user name that's attached is irrelevant. They are contributing value to the site.

Guidelines such as "throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely" are naive. Non-sensitive information can reveal sensitive things when aggregated. We've all read articles about how anonymized data sets can still contain enough data to identify, or come close to identifying, individuals. I'm sure a number of those articles have been linked to from this web site. Practicing user account rotation is a useful tool for mitigating such risks.

Maybe it's time to rethink this particular site guideline. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to users making contributions to the site.