I'm used to creating weekly HN accounts

[saydaark]

As I don't want that a profile of myself can be easily obtained from my posts, I'm used to first changing my account password to random, so I cannot login anymore into my current user, and then creating a new account. Is this a usual way of behaving in hn?

[jmillikin]

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

  > Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please
  > don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should
  > have an identity that others can relate to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17996295

  > dang on Sept 15, 2018
  >
  > HN can't be a community without members. Disembodied comments are
  > not community members. No one is required to use their real name
  > here, but users need to have some consistent identity for others
  > to relate to. Otherwise we might as well have no usernames and no
  > community at all.

[ofalkaed]

Thanks for letting me know, I was getting worried by all the people here who were starting to sound like you and was beginning to think HN was going to shit. I feel better about the world knowing that your are an outlier.

[saydaark]

Perhaps changing accounts is a way of not having to respond to posts like yours?

[ofalkaed]

Apparently not. Self control would probably work better.

[gostsamo]

There are some people who do an account per post, but doing something like that and like what you do assumes a thread model which I don't share. Who is the one who would start making profiles based on HN? What might they aim for? What can they achieve? I don't think that they will make it that far with what I've shared here or even with cross-referencing it with other of my stuff online, so I spare myself the mental effort of churning profiles.

[saydaark]

I think any LLM could be trained to make profiles from the HN posts and submissions of each user, don't you agree?

[gostsamo]

yes, and then what? mimik us on lobste.rs?

[h2odragon]

What's wrong with being who you are, openly? Do you have any faith that your serial accounts can't be connected by anyone who cares to do so? In other words, what can you hope to gain with this effort?

FWIW i've been "h2odragon" since 1991, in a series of fora.

[jmillikin]

Every post has many readers, now and in the future, and you never know what their mental situation might be like. For many people the value of a persistent identity isn't worth the risk.

I used to post under a pseudonym, but one day a person stalked through that account until they found my (pseudonymous) website, then my name, then called my employer with the goal of getting me fired. They did this because they were upset I had written a programming example in Haskell. My employer at the time was a defense contractor and they luckily (for me) decided to put the event into the "unknown third-party is threatening a TS/SCI employee" bucket, with a response as subtle as might be expected.

Unfortunately, there are people in other circumstances who face a legitimate risk of losing their job and/or career if they attract attention from some passing lunatic. That's why it's considered good practice to avoid tying too much sensitive information together in one account.

Nowadays I post under my name on (semi-)professional forums like HN, and anonymously elsewhere. No pseudonyms, because they provide a false sense of security.

[ClapperHeid]

> have an identity that others can relate to.

I'm not sure that works on HN. Usernames are given so little prominence in the display and there are no user avatars or signatures. So the vast majority of the time I don't even pay attention to who I'm interacting with. I just see a comment and either agree or disagree with it. This is unlike other forums I've been on where there is far more of a sense of getting to know people [or at least their online persona] indivually and having a sense of who you like and dislike.

As regards accounts, I think I'm on about no.4 now.

My first one got shadow-banned [Unjustly I think. But hey ho! Dang's playground. Dang's rules]

My second one, I wanted to see if I could get to 100 karma points without getting banned again. Once I did, I retired that account.

I then set up no.3 account and decided to see if I could get to 1000 karma points. Again, I retired that account once I reached 1000 karma.

So this is no.4. I haven't really set any targets for this one. Maybe I'll just go for 1000 karma again and then take it out the back and shoot it.

  >I don't want that a profile of myself can be easily obtained from my posts...

Same here. Although I do suspect that a bit of machine learning could pretty easily link accounts to the same person by analysing writing style and snippets of personal info we all inevitably let slip. In fact I have thought this could be an interesting challenge [if I could be bothered]: see how much of a "dossier" you could compile on any user here, by collating all the tiny pieces of personal info they give away over their dozens of posts.

As well as that reason though, I kill my accounts once they reach a pre-determined target because I don't want to become too attached to any of them because, at the end of the day, the banning and shadow-banning that takes place here can be capricious and inconsistent. So what's the point in making a lot of effort to build up a profile over the years, if you might express the wrong opinion and end up HNer non grata?

One other point. I also give my accounts completely random names that have nothing to do with me or anything I'm interested in. Yet another way of distancing myself from feeling any attachment to them.

EDIT: Just noticed this quote:

  >No one is required to use their real name
  > here, but users need to have some consistent identity for others
  > to relate to. Otherwise we might as well have no usernames and no
  > community at all.

I find that a really odd aspiration, given how "community unfriendly" [for want of a better expression] HN is. I've already mentioned above the lack of avatars and sigs and the way usernames are given so little prominence that, most of the time, it doesn't even register with me who I'm interacting with.

But, on top of that, you've got the completely haphazard way that the commenting system works.

There's no kind of chronology to any of it. Cmments move up and down the page, depending on... what?... how many replies they get?... how many upvotes? There's no way of separating out the new comments added to a submission. You come back to a story some time later and just have to hunt through the ever changing mix of comments to see if you can spot anything new.

Nor is there any easy way to see if anyone has replied to anything you said previously. You notice your karma score has gone up [or down] and then visit the "comments" link on your profile and [as above] hunt through all your previous comments to see if any have received an upvote/downvote or reply.

I'm aware that, by writing this, I may fall foul of the "Thou shallt not criticise how the site works" commandment and I'm not really trying to do that. I'm fine with the quixotic weirdness that is HN and amn't criticising it per se. But I was just a bit gobsmacked to see Dang being quoted as being so in favour of a "community" and user "consistent identity" when the site seems set up to hinder exactly these things.