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by ryandrake 805 days ago
I have found myself doing the same.

1. I use my real name, which has a strong cooling effect on the kinds of stuff I write. I'm not going to get into a flame war or say career-ending things under my real name. I do this deliberately to force me to keep my responses as high quality as I can.

2. As I temper what I write based on today's norms and taboos, I also have to think about (guess) what might be taboo in 10, 20, 30 years. Assume HN will be searchable forever. People today have a habit of drudging up things that their opponents wrote decades ago, and measuring them against today's (more restrictive) yardstick. I've told jokes back in the 90s that were benign and funny then, but would get me fired today. Imagine people decades from now reading the innocent things I am writing today and how they will be offended by it!

1 comments

Yeah that is sensible. It is one thing that I miss about the internet back in the early 2000s.

I am still a bit conflicted tbh about what to do concerning that. The accounts don't really get deleted, and it is not far-fetched to imagine tools that correlate the styles accross multiple accounts (so, one mistake, and the identity is unveiled).