[throwawayffffas]

Listen I agree, but the solution to this problem is not social media mediated pseudo-anonymity the operators know who you are and they are working with them.

The solution is keeping fascists of the levers of power which America has done an incredibly bad job at for the last 10 years.

If you really want to have free speech, you need to be in your own domain and that is going to be increasingly dangerous as you have noted too. So you know I see antifa tor services run out of servers in Europe in your future.

[soulofmischief]

I totally agree, the problem is difficult however because even if we create a perfectly anonymous system for registering with social media, modern LLMs make semantic analysis trivial. It's going to be impossible to remain anonymous without also using an LLM to strip the unique footprint of your text. Which leads to a very strange and monotonous culture for internet discussions. Might be unavoidable, though, at least for certain kinds of discussions.

[wolvoleo]

Yes this is indeed a problem. But this is even more reason to keep private conversations private. It will stop those LLMs learning your footprint from your private conversations.

It's an interesting thing what you're saying. I've been thinking about this happening (I think it's inevitable) and also about using an LLM to sanitise my semantic footprint.

[soulofmischief]

Yeah, it's been on my mind since the original transformers paper, because persona and identity management has been a long-time interest of mine. Both offensive and defensive tooling, such as fingerprinting and anti-fingerprinting.

If you're interested in building an open source persona management suite to distribute as freedom software and level the playing field against State agents who are already building and improving such tools, I would love to find a partner to help with such a project. Even if you don't code, there are other duties besides coding involved with successfully promoting such a project and developing a community around it.

[wolvoleo]

Yes I work in cyber and I've always thought about the ability for fingerprinting people by their content. Not really semantically (that was just not really possible until LLMs came up) but more in terms of interests on social media.

But semantic analysis adds a whole new level with so much entropy that it's bound to be unique. And LLMs are just ideal for pattern recognition. There's not much we can do about that as a human, trying to fool it won't work. It really needs an artificial sanitiser. One that really builds a persona and aligns to it deeply (like little colloquialisms from the purported origin of the persona).

And also things like comment posting hours. I have identified several accounts from people who said they were chatting with me and I could prove they were doing something completely different at that same time. Us humans aren't consistent enough for that. Especially if you have multiple sockpuppets.

I don't think I could help much with that though. I'm neither a developer nor a promotor, I'm too much of an introvert for that. But it sounds really interesting.

But yeah I'm sure that within 5 years, if you are still writing comments yourself, it won't matter whether they know your phone number or email address, you will be uniquely identified by just what you write. I wouldn't be surprised if the darker forces in society have this capability already.

[soulofmischief]

There was a thread not too long ago where someone did stylometric analysis on HN, and quite a few users had true positive matches (though there were plenty false positives).

They later pulled the dataset, but antirez recreated it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

https://antirez.com/news/150

You can try the demo here: https://antirez.com/hnstyle

but your account is too young to be in the dataset. You could ask an LLM to recrunch the numbers with a newer dataset, though.

[wolvoleo]

> but your account is too young to be in the dataset.

This is on purpose yes. I've taken to rotating my accounts everywhere on a semi-regular basis as a feeble low-effort mitigation that I'm sure will not hold once this gets into full blown deployment.

I know the HN community frowns on that but it's not like I rotate every day. Probably should for it to be effective though.

Thanks for the link I will try that out! I missed that happening.