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Comment by cuddlypsycho | Hacker News Reader

> Reddit works because it’s anonymous

Are you sure there? Anonymity doesn't really exist anymore on the internet for the average person. Reddit has the illusion of anonymity which gives its users a false sense of privacy so they can act the way they truly are (parallels to Westworld if you watch the show).

It would be incredibly easy for Reddit to de-anonymize its user base, the same way Facebook was trying to do with medical metadata, and sell that info (at least for the US users, given GDPR in EU now)

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You can make a new user account on Reddit in 30 seconds and don't even need an email (last I checked).

Pretty easy to maintain a significant degree of anonymity by just deleting your account and making a new one.

With that said, most users are more concerned about being anonymous to their peers in conversation than they are to Reddit's administration itself, IMO.

I'm not talking about email, IP address or any other convenient mode of identification.

Think voting patterns, date/times active, submission categories, comments, writing style, punctuation ...

Facebook had a project to cross-reference user behavior to anonymized medical data. Say patient A's history says he visited a foreign country in the Mediterranean, came back with the stomach flu, was hospitalized for 3 days ... Maps to: holiday photos, dates, locations, status updates, friends commenting get well soon etc.

I hear they were pretty successful at it too! Makes you think what a government actor can do with enough data.

I think he's right. There are so many features you can use to profile and de-anonymize a user, even if you're not running the servers.

People generally don't seem to appreciate the relationship between marginal information and statistical likelihood. ~87% of Americans are identified by DoB, zip code, and gender. That was about two decades ago. The state of the art today is going to make Cambridge Analytica look like the Post Office when it gets pulled out of the shadows.

You do need an email to sign up, although since they allow a user to be 'logged in' as more than one user at a time, they may allow more than one account per email address. And they don't do email confirmation, though. Maybe that's what you're thinking of.

>You do need an email to sign up

No you don't. You can leave the email box blank and sign up with no problems.

Not anymore.

This is not true!

Just to be sure I just tried it via iOS Safari and signed up for a new account by entering a username and a password. Left the email field blank. Works like a charm.

You're incorrect. You can leave the email field blank.

I've got about a hundred accounts and none of them were created with an email address.

Now they ask for e-mail before you can sign up, but you don t have to go to your inbox to activate you accounts so basically it's the same.

It's a dark pattern. They pop up a dialog with just an email field and a [Next] button. Makes you think you have to enter something before you proceed. But you can leave it blank and move to the username/password stage.

Why is that a dark pattern? Seems the same as almost every other site, except with the relaxation of the requirement for an email

Notice all the sibling comments that insist the email is required now? It’s an understandable misread of that sign up flow. Only one field and then a Next button.

Almost no other input flow allows you to hit “next” when the only form field hasn’t been addressed yet. Why not put username, password, and email on one page instead of splitting it up the way they do? Then you can mark the two fields as required and the third as optional.

You can leave the email box blank and still sign up with only username and password with no problem.

What if you use Reddit the way I do when posting anonymously: I post on throwaway accounts and delete the accounts every few weeks. The account names aren’t saved in the posts, and the posts aren’t linked in any visible way.

I’m sure Reddit has code in the back end to track people, but afaik thanks to Reddit’s general lack of ads, there just aren’t a ton of DMPs, so there aren’t a lot of data points to correlate with.

There are several sites out there that archive reddit threads. Someone could still find the account name to a comment.

That said, using accounts with throwaway names will keep you pretty anonymous on its own.

IP, browser signature, topic browsing patterns, linguistic mannerisms. Not too hard.

Not too hard for reddit, hard enough for the average user. This means that for the purposes of having a conversation with someone else, you're basically anonymous. It's the same level of anonymity that web forums had back in the day before all user-created content started ending up on Facebook and it's progeny.

Right but I think their picture will be disjointed and incomplete. Something like 99% of all users are lurkers who never post a single comment.

I think GP meant anonymous to other users - not Reddit itself.

If you are mostly a lurker that probably works great. But I have found that the most influential/upvoted posts tend to come from established accounts with higher karma.

Just like Twitter; but most of those millions of eyeballs aren’t posting anything.

I don't care it I am not anonymous to Reddit. I care that the average person, reading my comments, doesn't immediately know who I am.

Pseudonymous then.

P.s. Facebook doesn't sell data. It sells ads, targeted using the data it holds.

Facebook effectively sells data. It simply doesn't sell raw dumps.

The distinction isn't a minor one, but in this context it doesn't much matter. Reddit is unlikely to have the kind of quality data that facebook has to sell - directly, or indirectly.

I would say there are huge privacy differences between selling data and selling the right to advertise to their private data. The latter is quite a bit more privacy secure.

(Note, the Cambridge Analytica stuff happened in 2013 when Facebook was much more open with APIs using their data, since popular demand at the time was for FB to be less of a walled garden)

Even just targeted advertising is enough. Setup a campaign landing page for each campaign and anyone that clicks the link just exposed their gender or any other criteria you set up when defining the campaign.

> Reddit is unlikely to have the kind of quality data that facebook has to sell - directly, or indirectly.

It's a different kind of data. Spez claims to know his user's "dark secrets" and that can be an ad-tech advantage for Reddit. [1]

[1] https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2016/05/30/reddit-knows-y...

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