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Comment by kgwxd | Hacker News Reader

They still allow anonymous sign-up without an email address, but I've noticed a few dark UI patterns hiding that feature with recent redesigns. I delete and create accounts all the time to improve anonymity and prevent karma-lust. A few months ago I almost swore off Reddit because it seemed not providing an email was no longer an option during sign up. Now you just have to hit "Next" with an empty email field, it used to be a discrete option. This leads me to believe they don't like it, and it might not stand forever. Sure, I could always just use a fake email but, because I didn't have to, and the fact they specifically told me I didn't have to, I knew they respected my choice to be responsible for remembering/protecting my own password and didn't want to scare me into giving up my email address using "account recovery" FUD. That respect seems to be slipping away.

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> didn't want to scare me into giving up my email address using "account recovery" FUD

It's not FUD. I run a small website (about 10k daily visits) where you can log in and play some games and don't have the "reset password via e-mail" mechanism. You won't believe the amount of "I forgot my password, please reset it" requests I get from people.

Majority of people give more value to being allowed to be lazy and forgetful than you having their e-mail address on record.

I linked an email with my Reddit account long before it became recommended. Years later, I deleted that gmail account. Even more years after that, Reddit decided (automated) to lock my account until I reset my password for no discernible reason, the only option being via email. It took two weeks with support, across 3 different mediums of communication, to get it reset to a new email account.

I guess what I’m saying is that there is an internal motivation at play to get people to register their email accounts at Reddit, and it goes far beyond reducing customer support time because at present, they are going the opposite way. In fact, had I never registered an email, their automated account locking nonsense would never have triggered, and had I lost my password, their official policy is not to help at all.

I never considered what they'd do in the event of a forced password reset after a breach. Not a problem for my use case given I consider them throwaway accounts anyway. Maybe sites should have accounts specifically designed as throw aways. No visible karma, no email, clear indication that you can't recover if you forget password, if there is a breach, your account is deleted immediatley.

Listen up, I get your use case, but comparing it to Reddit is disingenuous, obviously they're not pushing to enter your email for being able to help you out of the good of their hearts.

Maybe your site does, but Reddit is a huge data mining company just like the other big players on the Internet. That is their motivation. Like Caprinicus' story demonstrates, if the situation were reversed, suddenly it takes weeks to provide customer support. That clearly shows the email isn't about being user friendly, they want to grab it just because they want to lock on to you and let themselves drift away from the anonymous registration they so proudly offered one day.

There's not a lot of goodwill left for this behaviour on the Internet.

I also hate being encouraged to enter my email, because I think they want to connect me up via other places I use that email. But I have various ways that I usually use to create a new email for every website, so they can't track me. I have to do a tiny amount of work to manage this but it is not so hard.

I guess other people aren't aware of how to do this or its too much work. Having an email does help the 'reset automatically' the account, without human intervention (when you still have the email).

On the email issue, I once talked to Steve (back when he was still the primary developer) about the issue, and he seemed genuinely sad about people signing up without emails mostly because people would forget their password and then couldn't log back in, and not for any nefarious purpose.

Of course, now that reddit is bigger than Jesus, there probably are nefarious privacy-destroying forces at work, but even more than a decade ago, there were totally innocent reasons for reddit to want an email address when you signed up. I think it says something good that you can still create an account without one (I require a valid non-temporary email on all of my own sites, mostly for spam reduction, even though I very much value/respect privacy and never sell any info we collect on our sites).

I (try to) block all throwaway mail providers, but give users the possibility to delete the mail after confirming the account. Then I keep a salted hash of the mail address for 6 month to deny another sign up. Only reason being spam protection.

I love places that don't block throwaway mail providers, cause I really don't want to enter a real email address at every random site. But if I had a site that had a lot of users, I'd probably want that because it would automate many account maintenance issues. I have started thinking my main privacy issue is the phone company tracking my location all the time and then selling it to anybody in the world, and me not being able to do anything to block that is the real issue (short of getting rid of my phone).

Isn’t the flip side to that Cambridge analytica? A bunch of anon accounts devoted to pushing an agenda? Maybe not. It sure seems like a knife edge to balance on.

I agree with you, I like the ability to create random one shot accounts to comment on something, but that’s exploitable in weird ways.

It's funny that was a Facebook scandal, while Reddit has movements like hail corporate trying to self-police dishonesty and manipulative behavior.

It seems like anonymity should be more of a driving force, but seeing both good and bad social media sites with each model, I'm no longer sure anonymity either preserves or inhibits culture... it might just be orthogonal.

> Reddit has movements like hail corporate trying to self-police dishonesty and manipulative behavior.

Self-policing can also be manipulated. You cannot rely on user-intent alone, you need some structural protection against these kinds of things. Although I don't know what the best kind is.

It's not clear to me why structural protection would be better than self-policing, given that both can fairly trivially be manipulated by a wallet the size of a corporation.

Nobody said it was better. You need both. Ideally, they complement each other in a bigger-than-the-sum-of-its-parts manner that is better than using either one alone.

Tangential example of technology/community interaction: Clay Shirky's "A Group Is It's Own Worst Enemy" is a great essay on how self-policing can backfire even without external influences[0]. The overall conclusion being that the technological framework surrounding the community needs to provide the means for it to support itself not only against internal influences, but also to prevent it from harming itself.

On reddit you can see in practice how the many different subcommunities apply this self-policing in practice, and what kind of effects it has. From the echo chambers of the more extremist ones (won't name any examples to avoid provoking anyone), to examples of subreddits dying due to sloppy moderation not holding back meme-ification and shitposting (same), to communities with very clear goals that are achieved through iron-fisted moderation (usually knowledge-oriented communities like /r/AskHistorians).

[0] http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

I didn't mean to imply hail corporate completely fixed anything, at its worst it's unsubstantiated allegations.

Just pointing out that true names didn't inoculate Facebook, which doesn't even get as far as that problematic response.

That's why I said anonymity is orthogonal--that was my main point.

For example, anonymity is easier on HN, and I prefer our comments to FB. On the other hand, I'm not typing this on 4chan. There are dozens of other examples on the spectrum. Anonymity just doesn't seem like the determining factor for culture everyone makes it out to be. Maybe it has some impact, but it seems washed out by the typical culture of the group, driven by that group's interests, style, and tolerance of (or preference for) obnoxiousness.

I think the mistake a lot of people make is mixing up anonymity with a lack of persistence. You may be anonymous, but you still have a persistent handle (unless the situation calls for it). That persistence is also "rewarded" with upvotes (or downvotes), which on HN even have some consequences.

+1 for karma lust

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