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Comment by Deimorz | Hacker News Reader

The scary part of this is probably for people that had accounts on reddit in 2007 but later deleted them, or just completely forgot they existed. Reddit's not going to be able to contact the owners of those accounts.

Did you have an account 11 years ago? Did you vote on anything embarrassing, or send any compromising messages? How sure are you?

I don't even know the answer to those questions for myself.

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Reddit can't contact them because Reddit didn't require an email address to create an account back then.

If they did require an email address, they could restore their database backups to retrieve that information.

Even then, that would require those people to still have access to the same email address they used to sign up over 11 years ago. Even Gmail probably wasn't in very wide use yet at that point, it was invite-only until February 2007.

i use email addresses set up 20 years ago, they are just redirected to my current mailbox or pulled by current mailbox

Reddit still doesn't require an email, the signup form is just a well executed dark pattern - you can hit next and skip providing an email.

I wouldn't call a form requesting your email (the only entry field on a dedicated page) a "dark pattern". They out right imply an email is necessary and knowing it's not requires knowledge otherwise or accidentally clicking "next".

I've made a couple of reddit accounts in the last 1-2 years and it was always explicit that an email was optional. Is this all since the recent redesign?

The only indication that an email is not required is that the email field doesn't contain a blue dot, as opposed to the username/password fields. However those are on the next page, so you have no indication that it's not required. That's actually on the new design, on old.reddit.com there is not even that indication.

I see. that's a shame, last time I used the register form it was all fields on one modal popup and said email wasn't required.

Why does everything have to be a "dark pattern"?

So now we're at a point where asking for an email is a privacy violation and a dark pattern, but not asking for an email is a security issue and a dark pattern?

Yup.

Welcome to trade-off oriented programming.

I have trouble calling this scary when the data we are talking about is upvotes and private messages associated with an alias (not necessarily associated with an human) that are over a decade old.

From the standpoint of the person who took the data it is likely boring enough that it's not even worth the effort to restore the database.

Given the existence of more pressing problems I really can't do more than shrug.

On the contrary, Reddit back then had much less moderation. What if it came out that a prominent CEO was a user of /r/jailbait or a similarly toxic subreddit? That person's life would be destroyed.

I got the email about an hour ago. My first reaction was embarrassingly hipster.

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