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Comment by rossenberg79 | Hacker News Reader

If this really is what you want then I propose eliminating usernames entirely. Just enter a password to log in if you want some continuity.

People rarely refer to each other by name here. It’s not important. Only content is important. Besides, a username in no way verifies your identity, you can say you are whoever you want to be.

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There are some consistently good commenters whose usernames I recognize. I will give anything they say slightly more weight than a random stranger.

So usernames are useful to me.

And that's the real problem with HN discussions!

HN already boosts comments from high-karma users. Then people like yourself come in, see them and boost them further because of the poster rather than the content, so the top of every discussion is perpetually filled with the same names.

If anything, a good experiment would be to obscure the usernames and then see if "good commenters" still get the same share of votes - this time based on the actual contents rather than their glorious posting history. It this happens to be true, bring back the usernames. If not, then see how to remedy this.

> HN already boosts comments from high-karma users

That's not true. That is, if you're talking about the HN software, it does nothing like that. Ranking algorithms don't look at karma. Karma is used for things like spam filter exemptions and turning on flagging (at > 30) and downvoting (at > 500).

I do the same as ansible. But, to answer your objection, I do it because I recognize the name as someone whose opinions I have noted as being worth listening to. I don't base it on their karma numbers.

Actually, I think that's an excellent point for hiding usernames, since they skew the perception of the actual comment. It might be interesting to be forced to consider what is written entirely on its own merit, and not be biased by who has written it.

If their comments are consistently good then they should stand on their own merit. Else you just get idol worship and groupthink.

Names are not as useful as you think.

> If their comments are consistently good then they should stand on their own merit. Else you just get idol worship and groupthink.

> Names are not as useful as you think.

Ummm... no.

I don't have the time and desire to completely verify everything that everyone says in every forum that I look at.

I doubt that anyone has time for that.

So I will use shortcuts, as does every other human on the planet. One of these shortcuts is reputation.

If someone has a good reputation with me, then that increases the credulity of everything they say. That doesn't mean that if one of the commentators I hold in high opinion says that "Goblins are behind the election hacking" I will just believe it.

However, if one of these highly-esteemed commentators has an opinion about Docker vs. CoreOS Rkt, I will likely take them at their word, if it isn't a critical issue. This doesn't obviate me from doing my on research on technology decisions, but can help guide my efforts.

I don't worship anyone or anything. Everyone's going to be wrong about something, but some are right more often than others, and should be given some benefit of the doubt.

Names are incredibly useful, because I know that tptacek does security, cpercival does cryptography and DannyBee does law.

In a thread about legal issues I'll certainly put more weight towards DannyBee's comments, even if he might have totally wrong views on, say, beekeeping.

You’ll get something like 4chan.

This reminds me of a thought I've had recently. It'd be interesting to have an anonymous forum like 4chan but with the strong moderation/guidelines of HN or /r/askhistorians.

Also, now that I'm thinking about it, I feel like tree style comment layouts are showing their age as well. I wonder if something like Zulip's layout could work in a more forum-y type of setting.

yeah, good idea, but I'd suggest hashed/pseudonymized usernames that are salted with the topic id for local consistency. I do value being able to read who is who in a dialogue

That could be a good compromise.

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