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Comment by throwaway1777 | Hacker News Reader

Start an anonymous blog. I have one. Also an anonymous hacker news account. :)

The trouble with that is that once you post something to it you can never associate it with yourself (even accidentally!) or deanonymization of everything else posted by that identity will also occur.

Half baked idea: A decentralized and properly anonymized (at the protocol level) service intended for long-form articles. Employ cryptographic primitives to allow association of a single article with one or more identities at any time after publication. (I suspect such a system would just end up getting abused, but who knows?)

I'm about to release something very similar to this. You might see it here in a week or two

This sounds cool - I'll be keeping an eye out!

> Half baked idea: A decentralized and properly anonymized (at the protocol level) service intended for long-form articles. Employ cryptographic primitives to allow association of a single article with one or more identities at any time after publication. (I suspect such a system would just end up getting abused, but who knows?)

The downside is that as a reader you wouldn’t be able to follow your favorite authors anymore.

That won't be safe for very long. De-anonymization based on writing style is pretty good already.

Maybe AI that changes the writing style to monotonous style would help.

Say, you always write like Yoda speaks, "Great you are." Then the AI would change it to, "You are great."

I know, I know, it's a tall order.

I suspect that resulting articles would be, while probably reasonably safe from style analysis, awfully boring and difficult to read. Good and interesting writing style is a skill.

You could pass it through a Google Translate, or maybe a couple, then back - correct for minor errors and style has changed (maybe not that much, but enough to scare AI).

Not necessarily that tall: you just need copies of a long enough text, written in different writing styles.

That's definitely true, but depending on the usecase it might not matter all that much. Also, that problem already applies to an anonymous blog anyway!

Consider the usage of semi-anonymous accounts on HN or Reddit or wherever. There's some risk of deanonymization depending on usage style and how determined the attacker is, but it's still quite different from openly publishing things in a manner that links back to you directly.

The issue for me is that (for an anonymous blog) once I decide to publish something to it the article becomes permanently and publicly linked to all the others as well. This means that I can never change my mind in the future without simultaneously changing my mind about all the other content published there. It also means that if I ever slip up (say on a non-anonymous HN account) and reveal that I'm the author then I've inadvertently and publicly tied the entire blog to myself (not just that one article).

An anonymous blog platform that offers a permanent and trusted Delete button could both let you change your mind about a former opinion and offer a fix in case of accidental slip-up

> a permanent and trusted Delete button

Any time bits leave your computer it would be wise to assume that they're out in the world for good. Especially for anything with a distributed architecture, presumably all you have control over is whether your personal box continues distributing it. I suppose you could set a "don't distribute" flag and hope that other hosts choose to honor it ...

How would such a system be "abused"? What does abuse of a blogging platform even look like? People might write text that others don't want to read?

I hadn't really thought it through honestly. I'm just assuming that if an anonymized publishing service with a low barrier to entry exists that people will find creative ways to misuse it. Semi-related Google Drive usage: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271)

Consider all the issues that Reddit and HN have with spam and other sorts of abuse. Then again, BitTorrent and IPFS seem to work well enough. At a minimum, I suspect that issues will tend to crop up anywhere a search or other curation mechanism exists that can potentially be gamed in order to gain an audience.

"Hi! It looks like you're trying to solve complex social problems with technology. Would you like some help in your futile endeavour?"

What complex social problem? All I see are a few technical problems regarding security, anonymity, and interrelations between nodes on a graph. There's also a closely related ease of use (ie UX) problem regarding the convenience (or rather lack thereof) of publishing things in a reasonably anonymous manner.

All the social problems, such as the underlying reasons for wanting or needing anonymity in the first place, remain.

It is a social problem because even the strongest, most bullet-proof cryptography solution can't prevent people slipping up and making mistakes, which a motivated attacker can then use to de-anonymize and connect their various identities together.

And people will slip up and make mistakes. A lot.

I agree that the potential for making mistakes could contribute to a social problem, but it's one that already exists. I also wasn't proposing to solve it - hence my earlier response.

“Authorship Attribution” is an active field of research. Even if you manage to solve the problem of anonymously publishing a bunch of content under distinct anonymous pseudonyms (or completely anonymously), there’s a non-negligible probability that, as soon as the author of one work is identified, the entire body of work can be attributed to that person.

You can invent a separate identity with the goal of being deanonymized one day. And post what you want to keep anonymous using other identities.

I did write a lot of articles anonymously back then(was afraid due to validation/criticism as I was learning) but later I found out that my blogs are legit and people liked them. And later couldn't associate with real me. Now making System design videos with real face and name and able to reach a subset of the audience. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn1XnDWhsLS5URXTi5wtFTA/

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