Show HN: Vigyaa Anonymous – A safe place to write and read anonymously | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Vigyaa Anonymous – A safe place to write and read anonymously

vigyaa.io

15 pointsgoelgarry198032 comments

A hunch: I think anonymous writing today (by those with more non-anonymous writing) will be reliably de-anonymized relatively soon through some sort of comparative analysis by a motivated enough party.

It feels like writing needs an additional layer of obfuscation. For example, one way to give feedback in a small circle of people might be to have a neutral, anonymous third-party rephrase the idea in their own words -- a bit like running it through Google Translate but less deterministic.

This sort of feature could potentially be baked into a service, as a checkbox. Perhaps in order to post you have to "anonymize" n number of other users' posts first.

Some further reading:

https://33bits.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/is-writing-style-suf...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry

I'm, like, not familiar at all with stylometry on a working basis, so this is absolutely just, like, my opinion, man. But the few examples I've seen of it were far more likely to bunch up subject choice than style e.g. all ethics to one heap, all metaphysics to another, regardless of author. And if you control for something like that (pet subject?) I don't know how much information would remain in the purely structural information of the text i.e. comma placement choice, but I'd guess it's fairly low. There are only so many ways to say things, and even then there are people seem to go straight to the point.

You'd only make yourself identifiable by railing about the same things over and over again, and I think this is something you don't even need a machine to pick up.

That seems to be more about intention, and I'll agree that even style can be intentionally selected, my dude. Perhaps there are larger leftover pieces, gaps, or other footholds to consider here. I'll agree you might not even need a machine, but I am concerned about unjustifiable ML-empowered humans sifting even more effectively for justified dissidence through style, sentiment, and semantic analysis. Do you think this is an arms race that is won by hand?

I'm not saying I disagree with you. I want to know more about what you think.

Wouldn’t it be possible to have a conversation with GPT-3 and have it generate the writing on some topic for you? Yes, the time it would take to write would no doubt become much longer, but then it would be much more difficult to find out who wrote what beyond getting access to GPT-3 and seeing queries.

Great point, I agree GPT-3 & related models will open up interesting avenues for this process.

I have not played around with it, but I can imagine querying it through a structure like LearnFromAnyone [0] where one would ask for a sentence (paragraph? document?) re-phrased in the style of a chosen person or group of people.

0 - https://learnfromanyone.com/

Look up Anonymouth on Github. It's abandonware now, but there might be an updated fork.

That's neat, thank you!

Thank you for your suggestions and suggested reads. Though I think the incentive to de-anonymise or get into stylometry is there only if the post has a larger impact on an organisation or individual. Most of the post on Vigyaa.io are personal in nature. I don't see why anyone will make the effort to figure out who has written it. The whole obfuscation is necesarry if one is blowing the whistle on someone or is posting something offensive. In either case the author will make their own effort to not let their writing style reveal themselves.

Would love to hear your prospective further.

> The whole obfuscation is necesarry if one is blowing the whistle on someone or is posting something offensive.

Agreed -- I don't think personal posts need the anonymization as much as perhaps political discussions in oppressive regimes (at which point getting the technical security stack right seems higher ROI than worrying about de-anonymization).

How do you plan to moderate this? I notice there's a report button, but does that lead to a manual process for you? How do you plan to scale that? 10K articles is already sizable!

For a site that claims no IP tracking, the constant callbacks (to /api/api/analytics..., some of which include a parameter `unique_id`) and the inclusion of googletagmanager make me a little uneasy.

Using NLP, machine learning and AI should be a good way to go upon automated moderation...

The callbacks and unique ID etc we will work on to help protect user information.

The report function is automatic after a sizeable number reports and article. Rest we do manual moderation and are working on NLP to automate. Thank you

Just a word of warning: Anonymity while writing honestly is harder than people typically think. You may need to develop some best practices to help people actually be anonymous while writing "anonymously."

People are generally pretty oblivious to the many things they say and do that can point to their real identity.

Noted thanx

Vigyaa.io is a 100% anonymous platform where there are absolutely no trace of your identity. So users can be free of any fear of judgment or vulnerability.

I watched a movie called "Dear God" a long time ago. A crook is sentenced to serve the community by working in the post office sorting room. He finds a pile of mails addressed to God. He starts to read them. That Idea stuck with me since.

Here is the link to the IMDB page of the movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116059/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

So Vigyaa.io is a digital incarnation of that idea. User is 100% anonymous. Anonymity takes away all the vanity of presenting your best version to the world. It makes you comfortable in your own skin. It rips away any kind of incentive for you to fake it. And thus you get to see the TRUE version of the people who post. I believe that it is a very rare thing in today's social media lead world.

The stories you find on our platform are so honest that it has become a one of a kind place where anyone can share anything that they are not comfortable sharing with another sole until now.

We moderate the content for any kind of spamming/ solicitation posts or that can be hurtful to any segment of the larger community. If we miss anything that is still offensive users can report such posts and we have them removed.

Our only goal here is to unburden your hearts and have a place to connect with humanity at large.

Please try it out and share your feedback. Ask questions. I will try to answer to my best.

>you get to see the TRUE version of the people who post

It is a great idea, no doubt, given how tiny is a step from free speech to public outrage with personal consequences today. Real values are important, as are discussions on these. But sadly you get to see true version of not all people, but mostly people who constitute a core mindset of those who prefer to be anonymous. And that attracts a much more specific population and mood than in general.

Maybe you're sure you know what you're doing, and I wish vigyaa good luck not turning into a version of altchan, dickroulette and many other sites with initially nice ideas of usage.

It's not a safe place for your mind being on though. At the time being, it is an usual, textbook aib content without images. If you look for places that could reduce your depression or fear of being stalked, do not consider anonymous boards. You'll get a huge loads of depression, products of mental illness, twisted worldviews, thinking errors and outright engineered posts than will put your own mental health in danger if consumed regularly. It's no safe place, because once you're hooked in, you're exposed to everything there and you cannot control that. It's tempting to separate "you" and your identity and integrity by hiding your name or username, but it's you who is there, not your username. It is like saying "okay, the world is scary and I will live in a simulation game where nobody knows who I am". The problem with that thinking is that now you live there and all your issues are still with you.

Also, as others pointed out itt, the problem with anonymity and deanonymisation is not in ip addresses or similar technical trails. To be anonymous, you have to check what you speak of on anonymous board and irl constantly, and which information you disclose, either consciously or in small details. Many slow aib users can recognize each other just by a little amount of text. You can also never know whether your readers could do A+B+C of your story or a comment and recognize you or someone from your environment irl. Your life is unique enough to do that, even if all you do is sitting before the screen all the time. I'd suggest to lurk for few years before getting out of readonly to evaluate your ability to stay anonymous, but only if there was something to do there in the first place.

It is also funny that it is called safe, when all you need to detect who said what at the legal level is your isp's metadata.

I get your point about spiralling down depression reading the posts there. We aim to segregate such posts using NLP so they don't crowd the center stage. But we can't and dont want to stop such posts as venting helps these people. And then there are many frequent users now that spend time helping other through reply posts.

ISP point noted and will see what we can do about that.

"Something Went Wrong!!! Please Try again" messages make it totally unusable. Not even a second after opening any post, bam: "Something Went Wrong!!! Please Try again"

After trying for some time and reloading a page like 5 times, honestly, I don't think I'll try again.

We are fixing this bug. Thanks still

Same experience. What's the point of a message board where you can't read the posts?

I think this looks great, I definitely will want to use it. I tried to read some of the popular posts and found a small bug:

When you are on a post page (like https://vigyaa.io/sadness-is-confusing-86b8c139/) it loads the content of the page and you can scroll and everything but then after a few seconds it switches to "Something Went Wrong!!! Please Try again".

Watching it happen with the console open this error comes out when it fails:

TypeError: NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource.

I'm still excited to use Vigyaa, worts and all!

Thank you. Will have it fixed.

Anonymous communication is interesting. It is nice to see another project in this space. Like some of the other commenters, I am curious how the moderation will work. Without IP address logs or user accounts it seems hard to ban malicious users. Since one can reply to posts, I imagine the moderation will be main difference from something like 4chan (also no images). I also wonder what the monetization strategy is. Finally, I am curious about what the name means.

Thank you for your comments. The moderation is currently manual and a manual moderation layer will always remain. plus we have a "report abuse" button for user supported moderation. 3rd we are also developing a NLP module that will be able to fish out anything offensive. Since we don't want to keep IP address logs we can target content directly. Any advise on that is welcome.

On monetisation: we will relay on ads and sponsored posts that are relevant to the audience.

Vigyaa means "knowledge"

"The Only Platform Where You can be 100% Anonymous" [citation needed]

I checked your platform, its a great idea, especially for someone like me who's a great introvert and has a fear how people will judge me.

Good Work!

Thank you for your encouragement. I am an introvert too. And don't like to put my feelings on display. I feel that is just a stunt to seek attention. But here you can't seek any attention since know one knows who you are.

Use NLP for sentiment analysis

Not surprising that there's literal hate speech on the front page.

How old is this?

Launched April this year. The numbers are from June onwards

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