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Comment by snoshy | Hacker News Reader

This whole episode serves as an interesting datapoint in how long a public person needs to stay out of the spotlight in order to return to their pseudoanonymity after being threatened to be outed by the media. It's not common to face such a threat, and it's not common for those threatened this way to even try to return to their former online identity and life.

Somewhat reassuring to me that it's this short.

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I'd not treat it as a data point for that - he's no longer anonymous at all, since he signed his name at the end of the post, and links to his psychiatry practice. It looks like it took him that much time to decide that he can make posting under his full name work for him.

You're quite right, and I stand corrected. Although it's not the datapoint I suggested previously, I suppose there is another datapoint to be gathered: for someone in his position, perhaps nuking the world (physical and virtual) is the only way forward when dealing with such a threat.

He basically had to quit his job and career as a psychiatrist as well as delete SSC in a way, in order to continue with his online no-longer-pseudo-identity.

He didn't quit his career, but he had to quit his job. Fortunately, he's at the stage where he can start his own practice (a somewhat experimental, no less). But if this situation happened just a few years earlier, it would most likely have destroyed his career prospects completely.

He actually decided to drop his pseudonymity a few months back, but it took time to get himself in a position where he could do that responsibly.

Interesting, that explains how he thinks he Streisand Effected himself.

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