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Comment by sparky_z | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a good suggestion here, but I have to point out that that does not fully address OP's stated concern about the use of text analysis techniques to figure out who wrote what, even if the username is different.

(It does probably make those techniques more difficult since it would mix comments together from multiple authors under the "deleted" username, but it doesn't fully remove the danger.)

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If all deleted accounts' usernames were replaced with "[deleted]", that would hypothetically do a pretty decent job of defeating text analysis techniques. A single post isn't really enough to characterize someone's writing style, and a sufficiently large pool of deleted accounts would make it quite difficult to reliably pick individuals out of the slush pile and group their comments together.

That said, HN is being archived and mirrored in I-don't-know-how-many-places, and I'm not sure how feasible it is to track all those places down and get them to expunge your userid, too. And this is all assuming nobody comes up with a new de-anonymization technique that deals with it well. That is a rather big assumption considering new ones are being developed all the time.

I imagine the same analysis can be performed on other networks like reddit, twitter, github, linkedin etc to find matches amongst them all, [deleted] is a signal as well. If there’s a strong match across one or more of those and a deleted one here, or vice verse to rule out possible matches, and the others are not anonymized [well enough], then it could probably deanonymonize quite a few deleted accounts here.

I’m sure something like this is available to recruiters or other HR/business admin, I remember seeing browser extensions/SaaSes years ago that were trying to tie together social media identities.

For a few years now I've imagined an AI that can ingest all my writing across platforms, figure out it's me via this type of analysis, find any information I leak, and archive that data in perpetuity. Then it could be used to judge me for whatever purpose its owner deems worthy; which given my age will probably mean selling me boner pills in a decade or two.

It feels like we killed god and then re-invented him. And I think that if you don't want his gaze and judgement to fall on you, then your only option is not to participate in online discussion, and probably not even read it because you can probably learn a lot about someone just from passively tracking the things they follow online.

I think it would decrease the Signal to Noise ratio sufficiently.

That would be different if responses hardcoded mentions of the username.

It does if you can't determine the accounts are the same. Right now HN does nothing to address these concerns. It is ridiculous anyone finds this acceptable.

Really good point. You could estimate if a [deleted] comment might be from [account X], but you'd only have that one comment to compare. The rest might be from other accounts.

So yea, you'd probably end up with a pile of comments that are more likely linked to [account X], but many of them wouldn't actually be. It would add a ton of noise into the system.

You would get some hints. There have been situations where someone said "like AnimalMuppet said upthread..." or something like that. But they weren't very common. Maybe 1% of my comments could be definitely identified like that.

Is that enough to define a "style" to determine the rest of my comments? Is it enough to doxx me from the comments where someone else names my nick?

If you took all the sentences out of all of the books in a library, and mixed the sentences together under one fake author name, I think it would be impossible to correctly attribute 99.99+% of the sentences to a correct author.

I think that is sufficient.

But we're not going to delete everybody's account and mix them all together, are we?

If I took a bunch of "minor" writing and mixed it together under one fake name name, but some of it was written by a famous author under a pen-name, then yes, in theory it could be possible to identify those.

Okay, 1% of the library. I see threads here every-so-often asking about deletion, and I imagine there are more people who would like the opportunity but already know the answer and doesn't ask.

Curious what happens when an HN user inevitably wants their dead-name changed but retain their history, and whether that would be a harder path to march than being deleted for privacy reasons.

I don't understand the question.

Edit: Thank you for the clarification (reply), I was not aware of the term "dead-name" refering to that. I still am not exactly sure what you are asking though. If a replier wrote the original username in an old reply that was written before the name change? In that extremely rare case, it might cause some confusion if a third person reads the old thread, in which case perhaps the user initiating the name change could use the search function for any instances of that, and then email the HN admin?

There is a high incidence of transgender people in our community. Often, names are changed, the old name is referred to as a dead-name. Addressing someone by this deprecated title is the height of disrespect.

If you email hn@ycombinator.com, they'll change your username for you. (Near the bottom of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

All of those comments were written from the perspective of a person who no longer 'exists' tangibly as they've transitioned.

Then perhaps what the transitioning person is looking for, is just creating a new account to go with their new self?

I'm not one of those who are affected, so unfortunately I'm without a sound rebuttal. You do raise a good point. Given that I'm not, someone who is may have more perspective that'd support one assertion vs the other.

That's a very theoretical problem though, isn't it? Individual comments don't have the length of books, and usually don't individually contain enough text to be unique. Once the account-relationship is gone, it's essentially like splitting all the books up into paragraphs and trying to attribute individual paragraphs. Unless you're Wittgenstein or someone with a similar interest in exploring how long sentences can be, I doubt there's enough there.

Of course, all of that is hardly useful, since HN is very open and lots of people have copies of all comments.

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