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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

> treat online accounts as throwaway wherever possible

I don't need to know who you actually are, but over time interacting with other people here I've started to get a feel for several hundred accounts. This makes HN more pleasant because I have some sense of what sort of person they are to talk with, and what is likely to go well or poorly. When there have been subreddits I was really into, I would start to get a sense for the more prolific commenters there too.

If I regularly attended some sort of social club and it was common for people to replace their faces I would find it frustrating as well.

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Interesting. Here I am thinking one of the best things about HN is how the usernames being a lighter shade makes them easy to ignore entirely and focus only on what's being said instead of the speaker.

That's what makes it so awesome when you start recognizing the same username on comments where you subconsciously bother to check the name because it was so interesting

> check the name because [the comment] was so interesting

I wonder how many people have that reflex. I usually only notice usernames when mentioned by others.

I would hope most people. I can't imagine being so incurious that I'd read an awesome comment and not wonder who wrote it.

Why should it matter who wrote it?

One big reason I care about who wrote things is expertise. Ex: I've consistently seen informed and sensible security-related commentary from tptacek, so I would pay more attention to security-related advice with his name on it than if it was a name I didn't recognize.

I guess it wouldn't if one didn't value people. YMMV, but I think people are kind of cool — so if I hear a great song I want to know who the artist was. It helps me build a mental model of what I might be able to expect from them. I'm kind of shocked that this might not be obvious to everyone, TBH.

When you've been on the site 10 years, I guess you start to notice more patterns. You'll get there, young buck. ;)

On the contrary, it makes it harder to immediate spot and ignore shitposters or people who consistently make really stupid posts on certain kinds of thread, of which sort there are several very active posters. It's a big part of why a certain kind of trolly posting thrives on HN in a way that it doesn't some other places with sigs or user images or otherwise more-prominent user ID.

My kingdom for an ignore-list.

HN is an accessibility nightmare thanks to the low contrast of so many critical UI elements

You can fix that with an extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/high-contrast/djcf...

If I attended a social club and my comments from 10 years ago were permanently engraved on the walls, I'd be much less honest and open.

You can use alts and delete old comments.

Yeah. Let's delete old blogs and shut down the internet archive as well.

Personally I value the web as a knowledge store that persists.

Use a non-logged chat service if you want a transient medium.

There's no deleting beyond a time limit on HN

you can request to the admins if you really need to

Changing alts is a lot more pro-social than deleting your comments: with alt rotation your old writing is still available for others to learn from.

There is also the aspect of upvoting/downvoting that completely skews honest opinion.

Instead of acting like a bullshit filter, upvote/downvote tends to act like a dog getting petted for echoing back a popular opinion to the group or the dog being scolded for echoing an unpopular opinion. Dogs like to get pats on the head and don't like being yelled at.

It is really one of the dumbest ideas of the last 30 years. Total disregard for human behavior and total disregard for the truth considering how often the truth is an unpopular opinion at a specific moment in time.

Throwaway accounts to me are a small protest to this ridiculous system.

Of course Reddit lets is political allies doxx and harass Reddit's political enemies without reservation, so this will likely affect those accounts more so.

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