Don’t post anything on the internet if you wish to remain anonymous. Don’t express opinions about anything.
We’ve had a few different posts on HN demonstrating that it is trivial to link aliases based on writing style. To avoid this you’d have to pipe everything you write through an LLM. And then you have another potential data point.
See e.g. https://idiomreplacex.de/ (German language)
It used to be a fun lab prank to set text filters on browsers of unattended laptops, like swapping all gendered words. A colleague spent a week in an alternate universe before he realized something was amiss when he read a movie review for "The Lady of the Rings".
It wouldn't imply deleting the content too, the username could just be `[deleted]` or `ghost` or something.
Not that will help much, because all 1013 of your comments[1] are likely archived in at multiple indexes: search engines, hn.algolia.com, the internet archive and half a dozen AI project by HNers
1. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I think allowing for account deletion line reddit does (with all comments attributed to "[deleted]") is bad for following a conversation after the fact. I'm fine with HN's policy here and think they've struck a decent balance. I think this should be a case of "if you're not ok with this, don't post on HN".
Do you have a link? I wasn't able to find it...
This site lets you put in a username and get the users with the most similar writing style to that user. It confirmed several users who I suspected were alts and after informally asking around has identified abandoned accounts of people I know from many years ago. I made this site mostly to show how easy this is and how it can erode online privacy. If some guy with a little bit of Python, and $8 to rent a decent dedicated server for a day can make this, imagine what a company with millions of dollars and a couple dozen PhD linguists could do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
It's also possible to eyeball similar writing styles, although not at scale. That's how "Fake Steve Jobs" was uncovered in 2007:
Last year, his agent showed the manuscript to several book publishers and told them the anonymous author was a published novelist and writer for a major business magazine. The New York Times found Mr. Lyons by looking for writers who fit those two criteria, and then by comparing the writing of “Fake Steve” to a blog Mr. Lyons writes in his own name, called Floating Point
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/technology/06steve.html#:....
It's astonishing how people are supposed to have freedom of speech and freedom from being spied on, since they live in the West and not in a Stasi controlled state, but they are given an advice not to talk too much, or the Big Brother is going to get them.