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Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Both the null search and dynamic generation per pageload (or any other randomisation across accesses or sessions) would reveal which comments/posts have been anonymised. That might be a cue to an adversary to dig deeper.

That information might be possible to determine from a comprehensive archive of HN, but it would be much harder to obtain.

The ability to disown a specific set of content (I'm not sure HN permits this) would avoid that issue. The associated account would just have a limited history, not an empty one. That would be equivalent to an after-the-fact throwaway account, which is much less attention-grabbing.

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HN will not do this.

The only thing they do is change your username on every comment you’ve ever made to something else. But they’re all the same , so you can still link all the comments to one identity, and if even one comment makes it clear it’s a real person, then they all are.

Requesting anything more results in them saying “oh yes, we respect users wishes, blah, blah” and no action.

> The ability to disown a specific set of content

We are willing to do this.

> Requesting anything more results in them saying “oh yes, we respect users wishes, blah, blah” and no action

We gladly work with users to redact any material that identifies a person or reveals their location, or that otherwise poses risk to their welfare.

As a third party observer, it feels like "work with" could still be hiding a lot of thorny differences in judgement over what constitutes material that should be removed. That's why I was outlining a broad-brush mechanical policy that would cover most of the cases (unlinking a user's contributions across different threads from each other).

The problem is that each case is different, and there's no one approach that would cover all of the cases. Indeed I can see that it doesn't actually address the concern in this case, now that I've been able to find out what the account is and investigate the issue.

More broadly, this is why it's extremely unfair to make public accusations the way this user has done in this thread. The way we handle these cases actually takes far more time and involves more effort and care than it would take to implement the approach being advocated here.

So then you should implement the approach being advocated here.

You said yourself it would take less effort, and the outcome is better.

Win, win.

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