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Comment by rincewind | Hacker News Reader

I trust security advice from tptacek or cperciva more than from [name withheld until you vote].

Threads get really confusing when [name withheld until you vote] argues with himself all the time.

How about withholding the name still, but offering a way to 'opt-out' from voting. You don't see the name until you either vote up or opt out. After you've withheld your voice, you can't go vote again on that submission/comment.

> you either vote up or opt out

How about voting down?

You can't vote down until you hit a certain karma threshold.

Yes, I know. I just could not resist making the itemization complete.

Your point about valuing an opinion more highly from a person who is known to be accurate on a subject is valid. In the arguments case, I think it's easy enough to follow an A/B conversation, even without names.

In the first case though, it still seems that the majority of comments here are not so specialized as to require the posters identity to determine if the content is accurate enough or not. Ideally, if you could not judge the accuracy of the comment on your own you would leave it alone. There would be enough others that could judge it impartially that the comment itself would get voted up or down appropriately.

There's still the matter of confusion when [name withheld] is responding to [name withheld], though -- and for that reason alone, I'm afraid I have to disagree with your suggestion.

It's also the case that sometimes I'm not entirely sure what someone's trying to say unless and until I look at it within the context of his or her earlier comments in the same discussion. If I can't match someone's comment with the context of previous comments, I sometimes can't tell if they're being sarcastic, accidentally saying "can" instead of "can't", and so on.

I judge by the content of a comment rather than by name, and I agree that's a good way to do it, but I don't think that needs to be enforced by withholding information from us.

You could simply name all respondents by their response position in the thread, first is person1 (hope that's not too limiting!):

person1:yay person2:people here like intelligent comments person3:go to digg if you want to yay all the time person1:yay

And have an option to reveal names and/or show them on the mouseover link for personX.

You would just need to break out the gensyms to resolve the differentiation issue.

That's my point - some people got high karma by posting intelligent comments, but many others just got it by posting a lot and echoing popular views. So, karma score in itself is pretty useless, in my opinion.

This is probably getting a tad too complicated but having a number of different 'upvote' icons (ala Slashdot) would be interesting.

You could upvote someone for being funny, informative, insightful, and so on.

If someone has a high karma for being funny in topics related to computer security, you probably wouldn't trust their security advice so much.

I don't trust security advice from tptacek. First because we had a discussion and we clearly do not agree as to who can be trusted, but second (and more generally), I don't trust anyone who has enough time to gather lots of karma on HN. Most people have better things to do.

If users can no longer rely upon their names being displayed, they will come up with alternate ways of identifying themselves. Forced anonymous has worked in some places in the past.

I don't know why you were downvotted. You do have a point. If we hide the name of the user on the header, they will probably simply post their name on the post itself.

> Threads get really confusing when [name withheld until you vote] argues with himself all the time.

Randomly generated names, until you vote ?

An answer to the second would be a system pointing out people's replies to themselves.

If you are not in a position to evaluate an argument about security you probably shouldn't be following the advice anyway.

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