Comment by ufmace
3 years ago
I wonder what's a reasonable threshold for "probably the same person". I've never had an alt on HN, and when I searched myself, it found 3 other users above 0.6, none of whom I've ever heard of before.
3 years ago
I wonder what's a reasonable threshold for "probably the same person". I've never had an alt on HN, and when I searched myself, it found 3 other users above 0.6, none of whom I've ever heard of before.
If it's >0.9 is you can almost guarantee it's an alt but I've seen certain matches at 0.6. The problem is writing styles change over time. Another idea I had was converting the scores which are just cosine similarity scores into percentiles (so 0.99 would be 99th percentile of certainty) to make them more human interpretable.
I make new accounts every so often and the accounts of mine that it found have a score of around 0.3. I'm not actively trying to defeat stylometry but it's possible I just have a particularly unremarkable writing style.
Well I must be stereotypical myself because it found me at 0.8 !
The people at 0.4-0.6 with me do share some interests. That's cool on its own.
>The problem is writing styles change over time.
Will be interesting if we could plot the writing style divergence over time.
I got matched with my old account with a score of only 0.45
I have no alts. The highest match for me is about 0.66.
Interesting. The highest non-me account is under 0.4 on my page. I do not believe that I have such a unique writing style - especially since half my posting is on mobile and therefore possibly slightly different than my desktop posts.
My closest is 0.4879. I know I tend to be wordy but I thought I had a pretty generic style as well. This is definitely a fascinating demonstration.
Feeling better about my high of 0.49 now
0.6 is not high enough to indicate an alt