Comment by nickthegreek

18 hours ago

Really appreciate seeing comments like this on HN. You got me thinking about my own presence online. I decided to use gpt-5-thinking and perplexity's deep research with the same prompt to deep dive on my legal name, find aliases, research those aliases, etc. Then report on positive and negatives findings. Both did a good job and helped me feel a bit at ease. They both noticed that I worked at a place that later had a controversy and knew that I left prior to that but gave actionable ideas on how to answer questions around that during interviews or via linkedin. I think I might set up a perplexity task to run and email this once a month.

I'll probably one seperate ones for my own handles that are not attached to my name to monitor them as well. The panopticon never sleeps.

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nickthegreek

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tombert  18 hours ago

Yeah honestly it really is something I hadn't considered much, especially my old Twitter which I haven't logged into for years and the last posts were when I was in an extremely bad state mentally. I completely forgot about it even existing, but of course whether or not I remembered it doesn't mean it won't potentially hurt my prospects.

It's impossible to know how many jobs I've been turned down for due to my online presence and edgy takes; most of my takes really aren't that edgy or even that out there, but they might be enough make a potential employer think twice.

I just deleted my old Twitter, my Reddit account, and most of my posts on LinkedIn. I don't think any of them were really that bad but I don't really need them haunting me for forever.

acheong08  15 hours ago

How did you manage to get perplexity deep research to do research about yourself? I keep getting denied based on privacy rules and policies

  • nickthegreek  13 hours ago

    i’m using perplexity pro set to deep research with this prompt:

    read the hackernews comments on this link to understand how someone's digital footprint might affect their ability to get hired. Then do that research against me, <first last>, to help me understand what is available about me out there that could help or harm my ability to compete. See if there are any internet handles that you can associate with me, if so, research them too.

    <hn link>