Comment by HendrikHensen
3 months ago
I rotate accounts on "social media" (mostly Reddit and Hacker News, the others don't interest me) every few weeks or months to make sure not too much of my post history accumulates in one account. I would dislike it very much if there would be high friction to create new accounts. On the other hand my behavior is probably a major outlier.
Same, though I'm also surprised how easy I can make new accounts for this site. But I love that. Hope it doesn't require me to jump through a bunch of hoops in the future.
I think yours might be extreme. But I think the anonymity here is widely appreciated. And frankly necessarily relies on easy creation of accounts.
People share things that they often wouldn’t. And somehow the culture remains mostly civil. It’s a pretty fantastic forum IMHO.
Changing the rules would surely change the vibe, so to speak.
I appreciate the anonymity. Posting as throwaway is often useful to distance the poster from $work or $ex or other situations yet contribute to a conversation.
But will it continue under all the login id surveillance laws coming up?
You are aware of the guidelines? (You are not fostering community)
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Technically, every HN account is a throw-away account. ;-)
https://web.archive.org/web/20260228135203/https://www.brain...
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/351103
https://web.archive.org/web/20250713080832/https://www.usmcm...
Thanks, I was not aware. They seem to be guidelines, and not rules. I find my privacy and the prevention of anyone to build a full profile of me (especially how easy that is now in the age of LLMs) a bit more important than the vague concept of "fostering community". I am sorry.
Just like how HN itself can't be immune from macro trends, neither can its users, and macro trends have unfortunately made this a necessity for many of them.
I think the problem is you can be tracked by your email when you sign up for a new account. So I am not sure how this can be helpful.
This matters when you're hiding from the website. It doesn't matter if you're just trying to hide such things from the public.
It also matters if you're trying to hide from subpoenas to the website.
My HN account has no email. Not sure whether it would still be possible for a new account.
On Reddit and Hacker News, I don't need an email address to sign up. But also I use SimpleLogin to have a separate email address per website/account. Quite necessary these days when personal data is leaked by some company or other every day.
> not too much of my post history accumulates in one account
I'm curious to hear what benefits you think can be gained from avoiding this.
I do the same. It simply means theres less accidental leakage / self-doxing that could be pieced together if you (or llm) read every comment on the account.
Suggestion: Pick a long term account, dump the comments, and see what an llm could figure out about the target
I do it sometimes just to restrict my own pride in the account. I get a buzz from upvotes and that upsets me on a deeper level.
Same, but also for the opposite reason: a new account gives me a chance to do better. If I post lame comments, I accept the lameness of the posts attached to a particular user name and the hesitation I feel to post more lame comments decreases. With a fresh identity, I am more likely to avoid lame posting sort of like how you avoid going out in the mud in brand new sneakers. A sort of repentance; being born again in the digital realm.
You can build quite an extensive profile of someone given enough post history. More post history means more details. Especially nowadays with LLMs it's trivial. This can lead to all sorts of issues. One is people I know in real life being able to identify me. Another is that through various means my account may be linked to my personal identity (e.g. through matching usernames or emails across platforms) and oppressive regimes (now or in the feature) may use my post history to take action against me.
Honestly, it's probably good if platforms disincentivize this. If you know creating a new account is high friction, you are more likely to take care of the account you have, and be a higher quality member.
If you intend your accounts to be thrown away, you will likely behave worse.
*I'm using "you" generically, I don't mean you specifically.
Your behavior is only an outlier because we don't teach kids basic security practices and so they don't grow up into adults who think like that. We also don't teach kids how to avoid "Internet addiction" dopamine chasing, so seeing a number (eg: karma score) get smaller instead of bigger hurts feefees.
I'm well aware that the cyberlibertarian ethos endemic here opposes any form of regulation. But when the status quo clearly isn't working something has to change. Parent's have failed to step up and do their jobs. Somebody else has to.
Reddit didn't ban you? I got banned for that lmao
Never got banned for it, though my "rotations" tend to be "a few weeks every year".
even if they did ban me: the account was going to be deleted in a short while regardless. So that fear isn't present for what's essentially a longer lasting throwaway.
Reddit didn't (yet). Another tech focused community site did though... So I stopped participating in the community.