What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

Pseudonymity isn’t anonymity. The problem of course is if you first had a non-anonymous account (e.g with your real name) and then for some reason switched to a pseudonym you thought wasn’t linked to your real identity.

The bottom line I guess is: if you did that, your choice is basically to never post at all or to create an account where you practice some kind of opsec to try to disconnect it from your previous account (e.g run it through a service that rewrites the text).

I always assumed that some actors had this capability and acted accordingly. The existence of a publicly available tool merely democratizes this power. Anyone seeking complete and perpetual anonymity should have been practicing better opsec from the beginning.

* It only works on accounts with 10k characters, alts tend to be for throwaway comments like your account

* Deniability - dang has matches that are close but probably not him, you can just say it isn't you

I finetuned T5, a text-to-text transformer, with a loss function based on the cosine similarity of any given text with statements made by individual HN users. It's like Dreambooth but for text. I have been posting under 40 different alt accounts that approximate the top users of this site textually and match them within an 80th percentile. AMA.

It might just as well happen that some accounts are falsely detected as alts even though they really aren't. If people place too much trust in that tool, that might also have consequences for the account holders with little the account holders can to to prevent that.

Btw, how is having an account system without any option to close or delete the account - and which might contain your real name as username - compatible with the GDPR?

Alternate take - if you submit content you think is interesting, you can now see people who submit similar interesting content and go check out their posts. I tried it and found some stuff I'm genuinely interested in.

I have no alts on this site (I just take the negative karma when I have something nice to say about crypto), but it still provided a list of 20 accounts, some with higher similarity scores than pg had (in the example).

Maybe I should be friends with these people then?

https://stylometry.net/user?username=cableshaft

EDIT: Did a quick cursory glance at the top five on my list, and despite pretty different subjects they talked about I can kind of see the stylistic similarities.

>So for some people who assumed anonymity this could be anything from unimportant to awkward to a real problem.

If that's the case, then that was a bad assumption, IMHO.

I don't assume anonymity. I assume pseudonymity.

Then again, I don't use alt accounts either. And, interestingly, the closest "match" for me is 0.51 on the site you mentioned.

Which, I guess, is both good and bad. Good in the sense that I'm expressing myself as me. And bad in that if folks were to use this dataset to compare to other sites where I also post, my activities on multiple sites could be correlated. Which would probably annoy me, but not for the reasons you may think.

It seems awfully naive to assume that certain people on this forum wouldn't work with or utilize this kind of tech to try and identify alts. It's hard to tell if it's accurate or not without having knowledge of actual alts.

This isn't the first time someone posted site like this by the way, nothing bad came of it.

If you're really paranoid/can realize the opsec ramifications, you'd note that submitting your username to a 3rd party site reveals a link of some sort between the submitted username and the IP the request came from.

One consequence is me realising just how meta and stuck-up-its-own-derriere HN is. I knew it's bad but I wasn't expecting a meta response to a meta post.

Perhaps we should just iterate. What does this post reveal about HN? Discuss.

I’m not worried, I use one of my many personalities for each alt!

We'll get fewer people asking for career advice if folks understand their throwaway accounts don't shield them from being identified by their employer.

My user name is an 18 year old domain I made. The software didn't find my gibbie account but I'm not sure how many posts were on it.

It doesn't matter, and no one cares.

>Presumably now people will routinely search for alt accounts of any HN commenter and bring what they find into the discussion.

First, only obsessive or crazy people will do that, or maybe journalists. It'll show up occasionally in discussions, but I don't think it'll be 'routine', and I think most commenters will avoid subthreads with those sorts of shenanigans.

But more importantly, these static analysis tools are only probabilistic. They find likely matches, but in most cases there'll be a factor of plausible deniability.

why'd you even make a throwaway for this ;)

don't use sockpuppets and you won't have a problem

> Presumably now people will routinely search for alt accounts of any HN commenter and bring what they find into the discussion.

There are false positives.