zlacker

> This is a "throwaway" account for obvious reasons.

You should know that if you also have a non-throwaway account, HN will unify your accounts in their backend records.

>>thauma+(OP)
Is there proof of this?

>>dnissl+x
Proof definitely needed. Honestly this doesn’t sound like something HN would have any interest in doing, they don’t serve ads or anything like that so why would they care?

>>tomdun+e2
Ban evasion?

>>thauma+(OP)
No, they don't do this. It's not even clear how they would; the closest thing would be merging based on IP or fingerprinting, but both are extremely noisy.

>>woodru+X3
You can easily demonstrate to yourself that they do.

And the situation here is that felon_in_texas visits HN in his usual manner, views a topic he wants to comment on, creates an account on the spot, and leaves his comment. How noisy do you think the IP identification can be?

>>thauma+H4
> You can easily demonstrate to yourself that they do.

How?

>>thauma+H4
How then? No need to be cagey

>>thauma+(OP)
It’s fine to have multiple accounts on HN as long as you use them with good judgment. I do. I have spoken with DanG about this before and he seemed fine with it.

Yes, you should assume that the moderators will know, and you should be fine with them knowing, because you’re not using the multiple accounts to escape moderation, but rather for greater anonymity in the comment thread.

The rules that I follow, which I think are implicit in “use good judgment”:

1. Don’t vote on the same thing from multiple accounts.

2. Don’t participate in the same comment thread with multiple accounts (or if you do, only separate parts of the thread). Don’t create a fake impression of consensus or have your accounts interact with each other.

Those are probably the two big ones I would imagine.

Whether the accounts are actually tied together on the backend, I don’t know. I would suspect that they are not automatically linked, but could probably be linked if the moderators are investigating you for bad behavior (like voting on the same thing with multiple accounts).

>>thauma+H4
Extremely, if they’re on CGNAT. Or live in a house with more than one person.

Please be precise about how I can demonstrate this to myself.

>>thauma+(OP)
Generally speaking, not really worried about it. I don't see HN as a risk vector. If I was worried about it, I would have run it through a standalone browser on a fresh machine (or VM) behind a VPN, and not spoken in my "voice" (I would have used ChatGPT to rewrite)

Not the first time I've used a throwaway, and they've never merged my comments into my main account (only use throwaways for these types of discussions - I assume abusing it, such as ban evasion, would be a different story)

>>thauma+H4
Very noisy, because I'm not concerned about HN. Not the first time I've used an alt, whether as a throwaway or logging in via my employer's account. I have comfort in HN's integrity when I'm not abusing the privilege.

>>tomdun+e2
They do definitely limit upvoting/downvoting from similar accounts, so this isn't out of the realm of possibility. They care to avoid false votes, voting rings, etc.

>>thauma+(OP)
GDPR would prohibit this, and since they never ask about consent, I would assume that they have no legal basis to collect personally identifiable information on anyone.

If you have evidence of the contrary, I would love to know.

>>mixmas+SB
Oh yeah that’s a fair point! But I’d hope the data isn’t used outside of that use